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A critical examination of the account of the definite article in
Quirk et al.’s A Comprehensive Grammar of the English
Language (1985)
(The false trail of grammatical categorising 1)
Amorey Gethin
This article is a slightly edited extract (pp.77-87) from my book Antilinguistics,
published by Intellect in 1990.
Contents
The
unreality of grammatical analysis
Quirk
et al.’s categories of the
Misleading talk about ‘anaphoric reference’
Further obfuscation by category
Failure of Quirk et al. to deal with the real problems of
the
Everybody, of course,
should be granted a few mistakes without suffering excessively severe
strictures, even if one would expect fewer from a team of four professors
working for so long with numerous assistants. However, it is a tiny detail that
reveals something even more important, and shows how wrong and impractical
their whole approach is. On page 252 of Quirk et al.’s book there is a
note [b]:
“It can be argued
that some nouns, like weather, are neither count (*a weather) nor
noncount (*a lot of weather), but these nouns share features belonging
to both classes. Noncount noun features include the premodified structures a
lot of good weather, some bad weather, what lovely weather. On the other
hand, count noun features include the plural go out in all weathers, in the
worst of weathers.”
This is typical of the
mistake of applying abstract grammatical analyses instead of thinking naturally
about meaning. They apply an inflexible test – “a lot of” – and fall straight
into the trap. There is no grammatical quirk in the word “weather”. It is
simply the particular meaning of
“weather” that makes “a lot of weather” somewhat uncommon. One does not often, in
life, mean that. But it is by no means impossible:
A lot of
weather is determined largely by temperature.
As for
“weathers”, that is a perfectly normal phenomenon found with ‘noncount’ nouns:
the plural form is used to express the idea of ‘sorts of’:
You can find
some wonderful cheeses in
They make
good wines in this region.
The unreality of grammatical
analysis
Quirk et al.’s
and most grammarians’ attitude is strange. On page 288 Quirk et al.
acknowledge that grammatical categories have unclear boundaries. Yet they
immediately go on:
"... we might wonder whether King's in King's College is
to be classed as a genitive common noun which is part of a composite common
name."
They talk as if there
was some absolute truth of the matter. We may wonder, but God knows the classes -
if only we could find out too. If they do not believe that God knows, they are
effectively admitting that they are engaging in a ritual of human-made
labelling for its own sake, analysis for the fun of it, without meaning in
reality.
The more they
classify, the more categories they can establish, the happier they seem to be.
Consider Quirk et al.'s treatment of "the". Even before
they have separated "the" from "a" they straight away
divide the articles into "specific reference" and "generic
reference". By that they mean the difference between, for instance,
25 There are two
giraffes in the garden.
and
26 Giraffes are
strange looking animals.
where in 25 one means two
'specific' individual giraffes, but in 26 giraffes in general.
They do make an
attempt to explain the meaning of "the" itself
(p.265). They write:
"The
definite article the is used to mark the phrase it introduces as
definite, ie as 'referring to something which can be identified uniquely
in the contextual or general knowledge shared by speaker and hearer',"
Any students of
English who manage to understand this language will be misled by “…knowledge
shared…” I guess fewer than half the people who have trouble with their
cars and are told
27 It's the constant
velocity joint,
share any knowledge of the
matter with the mechanic who tells them. But they will not question the
mechanic's "the", because they know which constant velocity
joint it is - it's the one on their car. And in fact a vast amount of the
"the" language that adults use to children refers to things that are
not familiar to the children.
The confusion Quirk et
al. have got themselves into is quickly confirmed, by a note on the next
page (266):
"In
practice, since a speaker cannot always be sure of the hearer's state of
knowledge, use of the involves a certain amount
of guesswork. In fact, in some cases the assumption of shared knowledge is a
palpable fiction. Notices such as Mind the step and Beware the dog, for
example, generally do not assume that the reader was previously aware of the
hazards in question."
