Introducing English Linguistics

It
was constructed by them
This example is also in the passive voice. If the sentence is changed to the
active voice, the noun phrase following by is moved to the subject position
in the sentence:
J. A. Howard and J. Sheth
constructed one of the best known models
If the original sentence is made into a question, the subject switches
places with the verb was:
Was one of the best known models constructed by J. A. Howard and J.
Sheth?
What insertion, substitution, and movement tests illustrate is that at
the level of syntax, certain structures form units but others do not.
Those structures that do form units are not an arbitrary and ad hoc col-
lection of constructions, but constructions that can be assigned formal
grammatical descriptions – descriptions that identify a finite set of
grammatical constructions that form the building blocks of English
syntax. The remainder of this chapter describes and defines these
constructions. But before the constructions are defined, it is necessary
to describe the two primary ways that grammatical categories are
defined.
Grammatical descriptions are of two types: formal or notional. Formal
descriptions focus on specific characteristics of a grammatical construc-
tion. For instance, the word truck in English can be classified as a noun
because it shares with many (but not all) nouns in English the ability to be
pluralized by the addition of orthographic s: trucks. Notional definitions, in
contrast, are more semantic in nature and define constructions in terms of
general qualities that they possess. Notionally, nouns are defined as any-
thing that is a person, place, thing, or idea. Truck is a noun because it is a
“thing.”