Intitucion Financiera

Grammatical functions
Richard Hudson 2007

Words are like little people, and like people, they’re gregarious. They like to work together in teams where each word plays a distinct role, sogrammatical analysis is rather like understanding the dynamics of a group of people. Think of a staff meeting, for example. There are different kinds of people – different ages, sexes, qualifications, etc –and partly because of these differences, each person plays a different role in the meeting. Likewise in a sentence: there are different kinds of words – nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on – and theyeach play a different role in the sentence.

The technical term for ‘kinds of words’ is, of course, word classes, and that for their roles is grammatical functions. Some people think that classifyingwords is the end of grammatical analysis, but in fact it’s just the beginning. For any word in a sentence, there are two grammatical questions, not one:
• What word class does it belong to?
• Whatis its grammatical function?
These are separate questions, with answers drawn from a separate vocabulary. For word classes we have the familiar ‘parts of speech’ (noun, verb and so on), but forgrammatical functions we use slightly less familiar terms. These include ‘subject’ and ‘object’, but the most basic ones are head and dependent, which only make sense in relation to a phrase. If youunderstand these three terms, then the rest of syntax is just filling in details.

In this technical vocabulary, a phrase is any team of words that collectively express a single meaning. An entiresentence is a phrase, and so is a two word combination such as English teacher. This means that one phrase may be part of another, Chinese-box style. For example, the phrase [about grammar] might be part ofa larger phrase [easy books [about grammar]]. (The brackets are a very useful notation for showing phrases, but there are others such as trees and arrow-diagrams.) For beginners, synthesis is...