ABSTRACT
We are gradually building up a picture of the grammar of English through the meanings associated with grammatical categories and classes. We have concentrated so far largely on individual elements of grammar: words and parts of words (inflections). These we have related to situation types (verbs), participants (nouns) and circumstances (adverbs and prepositions), and to various kinds of specification of these major categories, e.g. auxiliary verbs and modal adverbs for situation types, adjectives and determinatives for participants, and so on. We have gone beyond the individual account of isolated classes of words in our treatment of specification as having a structural relationship with the item that is specified. The term ‘noun phrase’, for example, which we used in the previous chapter, implies a unit which has internal syntactic structure, e.g. in the way that determinatives and nouns relate.
