Understanding Yes-No Questions & Auxiliaries in English Grammar: Rules & Relationships, Essays (high school) of English

Download Understanding Yes-No Questions & Auxiliaries in English Grammar: Rules & Relationships and more Essays (high school) English in PDF only on Docsity! SENTENCE RELATEDNESS I put the words down and push them a bit. EVELYN WAUGH,quoted in the New York Times, April 11,1966 Another aspect of our syntactic competence is the knowledge that certain sentences are related to one another,such as the following pair; The boy is sleeping. Is the boy sleeping? These sentences describe the same situation. The sentence in the first column asserts that a particular situation exist, a boy-sleeping situation. Such sentences are called declarative sentences.The sentence in the second column ask whether such a boy-sleeping holds. Sentences of the second sort is called yes-no questions. The only actual difference in meaning between these sentences is that one asserts a situation and the other ask for confirmation of a situation. This element of meaning is indicated by the different word orders, which illustrates that two sentences may have a structural difference that corresponds in a systematic way to a meaning defference. The grammar of the language must account for this fact. TRANSFORMATIONAL RULES Method consists entirely in properly ordering and arranging the things to which we should pay attention. RENE DESCARTES, Oeuvres, vol. X, c.1637 Phrase structures rules account for much of our syntactic knowledge,but they do not account for the fact that certain sentence types in the language relate systematically to other sentence types. The standard way of describing these relationships is to say that the related sentences come from a common underlying structure. Yes-no questions are a case in point, and they bring back to discussion of auxiliaries. Auxiliaries are central to the formation of yes-no questions as well as certain other types of sentence in english. In yes-no questions, the auxiliary in the position preceding the subject. Here are a few more examples: The boy is sleeping. Is the boy sleeping? The boy has slept. Has the boy slept? The boy can sleep. Can the boy sleep.