An Introduction of New Syntactic Elements

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the grammatical framework of English grammar as taught prescriptively in Korean schools (henceforth Korean School Grammar) from a critical point of view and to suggest an alternative framework based on generative grammar. The framework of Korean school grammar is based on tensed verbs and case, and is problematic in six respects. First, changing the part of speech of a tensed verb to an adjective alters the sentence type even though the semantic interpretations are the same. Second, there is a mismatch between grammatical analysis and semantic aspects of the sentence constituents. Third, the types of sentence constituents are limited to subject, verb, object, subject complement, object complement, and modifier. With these six sentence constituents alone, we cannot account for sentences that contain elements other than these six. Fourth, tensed clauses and infinitive counterparts are analyzed as different types of constructions. Fifth, to-infinitive constructions and NP-to-infinitive constructions are analyzed as different types of constructions even when they are both objects of two-place predicates. Six, NP-to-infinitive constructions are uniformly analyzed as object and object complement. This study shows that a predicate-based sentence analysis and an adoption of six new syntactic entities of proposition, location, cause, goal, source, and substance are able to solve all these problems.