"The" has
nothing to do with the sort of "shared knowledge" Quirk et al. are
worrying about, and so there is no problem whatever with "Mind the
step" or "Beware the dog". Just as "the" in 27 tells
you that "the constant velocity joint" is the particular one on
your car, so "Mind the step" tells us of the particular step
right there in front of us, and "Beware the dog" tells us of
the particular dog lurking around those parts. Such notices have to say
"the" to make sense. Some people might get very alarmed if they found
notices saying "Mind a step" or "Beware a dog" and watch
out furtively for steps and dogs for the rest of their lives.
Quirk et
al.’s categories of the
But by this stage
Quirk and his colleagues have started on something even worse, though it is an
extension of the same fundamental fault. Under one heading alone,
"Specific reference...Uses of the definite article" (which is only
the beginning of their treatment of "the"), they establish no less
than eight categories. (The examples are mine.)
(a) Immediate situation - e.g. Would you like to see the garden?
(b) Larger
situation (general knowledge) - e.g. The world Cup was
held in
(c)
Anaphoric reference: direct - e.g. We've a dog and a
cat. The cat's called Tonk.
(d)
Anaphoric reference: indirect - e.g. This new
cassette's no good. I'll take it back to the shop.
(e)
Cataphoric reference - e.g. The history of
(f) Sporadic reference - e.g. We're not on the telephone.
(g) The 'logical' use of the - e.g. Rico is the eldest son.
(h) The
use of the with reference to body parts - e.g. He was hit in the chest.
All this
categorization is pernicious in two ways, and the second evil arises out of the
first.
First is that the
categorizing gives a wholly wrong impression of how language works. The truth
is that "the" (when used in the common way I am discussing here, as
the 'definite article', though academic linguists waste energy debating that
term too) has just one simple basic meaning. All the other meanings of complete
phrases or sentences arise merely as the result of that one simple basic
meaning in combination with other meanings. Exactly the same applies to,
say, "a", or plurals, or words for
uncountable things without "the", and so on. (And I mean
"things", not "nouns". This is a crucial point. You can
perhaps see what I have in mind if you think of the example above of "weather"
again.) There is no such thing as an 'anaphoric' "the" as opposed to
a 'situational reference' "the" as opposed to a 'cataphoric'
"the" etc. They are all exactly the same "the".
Misleading talk about ‘anaphoric
reference’
It is not possible to
describe any word accurately with other words. The only perfectly true
description of the meaning of "the" is "the". But one can
give a pretty good and useful idea of what it means if one says it has the
sense of "that particular limited (thing), you know which I mean".
Actually, the second part of that description is almost certainly unnecessary -
the "you know which I mean" idea must surely always follow inevitably
from the first basic idea.
So in
28 We've a dog and a
cat. The cat's called Tonk.
there is no "the"
of 'anaphoric reference' in the second sentence. There's just plain
"the". Of course the second sentence is about the cat in the
first sentence, but that does not excuse saying that the "the" is
anaphoric. The second sentence is about the cat in the first sentence because
"the" - old, familiar, constant "the" - has been used
together with "cat". Quirk et al. want us to believe virtually
the reverse: that a special sort of "the" (anaphoric "the")
is being used because the second sentence is about the cat in the first
sentence.
The absurdity of
dividing "the" up into categories can be seen if one imagines a
grammarian analysing "does" who says that when a speaker uses
"he does", "does" has male reference; but it can also have
female reference, as in "she does", or "the hen does", or
"his wife does". But naturally the male/female distinction is in no
way the foundation or starting point of the grammar of "does", and it
is sheer befogging analysing to present language on this basis. Meaning is the
basis, and the result.
The categorizing approach
gives the wrong impression of language in general; and it leads to wrong
practical conclusions on individual points of grammar. Here is a single example
of the latter - under (c) Anaphoric reference: direct, Quirk et al. write:
"the first reference to an object will ordinarily be
indefinite, but once the object has been introduced into the discourse in this
way, it can be treated as 'contextually known', and can thenceforward be
referred to by means of the definite article." (p.267)
Readers who speak a
language without articles can draw quite the wrong conclusion from this, for it
means that the following conversation would be normal.
