6 . Syntactic - Semantic Relations

    English has carried very far a practice which many other languages firmly resist : that of letting many words switch freely from one grammatical category to another. Normally there is little if any discernible change in pronunciation. Slight changes may occur which pass unnoticed by any but the trained ears of phonologists. But sometimes change in stress is marked as when, e.g., próduce (n) becomes prodúce (v). Changes in a word's import as it passes from one syntactic duty to another are, on the other hand, frequent, though to note them explicitly may need special care and attention. In addition to the codification brought in by and inseparable from its grammatical role, there may be other shifts to be noted.
    Close inspection of even a section of the list of General Things will bear out the points just raised. Let us suggest that our readers place a lightly pencilled dot before words in Column 2 of the Basic List which, outside Basic, are also used as regular verbs.

    Note as you do what tests you are using. some words you will hardly need to try out in sentences. You recognize them at once as verbs you have used and will use in countless times. Other hold you up a bit till you think of a specific application. With others again you may have to consult rather carefully a body of more or less precise information you possess which may be described as your own personal mental dictionary —- your readiness to accept or reject most offered sentences as “making sense” or not. Check especially with this whether your “OK” or your headshake comes along with and gets its authority from some imagined situation in which some one might say the sentence and whether the mere failure of your imagination to invent any such situation is enough to make you dismiss a possibility. Keep your ears open for what you may soon hear someone say that might refute you.
Content of Column 2

account act addition adjustment advertisement   agreement air amount amusement animal answer apparatus approval argument art attack attempt attention attraction authority back balance base behavior belief

birth bit bite blood blow body brass bread breath brother building burn burst business   butter canvas care cause chalk chance change cloth coal color comfort

committee company comparison competition   condition connection control cook copper copy cork cotton cough country cover crack credit crime crush cry current curve damage danger daughter

day death debt decision degree design desire destruction detail development digestion direction discovery discussion disease disgust distance distribution division doubt drink driving dust earth edge


    This exercise of comparing the noun and verb uses of what looks and sounds like the same word induces a lively awareness of the flexibility the give and take, of the language. Whether we let a dictionary help us in it or not, the game of composing sentences using a given word (in whichever of its various senses) first as a noun and then as a verb (or vice-versa) and comparing the outcomes can be exacting. It can also, if played attentively, be surprising and intriguing, offering us frequent glimpses of nuances and distinctions which we will find delicate indeed if we try (I) to give an account of them -- much less (2) to account for them. None the less, though language will not easily describe or explain such distinctions, it uses them all the time and often, as here, to indicate what may be crucially different directions. A whole controversy in the methodology of the sciences has turned on whether description or explanation is their true aim. Have they done their duty if they have supplied an account of the fact or can they be called upon to go further and account for them?
    Here then, with the first of our 400 words naming “general things,” we have one of the biggest of all issues involved by —- almost forced upon us through —- what might seem merely a syntactic noun-to-verb shift. But the fact that for replaces of here should serve us warning. Both for and of are often enough alarm signals—as their separation, in Column I of the Basic List, from the relatively straight and plain position-direction words : about-with, was intended by Ogden to indicate. If we look in The Shorter Oxford at the noun and verb uses of this first word in Column 2 of the list we will find what may be a hint from history as to this difference between account of and account for :
Account, v. 2. intr. to render or receive an account.
ME : trans. to render account of, 1614 ; to render an account for trust moneys ;
to explain ; to answer for (See quotes.).
2 Ramnarian was ready to account fairly . James Mill.
All receipts should be accounted to a finance committee . M. Patison.
At once accounting for his deep arrears . Dryden.
To account for the greater cold . Tyndall.
The Terrier accounted for one, the keeper for another . Thackeray.
Perhaps the trust moneys have something to do with it. A trustee has to supply more than items and total : he is acting for others, in their place ; he is representing them. When we account for something we point to facts without which it would not be so. The something is shown to be the outcome . . .
    . . . page77 . . .(more) . . . 21 pages go here. . .
   
    . . . We need our best attention for the prime practical question : How can the segment of English most responsible for the management of essential affairs and for the upkeep in efficiency of the rest of the language be more widely and more ably used?

FOOTNOTES
1 . Theory and practice of field crop production and soil management.
2 . Quaint originally meant skilful, knowledgeable, prudent cunning, and goes back through Old French to L. cognoscere learn and noscere know. One of the modern senses, almost the same as one sense of queer, namely, odd, is thus a nearly complete reversal).
3 . I. A. Richards (ed4, Plato’s Republic, Cambridge University Press. Pp. 104-105.
4 . op. cit., p. 42.
5 . A fuller account of this language-society analogy, which it rather more than an analogy, is developed in I. A. Richards, So Much Nearer, Essay VI “Meanings Anew,” Harcourt Brace, New York, 1968.
6 . For more on this see Christine Gibson and I. A. Richards. English through Pictures Book 2, Washington Square Press, New York, Pp 199, 200, 205. This little book is itself a model of controlled language at york in step-by-step building up of the key ideas needed for living in the changing worlds of today and tomorrow. For the Comenius picture, see English Through Pictures,. Book 3, p. 199.
7 . For further discussion of this model or image see I.A. Richards So Much Nearer, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1968. Pp. 87-90 ; and by the same author, How to Read a Page, Norton, New York, 1942 (consult Index.) Possibly the most influential instance of this way of representing reality is to be found (with the diagram of the Divided Line) in Plato’s Republic, VI, 50 sq., Pp. 119-122, a version in Every Man’s English, Cambridge University Press.
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