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9
Form and function
The distinction between form and function is one of the fundamental distinctions
in linguistics, yet it causes problems surprisingly often. The basic insight
is very simple, yet failure to understand it leads to many complications in linguistic
descriptions.
The basics
We need to begin with some definitions of some linguistic terms. Parts of
speech were introduced in section 5. Words belonging to many of these classes
can be the most important word in a phrase which contains them. In red onions,
for example, the most important word (or head) is onions because it is obligatory
within the construction and because the phrase as a whole denotes a subset
of onions. Onions is a noun, and red onions is a noun phrase. By a similar logic,
extremely unusual is an adjective phrase, in the park is a prepositional phrase,
and so on.
In a sentence like Kim runs the video shop, the noun phrase Kim is not compatible
with a verb form run (as we might find if the initial noun phrase were
Kim’s family). This noun phrase is called the subject of the sentence, and is
traditionally often equated with the person or thing that carries out the action
of the verb. There are instances, though, where there is not much action for the
subject to carry out: in The video costs $30,for example, the subject is the video.
In Kim runs the video shop, the video shop acts as the (direct) object of the verb
run. The object is closely related to the verb (compare ate the cake with *ate the
water, *ate the sky, etc.). Just as the subject is commonly thought of as the performer
of the action of the verb, the object is commonly thought of as the
receiver or patient of the action of the verb. In the sentence Kim wrote Pat a