29a Bill: What are
those?
29b Ted: A melon and a
pineapple, of course.
29c Bill: It's the very small melon.
or
29d Bill: Yes, I can
see it's the melon, but
what's it doing here?
Now, I dare say the
classifying grammarians will find a way of wriggling out of this. That will be quite
beside the point, because the only important issue is: What is the practical
use of their grammars? Mistakes like those in 29c and 29d are inevitable with
their methods. But give students a simple explanation based on the meaning of
the word itself, and no more, and everything falls
naturally into place. It will become clear, for instance, that one cannot use
"the" for "melon" in 29c or 29d because there one does not
mean "that particular limited thing"; one means instead "one of
the several (or many) that exist."
Certainly one will
sometimes have to point out to a language student what a particular sentence or
phrase means, and so one will be involved in saying things like "Look,
clearly we are talking about all tigers in general here, not particular
tigers". But the meaning of the words are all one
needs, not some artificial system of categories which will only be another
barrier to understanding, insight and grasp.
Further obfuscation by category
The analysing and
categorizing system not only gives students false information; it imposes a
completely unnecessary burden on them. Naturally, describing words' meanings is
not in itself enough. One has to give examples. But the larger part of Quirk et
al.'s explanations in their section on the articles, for instance, is
concerned purely with an elaboration of their categories or trying to get out
of the tangles that their method must lead to. The whole of their section on
Cataphoric reference (pp.268-69) is typical, but I will quote only two parts of
it in illustration:
"Sometimes the definite noun phrase can be contrasted with an equivalent indefinite phrase. In such instances, the definite article is not in fact genuinely cataphoric but entails some degree of anaphoric reference."
"Note It is not necessary to postulate that the expression [5] presupposes some unspoken preamble such as [5a] but, rather, such as [5b]:
the mud on your coat [5]
There's some mud on your coat. [5a]
You
know there's mud on your coat. [5b] "
If students seriously
get down to grasping and learning all this - and remember that it goes
on and on for the greater part of 1779 pages - their heads will soon start to
spin.
Again, under (d)
Anaphoric reference: indirect, the authors are exercised by the problem of how
much indirect anaphora is combined with cataphoric reference, and so whether
the use of "the" is explained by ellipsis. And so on. It starts all
over again when Quirk et al. get to "The articles in generic
reference" (p.281). On page 283 there is:
“The
Romans is thus a generalization (like the mathematicians, the teenagers,
the birds, etc in similar use), whereas the Roman implies a generic
statement. Nevertheless, it will be convenient to apply the term 'generic' to
both the singular and plural uses."
Convenient for whom and why? Surely convenient only for
analysers trying to fit everything into their classification scheme. The
authors of this tome are only the tip of the iceberg. Year after year after
year grammarians publish articles in the linguistic journals earnestly debating
how generic 'generic' "a" and "the" really are. Naturally
the debate is only a minute part of the whole, of the constant analytical
linguistic debate among academics.
Failure of Quirk et al. to deal with the real problems of the
Yet, in the more than
30 pages of their section on the articles, with all their classification Quirk
and his colleagues have no room for two of the most important practical
problems connected with "the" that face students of English as a
foreign language: nouns with modifying adjectives, and nouns modified by
"of' phrases.
Without “the”:
heavy industry
central
tropical birds
But:
the electrical industry
the
the French impressionists
And without
"the":
history of great interest
literature in the nineteenth
century
But:
the history of music
the literature of the
nineteenth century
(See
Cook, Gethin, Mitchell, A new way to proficiency in English, 1967/1980,
pp.79-81.)
All that Quirk et
al. have to say on the two problems is on page 286 under the heading
"The articles in generic reference":
"Normally
the zero article also occurs when the...noun is
premodified.
she's studying European history."
[By “the zero article...occurs" they
mean that the article does not occur.]
