Saturday 25 July 2015

Sentence Variety:Many Ways to Say the 'Same' Idea

Speakers and writers of any human language have many options when they compose each sentence they utter. English, for example, has been gifted with an enormous variety of sentence types. At first glance, each different sentence type may appear to mean exactly the same as every other type in the examples below so that one has the idea that there is an enormous amount of wasteful redundancy in the language. But that's not true. Each sentence has its own subtleties of emphasis and meaning.
Consider the sentence John sent Mary a letter below. It expresses the proposition in the most common grammatical pattern in English — the grammatical subject expresses the actor, the grammatical verb expresses the action, and the grammatical objects express the beneficiary and goal of the action.
1. The BASIC clause pattern in English
Grammar
Subject
Verb
Indirect Object
Direct Object
Meaning
Actor
Action
Beneficiary
Goal
Example
John
sent
Mary
a letter.
In other words, what it means to be a subject in the basic English clause is to convey meaning about the actor or agent responsible for the action realized in the verb, etc. However, in addition to the basic clause, there are several more ways to express the same "basic" information, ways that allow the speaker or writer to emphasize and focus on different parts of the sentence.
2. PASSIVE VOICE
In the passive voice sentence pattern, we find a "reversal" of the information that is presented in the basic clause pattern. That is, the subject conveys the goal, not the actor, and the actor is mentioned later in the clause (in a structure known to grammarians as the adverbial); sometimes the actor is not mentioned at all. For example, consider both example below, where first the subject expresses the goal in the first example and then the subject expresses the recipient in the next example.
Grammar
Subject
Verb
Adverbial
Adverbial
Meaning
Goal
Action
Recipient
Actor
Example
The letter
was sent
to Mary
by John.
and 
Grammar
Subject
Verb
Direct Object
Adverbial
Meaning
Recipient
Action
Goal
Actor
Example
Mary
was sent
a letter
by John.

Passive voice allows the writer to focus attention on the recipient or the goal at those times when the writer wants to ensure that the readers' attention is focused on the most important part of the message in the sentence.
3. Wh- CLEFT
Tcleave means to cut or split into two parts, and the cleft sentence takes its name from the the fact that the single clause of the basic sentence pattern above is split into two clauses. (We recognize a clause by the presence of a subject and a verb.) The Wh- cleft is a sentence that splits the basic clause into two parts, with one of the sentence's parts beginning with a word that starts a wh. For example, from the basic clause in (1) above, we can create several different wh- sentences of similar meaning:
Grammar
Subject
Verb
Complement
Meaning
Theme
Process
Goal
Example
What John sent to Mary
was
the letter
In this example above, the fact that the basic clause has been split into two clauses allows us to emphasize both John and the letter in the same sentence. (You can "hear" the emphasis on John and the letter in the sentence when you read the sentence aloud — note the extra stress on those two phrases.) The subordinate clause What John sent to Mary is the Theme of the Wh- cleft above: theme is the term used in systemic linguistics for the part of the clause the introduces the message in the clause.
The next example, below, splits the clause with emphasis on the actor (John) and what he did (the action).
Grammar
Subject
Verb
Complement
Meaning
Theme
Process
Goal
Example
What John did
was
send the letter to Mary
Finally, the last wh- example, below, splits the basic clause in yet a different way to allow the writer to emphasize all three elements of the basic clause at once — the actor, action, recipient, and goal.
Grammar
Subject
Verb
Complement
Meaning
Theme
Process
Goal
Example
What happened
was
that John sent Mary the letter.
Although the wh- clefts above are similar in meaning, they are not the same as (1) above or each other.
4. It CLEFT
It clefts allow writers another type of sentence that splits the basic clause pattern into two parts. The theme in this sentence pattern is an "empty" function word, a pronoun, it, that really has no meaning like an ordinary pronoun since it refers to nothing. Instead, the it cleft allows the writer to focus on the actor in the first example below or on the goal, as in the second example below.
Grammar
Subject
Verb
Complement
Meaning
Theme
Process
focus on Actor
Example
It
was
John who sent the letter to Mary.

Grammar
Subject
Verb
Complement
Meaning
Theme
Process
focus on Goal
Example
It
was
the letter that John sent.
5. OTHER MARKED THEMES
Isystemic linguistics, the grammatical subjects in the it cleft and wh- cleft sentences above are called "marked" themes since those sentences do not begin with the expected, common, ordinary subject of the basic clause pattern (which is called the "unmarked" theme). Another type of marked theme can be seen below, a type characterized by the use of the grammatical object at the beginning of the sentence.
Grammar
Direct Object
Subject
Verb
Adverbial
Meaning
Goal
Actor
Action
Recipient
Example
The letter
John
sent
to Mary.
In the example above, the direct object (the letter) holds the focus of attention as it takes the lead in the sentence. Occasionally, a writer will seek to add extra emphasis to the object by using a pronoun (it) to serve as another grammatical object in the in usual position of the grammatical object, as in the example below.
Grammar
Direct Object
Subject
Verb
Direct Object
Adverbial
Meaning
Goal
Actor
Action
Goal
Recipient
Example
The letter
John
sent
it
to Mary.
When a sentence has an indirect object, that constituent may also function as a marked theme, the focus of attention, by beginning the sentence. In the example below, notice too the use of the "second" pronoun (her) object for added emphasis.
Grammar
Indirect Object
Subject
Verb
Indirect Object
Direct Object
Meaning
Benefactor
Actor
Action
Recipient
Goal
Example
Mary,
John
sent
her
the letter.
There are two points I hope you gather from this rather detailed, technical discussion. First, that each and every sentence you write is important to building an intelligible, "readable" essay. Second, that human language has this much variety not to confuse or create redundancy, but rather to allow us to choose the part of our message (the sentence) where we want to place our emphasis. For example, as an answer to the question Was it John or Bill who sent the letter?, we would more likely get It was John who sent the letter to Mary than Mary was sent a letter by John. Likewise, as an answer to What did John send Mary?, we would be more likely to get The letter, John sent to Mary than Mary, John sent her the letter.

Each sentence is a remarkable package of information, tailor-made for the situational and linguistic context. A good writing style grows from an awareness of how a writer crafts his/her sentence to its context.

References
Halliday, Michael A. K. Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold, 1993.
Kies, Daniel. "Some Stylistic Features of Business and Technical Writing: Nominalization, Passive Voice and Agency." Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 25 (1985): 199-208.
Kies, Daniel. "Marked Themes with and without Pronominal Reinforcement." In Steiner and Veltman, Pragmatics, Discourse, and Text. London: Pinter Publishers, 1986.
Prince, Ellen. A Comparison of Wh- Clefts and It Clefts in Discourse. Language 54 (1978): 883-906.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman, 1985.

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