A grammar is in some ways like a machine, an assemblage of cogs, levers, belts, pulleys, and rollers, connected together to function as one integrated system. Move one component and this will, in some way, affect every other part. Take away one bit (making necessary adjustments for its absence) and the role of each other part is likely to be affected. This analogy has some validity but ultimately it fails in that a language is not mechanical; it is a naturally evolving entity, rather than something purposely constructed.
A more appropriate model might be a densely knit forest, with all manner of plants, vines intertwined around limbs, ferns sprouting from trunks, birds and insects spreading seeds, moisture evaporating from leaves and returning as rain on the soil, to provide nurture and advance the cycle of activity. Here each component depends on others, though not in a rigid way. Excise a large tree (or it may fall unbidden) and others will move in to take its place.
A grammar is in some ways like the machine model, in some ways like the jungle model, and in some ways like neither. But the analogies should serve to make the most important point—that every grammar is an integrated system. Each part relates to the whole; its role can only be understood and appreciated in terms of the overall system to which it belongs.
1.8 a grammar as an integrated system 25 There are some linguists who do just a little work on a language that is not well described, looking at perhaps a single construction type. This is bad science. One cannot appreciate the role of relative clauses in language X without relating and comparing them to other kinds of subordinate clauses, to the ways of marking syntactic function, and so on.
The pioneer linguist Ferdinand de Saussure criticized scholars who studied the history of a part of a language, dissociated from the whole to which it belongs. He insisted that linguists should study the complete system of a language at some point in time, and then examine how the entire system changes over time. Saussure’s pupil Antoine Meillet (1926: 16) is responsible for the aphorism: ‘une langue constitue un système complexe de moyens d’expression, système où tout se tient’ (‘a language makes up a complex system of means of expression, a system in which everything holds together’). Scien- tific linguists who produce comprehensive grammars of languages naturally follow this tenet. (Proponents of formal theories, who look at isolated bits of language for some particular issue, naturally contravene this fundamental principle.)
The statement of a grammar is a product of analysis. And every analytic decision has to be justified by criteria relating just to this grammar, not to meaning (considered apart from this particular grammar) or to what happens in the grammars of other languages.
Within every grammar a number of major word classes can be posited. Their recognition must be based on grammatical criteria from the language under analysis. The nature of the criteria is likely to depend on the structural profile of the language. For Latin, we recognize three major word classes, with the following properties:
class A, inflects for case and number
class B, inflects for case, number, and gender
class C, inflects for tense, aspect, mood, person, and number
For English, we also recognize three major word classes and here the criteria are:
class X, takes suffix -ing
class Y, may be immediately preceded by an article and need not be followed by another word
class Z, may be immediately preceded by an article and is then followed by another word (either one from class Y or another word from class Z) Now the lexemes belonging to each of these classes show a certain range of meaning. They also have typical behaviour in filling functional slots within a clause. It is because of a measure of similarity of meaning and function that
we may identify word classes between languages, and use the same label for them:
Noun—classes A and Y. May be head of a noun phrase which can be in subject or object function within a clause. The class includes words referring to concrete objects (and their parts), such as ‘tree’, ‘stone’, ‘star’, ‘woman’, ‘foot’, ‘water’, ‘axe’.
Adjective—classes B and Z. Typically, modifies a noun. Includes words relating to states, typically dimension (such as ‘big’, ‘little’), age (‘new’, ‘old’), value (‘good’, ‘bad’), and colour.
Verb—classes C and X. Occur as head of a predicate. Includes words referring to actions, such as ‘jump’, ‘sit’, ‘burn’, ‘eat’, ‘laugh’, ‘talk’, ‘see’. Note that the criteria employed are different for the two languages. Latin has a rich morphology but no strict ordering of words within a clause. English has rather little morphology but fairly strict rules of ordering. (In English some— but not all—nouns take plural suffix -s, and some—but not all—adjectives have comparative and superlative forms.)
A very important point to note is that although the word classes have similar semantic content between languages, the full ranges of meanings they cover are never identical. The central members—as exemplified above—are likely to correspond (although there is no guarantee that every single one will). But there can be considerable variation among non-central members. For exam- ple, the idea of needing to eat is expressed through noun hunger in English, by verb ¯esurio in Latin, and by adjectiveNamir in Dyirbal. (Interestingly, English has a derived adjective, hungry, formed from the noun; and Latin also has an adjective, ¯esuriens, derived from the verb.)
Kin relationships such as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are nouns in most languages but in some—for example, the Yuman languages of southern California—they are expressed by verbs ‘be mother of ’ and ‘be father of ’. (These words are, after all, describing a relationship between parent and child.) The number ‘two’ is an adjective in many languages but a verb in others (for instance, Jarawara).
The moral of all this is that it is not possible to decide which class a word belongs to in a given language solely on the basis of its meaning. If this were the case then the word for ‘wanting to eat’, or for a male parent, or for ‘two’ would be in the same word class for every language, which they are not. In one Amazonian language we find the unusual circumstance of ‘good’ being a verb, ‘be good’. It takes the same inflections as verbs such as ‘see’, ‘laugh’, and ‘jump’, having quite different grammatical behaviour from adjectives (such as ‘big’, ‘little’, ‘new’, ‘old’, and ‘bad’). Someone who was actively working on this language once told me that ‘good’ must be an adjective because ‘everyone