Talk:English clause syntax
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)
- 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)
- What readers will be looking for in the verbs article are the ways English has of expressing things using verb forms. It can hardly be denied that the distinction in meaning between "drinks" and "is drinking" is a verb-related thing more than a clause-syntax-related thing (even if the second form is not technically "a verb" - for that matter it's not technically a unit of clause syntax either). Things about do-support and passivization and so on should probably be dealt with in detail in the syntax article, though it's inevitable that we'll want to mention such things at least in summary in the verbs article. That probably applies to most of this information in fact - it needs to be done in detail in one place (possibly we need more separate articles for that purpose) and summarized in several others. Victor Yus (talk) 11:43, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
- That distinction is related more to clause syntax. (a) "He drinks" and "He is drinking" are both clauses (b) The difference between them is the syntax of the clause, i.e. the pattern of constituents in a clause. Which forms of verbs are used is subject to the particular syntactic construction being used. This is true of verbs as it is true of any other lexical class. You wouldn't expect the "noun" article or the "adverb" article to explain the full details of clause syntax just because nouns and adverbs are used in clauses. Verbs are a part of speech in English and that is what the "verbs" article should cover, not syntactic expressions used to express tense, aspect or anything else (just as you would not expect the verbs article to cover nouns or adverbs denoting the same, e.g. "future" or "always" in the examples I gave above). Count Truthstein (talk) 12:08, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
- OK, I suppose if you put it like that, it makes some sense to keep the full detail about these issues on this page. Though there still needs to be some discussion of it on the verbs page, since it is clearly relevant to the topic of how the various verb forms that we talk about on that page are used. Victor Yus (talk) 07:33, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
- That distinction is related more to clause syntax. (a) "He drinks" and "He is drinking" are both clauses (b) The difference between them is the syntax of the clause, i.e. the pattern of constituents in a clause. Which forms of verbs are used is subject to the particular syntactic construction being used. This is true of verbs as it is true of any other lexical class. You wouldn't expect the "noun" article or the "adverb" article to explain the full details of clause syntax just because nouns and adverbs are used in clauses. Verbs are a part of speech in English and that is what the "verbs" article should cover, not syntactic expressions used to express tense, aspect or anything else (just as you would not expect the verbs article to cover nouns or adverbs denoting the same, e.g. "future" or "always" in the examples I gave above). Count Truthstein (talk) 12:08, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
- What readers will be looking for in the verbs article are the ways English has of expressing things using verb forms. It can hardly be denied that the distinction in meaning between "drinks" and "is drinking" is a verb-related thing more than a clause-syntax-related thing (even if the second form is not technically "a verb" - for that matter it's not technically a unit of clause syntax either). Things about do-support and passivization and so on should probably be dealt with in detail in the syntax article, though it's inevitable that we'll want to mention such things at least in summary in the verbs article. That probably applies to most of this information in fact - it needs to be done in detail in one place (possibly we need more separate articles for that purpose) and summarized in several others. Victor Yus (talk) 11:43, 13 September 2012 (UTC)