Syntactic linkage in English

Syntactic linkage in English is less complex than in Latin for the simple reason that English nouns no longer have a case system like the Latin one and English verbs have only one contrast in person and number. English uses word order and prepositions to signal syntactic links. As discussed on grammatical functions, in the active, declarative construction the subject and object nouns are never preceded by prepositions, the subject noun is immediately to the left of the verb (allowing for modifiers such as relative clauses) and the direct object noun is immediately to the right of the verb. Adjectives modifying a given noun are immediately to its left. Compare the word order in the line of Latin poetry in (14) and the word order in the English translation.

The adjective improbus, the second last word in the clause, modifies the first word, Cerberus, and the adjective nullas, the third word in the clause, modifies the last word, umbras. (Note that (14) is a line of poetry; native speakers of Latin, as far as we can make out, did not talk off the cuff in this complex fashion.) In the English translation, voracious immediately precedes Cerberus and no immediately precedes shadows. English pronouns have retained some case distinctions, and these are relevant to syntactic linkage. In standard (written) English, I, we, he, she and they occur as subject and me, us, him, her and them occur as direct, indirect or oblique object. A couple of examples are given in (15)

The construction in (16) – called the [CONTRAST] construction– does have an unusual word order in that the direct object or oblique object phrase is put at the front of the clause.

The entire object phrase is moved to the front of the clause, that is, the noun and all its modifiers. The noun and its modifiers are next to each other but the whole noun phrase is in an unusual position in the clause. Relative clauses and noun complement clauses can and do occur separated from their head noun, as in (17).

In (17a), the relative clause that Sheila had brought all the way from Chengdu is separated from its head noun vase by the phrase got broken. The vase got broken is an intransitive construction and there is no other noun that might be taken for the head modified by the relative clause. Noun complement clauses can be separated from the noun they modify even in transitive clauses. Example (17b) poses no problem because it is intransitive and the noun complement clause that traffic should be banned can only be interpreted as modifying plan. In (17c), which reads much more awkwardly than (17b) but is nonetheless acceptable, the noun complement clause that the Dome was dull relates to the content of an idea, plan, proposal, theory and so on and can only be interpreted as modifying idea. (Noun complement clauses always relate to the content of an idea and so on; this is one of the criteria by which you can decide whether a given clause is a noun complement or a relative clause.) In general, then, phrases in English can be separated from the word they modify and so can clauses, but modifier words are not separated from their head word.

English has a minimal amount of linkage between subject noun and verb. Only the verb BE has any linkage in the past tense, was requiring a singular noun and were requiring a plural noun (in standard English). All other verbs have one past-tense form (and are said to be invariable in the past tense). In the present tense, BE is again idiosyncratic; it has a first person singular form am in addition to the contrast between is (third person, singular) and are (second person singular and all persons plural). Apart from the modal verbs such as CAN, MUST and so on, which are invariable, all other verbs take the suffix -s in the third person singular – The dog barks vs The dogs bark.