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Sentence morphemes in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

William F. Klatte
William F. Klatte*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

The Aim of this paper is to define a form class of English (the sentence morpheme) and to try to determine whether or not this form class may be incorporated into the traditional linguistic system of English. Various criteria—phonological, morphological and syntactic—will be applied to establish the formal characteristics of this class.

The forms considered here deserve serious treatment by any school of linguistics that claims to give priority to the spoken language, since quite a large proportion of colloquial speech consists of just such forms. Apart from any consideration of their linguistic marginality, they are surely important if only because of their frequency in English speech.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Spring 1967 , pp. 90 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1967

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References

1 Some of these forms are of course treated elsewhere. C. C. Fries in his The Structure of English (New York, 1952) includes oh (but no other forms of my type 4, although they occurred in his corpus: compare, e.g., the fifth line on p. 51 for ah) and type 5 in his Group K. His Group L, which consists of yes and no (pp. 102-3), may include my type 3, which occurred frequently in his material (cf. p. 49).

J. Sledd in A Short Introduction to English Grammar (Chicago, 1959) recognizes a class of ‘sentence adverbials’ which includes types 6 and 8, and perhaps 2, 3 and 4 as well (although this is not entirely clear), but it also includes a great many other things, such as all absolute constructions and interjected clauses.

2 All indications of stress, pitch and terminal contour are to be read as phonemic, even when occurring in square brackets. The segmentals, however, are phones in square brackets, phonemes in slant lines.

3 I shall not discuss here the various transformations into which the sentence morphemes might enter, but it is interesting in connection with their status as sentences to note that some of them (not here treated) seem able to function only as dependent clauses (such as then which does not occur alone as a sentence morpheme), may take superfixes 1 and 3, and may occur with /22→/ only if something else follows or precedes.

4 This is, of course, the same as Robert P. Stockwell’s suggestion: S → Nuc + IP in Language 36(1960), p. 360.