"But
when the same noun is postmodified, especially by an of-
phrase, the definite article normally precedes it: She is studying the history
of
There is no
explanation of why and when some nouns modified by adjectives take the article
and others don't; and no explanation of why and when some "of' (and other
prepositional) phrases make "the" necessary and others don't. Yet
these, particularly the first, are 'mysteries' that cause difficulties for
millions of students of English. It is hard to see what is
the purpose of a grammar that makes no attempt to clear them up. It is
true that in an earlier version of their book, A university grammar of English (1973/1979, pp.71-72), Quirk
and Greenbaum had very slightly more to say on the subject:
"...English
tends to make a liberal interpretation of the concept 'generic' in such cases,
so that the zero article is used also where the reference of the noun head is
restricted by premodification. ...Canadian paper..."
What is the good of
making these beds of Procrustes for themselves? The uselessness of their sort
of classification and analysis is shown up clearly by the vagueness of the weak
attempts to get round difficulties. In this case, for example, they have got themselves
into a tangle only by insisting on the 'generic' classification in the first
place. Quirk et al. talk of "the generic the" as if the
word "the" itself had different functions, and itself gave generic
(or other) meaning to nouns - instead of it being the meaning of each specific
phrase or sentence in its context that gives the meaning - i.e. the meaning is
the meaning! It isn't "the" that is generic - it is the phrase that
has generic meaning, or not, as the case may be. In any case, as we have seen,
there are different sorts of 'generic', and disagreement as to what has true
generic meaning or not. This surely confirms that the linguists have got the
wrong end of the stick.
What students need to
have shown and explained to them are the most basic meanings. Here are three of
them:
a horse
the horse
horses
They can then be
illustrated in varying contexts. But Quirk et al. and many other
grammarians insist on lumping them together under the heading 'generic' and
then find they have to unravel them again. Quirk and his fellow authors fail to
do this properly and so only achieve confusion. All I can find in A
Comprehensive Grammar...(pp.281-82)
is:
"The
bull terrier makes an excellent watchdog [1a]
A bull
terrier makes an excellent watchdog [1b]
Bull terriers make excellent watchdogs [1c]
....It
should not, however, be assumed that the three options [1a], [1b], and [1c] are
in free variation. One difference between them is that, whereas the [1a]
keeps its generic functions in nonsubject positions in the sentence, a/an [1b],
and to a lesser extent zero [1c], tend to lose their generic function in these
positions:
the
medieval mystery play [3a]
Nora has
been studying a
medieval mystery play [3b]
medieval mystery plays [3c]
Of these, only [3a] refers to mystery plays as a genre; [3b] refers
to only one play; and [3c] is most likely to refer only to a
subset of them.
……………..
The
generic use of a / an picks out ANY
REPRESENTATIVE MEMBER OF THE CLASS. Thus any can be substituted for a / an
in examples like:
The best
way to learn a language is to live among its speakers.
Generic a / an is therefore restricted in that it cannot be used in attributing properties which belong to the class or species as a whole. Thus:
The
tiger is
becoming almost extinct.
Tigers are
BUT NOT: *A tiger is becoming almost extinct.
The generic use of zero article with both plural nouns and noncount nouns identifies the class considered as an UNDIFFERENTIATED WHOLE (cf 5.39 f):
Cigarettes
are bad for your health.
………………..
The is rather limited in its generic function. With
singular heads, it is often formal or literary in tone, indicating THE CLASS AS
REPRESENTED BY ITS TYPICAL SPECI:MEN:
A great
deal of illness originates in the mind.
No one knows precisely when the wheel was invented.
My
colleague has written a book on the definite article in Spanish.
Marianne
plays the harp very well."
These explanations do
not, I think, explain differences - and 'impossibilities' - like the following:
30 Bill trains a
horse.
31 Bill trains the
horse.
33
A horse gets its training at places like Bill's.
34 The horse gets its
training at places like Bill's.
35 Horses get their
training at places like Bill's.
