Строй современного английского языка
THE PROBLEM OF HIGHER SYNTACTICAL UNITS
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| THE PROBLEM OF HIGHER SYNTACTICAL UNITS
This problem may be formulated as follows: is the sentence the highest existing syntactical unit, or are there higher syntactical units than the sentence — units of which a sentence is but a component part? The traditional view of course is that the sentence is the highest syntactical unit and that whatever units we may find of a higher order will be not syntactical, but either stylistic, or literary. However, this traditional view has been questioned in a paper by Prof. N. Pospelov.1 Although Pospelov treats of the Russian language only, his views have a bearing on linguistics in general, since his reasonings are not based on any specifically Russian material, but on material found in other languages as well, and possibly in all languages, Therefore we will devote some space to the analysis of these ideas, as they may be applied to the English language. What reasons are there, then, to suppose that there exists a grammatical, that is, a syntactical unit higher than the sentence, and how are the limits of this higher unit to be delineated? The chief consideration that may be laid down in favour of this view is, that sometimes co-ordinating conjunctions establish some sort of connection between independent sentences, separated from each other by a full stop. The two conjunctions that are especially frequent in this function are, and and but. The conjunction and is found in this function often enough, and some writers seem to have a special predilection for it. Here is a typical example from Th. Dreiser's "An American Tragedy": They had been to all these wonderful places together. And now, without any real consciousness of her movements, she was moving from the chair to the edge of the bed, sitting with elbows on knees and chin in hands; or she was before the mirror or peering restlessly out into the dark to see if there were any trace of day. And at six, and six-thirty when the light was just breaking and it was nearing time to dress, she was still up — in the chair, on the edge of the bed, in the corner before the mirror. But she had reached but one definite conclusion and that was that in some way she must arrange not to have Clyde leave her. It might perhaps be said that the higher unit established by co-ordinating conjunctions is somewhat like what we call a "paragraph". But a conjunction of this kind may even be found at the 1 See H. С. Поспелов, Проблема сложного синтаксического целого в современном русском языкe. Учёные записки МГУ, вып. 137, кн. 2, 1948 The Problem of Higher Syntactical Units 349 beginning of a paragraph. Thus, in the passage just quoted the sentence And now, without any real consciousness... stands at the opening of a new paragraph, and so does the sentence beginning with But she had reached... Occasionally a conjunction of this kind may even stand at the opening of a new chapter, as is the case in the following extract from "An American Tragedy": The beauty of the various houses along Wykeage Avenue and its immediate tributaries! The unusual and intriguing sense of movement and life there so much in evidence. Oh, if he were but of it! Chapter XXIII
We will only give some hints as to the possible trends of investigation in this field, and we begin by studying some opening 850 Conclusion p aragraphs of a modern novel. Let this be Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley: The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories. This young woman who had stood in a garden at the turn of the century was like a ghost at cockcrow. His mother, Anthony Beavis recognised. A year or two, perhaps only a month or two, before she died. But fashion, as he peered at the brown phantom, fashion is a topiary art. Those swan-like loins! That long slanting cascade of bosom — without any apparent relation to the naked body beneath! And all that hair, like an ornamental deformity of the skull! Oddly hideous and repellent it seemed in 1933. And yet, if he shut his eyes (as he could not resist doing), he could see his mother languidly beautiful on her chaise-longue, or, agile, playing tennis, or swooping like n bird across the ice of a far-off winter, Now let us take a look at the elements in this passage which in some way or other tend to establish connections between sentences. In the first sentence there is the past perfect form had become, which points to two time levels in the narration. In the second sentence, there is another past perfect form — had stood and this time it is correlated with the past indefinite form was in the same sentence. In the third sentence the possessive pronoun his does not establish any connection with the preceding text, as there has so far been no mention of any man, to whom the possessive pronoun might refer. It refers to the name Anthony Beavis, which appears after the pronoun (this is not a frequent use). If there had been mention of a man in the preceding text this would be misleading. In the next sentence the pronoun she establishes a connection both with the second sentence (the phrase this young woman) and with the third (the phrase his mother). In the next sentence, the conjunction but establishes a relation with the preceding text. So does the pronoun he, referring to the name Anthony Beavis, and also the phrase the brown phantom, which (as is clear from the context) refers to features of the woman in the photo. Then the pronoun it refers to the phrase all that hair, and would be unintelligible without this reference. Finally, the phrase his mother in the last sentence of the passage clearly refers back to the identical phrase his mother used in the third sentence. Further investigation into such means of establishing connections between independent sentences should yield valuable conclusions about logical and semantic structure of larger text units. It is fairly obvious that here grammatical means go hand in hand with lexical ones, and the scholar's task should be to find out the precise part played by each of these, and the way they combine to produce the final result. |