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Talk:English clause syntax

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Count Truthstein (talk | contribs) at 10:45, 13 September 2012 (→Move some material back to verbs). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Move some material back to verbs

I appreciate what's been done here to make a clear distinction between topics, but I think a lot of the material here ought to be moved back to English verbs. The information on verb tenses/aspects, even though they may be formed periphrastically, seems to belong in the verbs article (and that's where most people will be looking for it). The clause syntax article ought to focus on how clauses are built up from their components (of which the verb is one component). I can see the phrase-structural objection (that it's probably I was (drinking coffee) rather than I (was drinking) coffee), but given that we effectively present the material according to the second interpretation anyway, it would be better to put it in the article in which people expect to find it, and mention the more rigorous theoretical interpretation along the way. Victor Yus (talk) 07:16, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think the fact that the article is quite long means that it is worth having as a separate article. When some of this material has appeared in other articles, it has tended to list grammatical features and not to explain the interaction between the different features very well. For example, something like: "English has two tenses (non-past and past), and progressive and perfect constructions." See English_grammar#Verbs for the kind of thing I am talking about. English_verbs#Tenses.2C_aspects_and_moods (which I think you recently started) is another example. I think if this article was merged into other articles, it would probably not explain the subject as clearly and as in depth. (For example, describing perfect constructions, and progressive constructions, doesn't tell you about perfect progressive constructions. Is it "He has been speaking" or "He is having spoken"? Could you use "do-support" in this sentence? Could you make it passive?) If these sections were expanded to cover the subject thoroughly, I believe it would end up looking like this one. If readers can't access the information, it is a question of directing them to the information better.
It feels a bit like Wikipedia is going round in circles here. This article was created to put all the information on this subject in one place. It merged material from English grammar and English verbs. Then other editors came along and saw that these latter articles didn't say that much about the various grammatical constructions used in English so they started to expand those articles covering the information which was removed.
I strongly disagree with saying that strings of words like "was drinking" should be discussed under the verb section. They are not forms of verbs. I remember that one Wikipedia article used to present strings like these as "verb phrases", which was patently wrong. (They can be split up ("I was always drinking") or rearranged ("Was he drinking?"), so are not a fixed unit the way a single form of a verb is.) Just because editors will be looking for information about how English expresses tense or aspect in the "verb" article doesn't mean we should put it there. Using the same reasoning, we should cover other ways that English has of expressing tense or aspect in the "verbs" article, including nouns ("I will do it in the future") or adverbs ("He is always sleeping") that denote tense or aspect. Count Truthstein (talk) 10:45, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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