30 certainly fits what Quirk et al. say about their example [3b] (above) though Bill appears to have
a rather limited life. But already here one notes that they merely say "tend
to lose their generic function" (my italics). That is not satisfactory
for any student hoping for clear guidance. 31 is
impossible unless either the speaker is talking about one particular horse, or
Bill is God. Yet there is nothing in the exposition above to tell one that. Is
it not the fullest generic sense that is needed and is not the "the
horse" form the very type of the generic? Students must be forgiven for
believing both these things if they study Quirk et al., and they will
get decisive confirmation of their conclusion when they note [3a] –
Nora has
been studying the medieval mystery play.
-
and what is said about it. For 'syntactically' [3a]
is effectively exactly the same as 31. The only difference that might be
significant is that 31 uses the 'simple' form rather than the "-ing"
form of the verb. But any students who have read Quirk and Greenbaum's earlier A
university grammar of English (1973/79, p.68) will have their conviction
strengthened further by
-
“There is
considerable (though by no means complete) interdependence between the
dynamic/stative [i.e.
"-ing"/simple] dichotomy in the verb phrase and the
specific/generic dichotomy in the noun phrase...”
So what is to stop
students thinking that 31 is just what they need? The
answer to that question is once more: don't think about irrelevant
classifications, but concentrate on the particular 'whole' meanings produced by
the particular meanings of the parts - "studying" is different from
"training", and "the medieval mystery play" is different
from "the horse", and will affect the outcome accordingly.
Notice, too, not only
the familiar vagueness, but also the old mistake of turning what is simply more
common in life into a function of language. It is quite
irrelevant that people do not so often want to express 'generic'
with 'dynamic' as 'generic' with 'stative', and it is utterly misleading to
draw attention to non-existent linguistic associations. If the idea one
wants to express happens to be "Peanuts (in general) are doing
something", that is what one has to say, irrespective of how rare that
situation may be in the world.
Quirk- et al. might
of course be ingenious enough to show that their description of the "the
horse" form as "indicating the class as represented by its typical
specimen" is precisely the right one for preventing the use of 31. But
they can surely not seriously pretend that anybody who did not know how to use
the articles in English already could work out from such an abstract formula
that "Bill trains the horse" is not what they mean.
32 (above) is the 'right' one. How are
students to know this from Quirk et al.? Is "horses" specific
or generic here?
And which do we want anyway? If generic, how generic? Presumably not anything generic in the sense of "Horses are
beautiful". Perhaps their reference to a subset (but how generic is
a subset?) in non-subject positions is just what we should bear in mind here.
But then, why can't we say "Bill trains some horses", for isn't
"some horses" a subset? And do we identify something as a subset
first and then choose the appropriate words accordingly? And if that is how we
work, what happens to ideas like "I like horses", where
"horses" is certainly not a subset. All this is a perfect example of
how totally misguided the classificatory approach is, not only to the
theoretical problems of grammarians, but also, more seriously, to the practical
problems of students.
From Quirk et al.'s
examples [1a], [1b], [1c] (above)one would think that 33, 34 and 35 (above)are all perfectly acceptable.
The various "horse" phrases are all subjects. But again it is the
particular meanings that prevent this, not any of the distinctions noted in A comprehensive grammar... 34 is impossible in
the same way as 31. If 33 and 35 are to be taken in a general or 'world'
context, they are patently untrue; in the limited context of horse racing both
are a possibility, although "The horses" seems to me more natural
than merely "Horses".
Meanwhile bewildered
students can only become more frustrated than ever by the failure to tell them
the things they really need to know.
Quirk et al.’s
treatment of the articles is not at all an isolated case. For instance, when
they come to the distinction between "some" and "any" (and
their compounds) they immediately start in their usual way. "Some" is
declared to be 'assertive', "any" 'non-assertive'. This is exactly
the same cart-before-the-horse approach as they applied to the articles. Once
more they fail to see that it is the basic, original meanings of "some"
and "any" that produce, sometimes, sentences that can be
analysed or classified in this way………………….(See further www.lingua.org.uk/saquirk.htm)
Revised 8 April 2010
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