L/j8 Хаймсшич и

tences when the predicate verb contains no morphological word-morphemes.

§ 392. A unit of a higher level, as we know, contains units of the next lower level. A sentence contains words, not mor­phemes — parts of words. So morphological word-morphemes cannot be regarded as parts of the sentence as long as they remain parts of analytical words. In spite of the fact that in the sentence He is writing predicativity is conveyed by he is, we cannot treat is as the predicate because it is part of the word is writing. Only the whole word is writing can be regarded as a part of the sentence. Still, the predicate is writing consists of two parts: the structural part is and the notional part writing. Only when the notional part of the verb is dropped does a morphological word-morpheme become the structural predicate of a sentence, as, for instance, in short answers He is, She has, We shall, etc.

It is not so with syntactical word-morphemes. They are nor parts of words, but parts of sentences, more exactly, structural parts of sentences. In It is cold, for instance, the syntactical word-morpheme it is the structural subject of the sentence. In Does he smoke? the syntactical word-mor­pheme does is the structural predicate.

§393. Every predication can be either positive or nega­tive.

He is. — He isn't.

It rains. — // does not rain.

Speakl —Don't speakl

The 'positive' meaning- is not expressed. It exists owing to the existence of the opposite 'negative' meaning. The latter is usually expressed with the help of not (n't) which we might call the predicate negation. It is a peculiar unit differing from the particle not in several respects.

a) The particle not has right-hand connections with various classes of words, word-combinations and clauses.

E. g. You may come any time, but not when I am busy. Not wishing to disturb her, he tip-toed to his room. May I ask you not to cry at me? The predicate negation has only left-hand connections with the following 24 words and word-morphemes which H. Palmer and A. Hornby call

anomalous flnltes^l and J. Firth names syntactical opera­tors ²: am, is, are, was, were, have, has, had, do, does, did, shall, should, will, would, can, could, may, might, must, ought, need, dare, used ³. In the sentence, as we know, all these words and word-morphemes are structural (parts of) predi­cates.

b) Unlike the particle not, the predicate negation is regu­
larly contracted in speech to n't and is as regularly fused
with the preceding structural (part of the) predicate into units
differing in form from the sum of the original components
do + not — don't [dount], will + not =• won't [wount],
shall + not — shan't [Ja:nt], can + not — can't [ka:nt].

c) The predicate negation remains with the predication
when the latter is reduced to its structural parts alone.

E.g. Is mother steeping"? She isn't. He has bought the book, hasn't h e?

d) The predicate negation may represent the whole predi­
cation like a word-morpheme.

E. g. Are we late! I believe not. Here not substitutes for we are not or we aren't late.

Hence we must regard the predicate negation as a special syntactical unit, as a syntactical word-morpheme of negation. It differs from other means of expressing negation.

Cf. He d i d n ' t return. There isn't any book on the table. He n e v e r returned. There is n о book on the table.

§ 394. In English there are 'predications' which retain only the notional part of the predicate without its structural part. They are known as secondary predications or complexes (see § 310), and contain a verbid instead of a finite verb.

¹ See The Advanced Learners' Dictionary of Current English by
A. Hornby, E. Gatenby, H. Wakefield, London, 1958, p. VII.

² Studies in. Linguistic Analysis. Oxford, 1957, p. 13.

³ Here is what W. Twaddell says on the subject: "True sentence
negation requires an auxiliary to precede the signal -n't (not), any
other location of 'not' specifically makes the negation partial, affecting
part but not all of the sentence The unstressed suffix -n't is not only
the normal negative signal with an auxiliary: it occurs only with auxili­
aries and the related copula 'be'". (Op. cit., p. 13).

V,8*

ial complex»

John smokes

John smoking participial complex John ... {to) smoke infinitival com-

plexes

(for) John to smoke

As we see, the complexes possess only the person component of predicativity. The other two components can be obtained obliquely from some actual predication. That is why the complexes are always used with some predication and why they are called 'secondary' predications. In the sentence / felt him tremble the complex him tremble borrows, as it were, the tense and mood components of predicativity from the predication / felt and becomes obliquely equivalent io an actual predication He trembled into which it can be trans­formed. Thus a complex may be regarded as a transformation (transform) of some actual predication, the verbid acting as an obliqueor secondary predicate.

§ 395. The terms 'transform', 'transformational' have become popular among linguists after the publication in 1957 of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's transformational grammar is a theory for grammatical des­cription of linguistic structure. It is a generating grammar in the sense that it is a body of rules to generate an infinite set of grammatically correct sentences from a finite vocabu­lary. As B. Strong has it, it "combines great precision with a cumbersomeness that unsuits it for ordinary purposes." ^l

In this book we do not deal wi th transformational grammar as a theory, and we use the term transform as it is defined by R. Long. ² Transforms are "Syntactic patterns that close­ly parallel other syntactic patterns, from which they are conveniently considered to derive, but that are nevertheless distinct in form and use. Thus the main interrogative Was Jane there"? is conveniently regarded as a transform of the main declarative Jane was there. Clauses with passive-voice pred-icators ³ are obviously transforms of clauses with common voice ⁴ predicators. / gave him the book can profitably be con-

¹ Modern English Structure, Lnd., 1962, p. 81.

* The Sentence and its Parts, p. 508—509.
⁸ Predicates.

* Active voice.

sidered a transform of / gave the book to him, and an economics teacher of a teacher of economics."

Similarly, the sentence The bus being very crowded, John had to stand can be regarded as a transform of the sen­tence As the bus was very crowded, John had to stand or the participial complex as a transform of the subordinate clause.

Likewise can the infinitival complex of the sentence It is not possible for him to do it alonebe treated as a trans­form of the subordinate clause in It is not possible that heshould do it alone.

The gerundial complex in / resent your having takenthe book can be viewed as a transform of the subordinate clause in / resent that you have taken the book.

As we see, the complexes retain the lexical meanings of the clauses, but they are deprived of the predicative (struc­tural) meanings of mood and tense, which they borrow, as it were, from the finite verb.

This correlation of structural and non-structural predi­cations is also part of the system of a language regularly detaching the structural part of the predicate from the'no­tional one.