Строй современного английского языка

THE PROBLEM OF HIGHER SYNTACTICAL UNITS
This problem may be formulated as follows: is the sentence the highest existing syntactical unit, or are there higher syntactical units than the sentence — units of which a sentence is but a component part?
The traditional view of course is that the sentence is the highest syntactical unit and that whatever units we may find of a higher order will be not syntactical, but either stylistic, or literary. However, this traditional view has been questioned in a paper by Prof. N. Pospelov.¹ Although Pospelov treats of the Russian language only, his views have a bearing on linguistics in general, since his reasonings are not based on any specifically Russian material, but on material found in other languages as well, and possibly in all languages, Therefore we will devote some space to the analysis of these ideas, as they may be applied to the English language.
What reasons are there, then, to suppose that there exists a grammatical, that is, a syntactical unit higher than the sentence, and how are the limits of this higher unit to be delineated?
The chief consideration that may be laid down in favour of this view is, that sometimes co-ordinating conjunctions establish some sort of connection between independent sentences, separated from each other by a full stop. The two conjunctions that are especially frequent in this function are, and and but. The conjunction and is found in this function often enough, and some writers seem to have a special predilection for it. Here is a typical example from Th. Dreiser's "An American Tragedy": They had been to all these wonderful places together. And now, without any real consciousness of her movements, she was moving from the chair to the edge of the bed, sitting with elbows on knees and chin in hands; or she was before the mirror or peering restlessly out into the dark to see if there were any trace of day. And at six, and six-thirty when the light was just breaking and it was nearing time to dress, she was still up — in the chair, on the edge of the bed, in the corner before the mirror. But she had reached but one definite conclusion and that was that in some way she must arrange not to have Clyde leave her.
It might perhaps be said that the higher unit established by co-ordinating conjunctions is somewhat like what we call a "paragraph". But a conjunction of this kind may even be found at the
¹ See H. С. Поспелов, Проблема сложного синтаксического целого в современном русском языкe. Учёные записки МГУ, вып. 137, кн. 2, 1948

The Problem of Higher Syntactical Units 349
beginning of a paragraph. Thus, in the passage just quoted the sentence And now, without any real consciousness... stands at the opening of a new paragraph, and so does the sentence beginning with But she had reached...
Occasionally a conjunction of this kind may even stand at the opening of a new chapter, as is the case in the following extract from "An American Tragedy":
The beauty of the various houses along Wykeage Avenue and its immediate tributaries! The unusual and intriguing sense of movement and life there so much in evidence. Oh, if he were but of it!
Chapter XXIII
And then, one November evening as Clyde was walking along Wykeage Avenue, just west of Central, a portion of the locally celebrated avenue which, ever since he had moved to Mrs Peyton's he was accustomed to traverse to and from his work, one thing did occur which in so far as he and the Griffiths were concerned was destined to bring about a chain of events which none of them could possibly have foreseen.
If we were to take the view that a co-ordinating conjunction always forms some kind of grammatical unit, we should have to say, in this case, that the grammatical unit formed by the conjunction and embraces the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. That, however, would be most unnatural. If, therefore, we have to choose between the two alternatives: either to admit that a conjunction may join two independent sentences without forming any higher grammatical unit, or to say that a higher grammatical unit may include parts of two chapters, and so forth, we will decidedly prefer the first of them. This, however, will make it necessary to add something to the definition of a conjunction: a conjunction may unite words, parts of a sentence, clauses, and independent sentences as well (compare above, p. 31).
Let us study the means which are used to establish connections between sentences. And this leads on to a series of questions which may be said to lie on the border line of grammar.
What is meant is study of the structure of entire texts, such as short newspaper notices, poems, or novels. In this study it does not appear possible to stay strictly within the limits of grammar: some lexical phenomena will also have to be taken into consideration.
We will only give some hints as to the possible trends of investigation in this field, and we begin by studying some opening

850 Conclusion
p aragraphs of a modern novel. Let this be Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley:
The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories. This young woman who had stood in a garden at the turn of the century was like a ghost at cockcrow. His mother, Anthony Beavis recognised. A year or two, perhaps only a month or two, before she died. But fashion, as he peered at the brown phantom, fashion is a topiary art. Those swan-like loins! That long slanting cascade of bosom — without any apparent relation to the naked body beneath! And all that hair, like an ornamental deformity of the skull! Oddly hideous and repellent it seemed in 1933. And yet, if he shut his eyes (as he could not resist doing), he could see his mother languidly beautiful on her chaise-longue, or, agile, playing tennis, or swooping like n bird across the ice of a far-off winter,
Now let us take a look at the elements in this passage which in some way or other tend to establish connections between sentences.
In the first sentence there is the past perfect form had become, which points to two time levels in the narration. In the second sentence, there is another past perfect form — had stood and this time it is correlated with the past indefinite form was in the same sentence.
In the third sentence the possessive pronoun his does not establish any connection with the preceding text, as there has so far been no mention of any man, to whom the possessive pronoun might refer. It refers to the name Anthony Beavis, which appears after the pronoun (this is not a frequent use). If there had been mention of a man in the preceding text this would be misleading. In the next sentence the pronoun she establishes a connection both with the second sentence (the phrase this young woman) and with the third (the phrase his mother).
In the next sentence, the conjunction but establishes a relation with the preceding text. So does the pronoun he, referring to the name Anthony Beavis, and also the phrase the brown phantom, which (as is clear from the context) refers to features of the woman in the photo. Then the pronoun it refers to the phrase all that hair, and would be unintelligible without this reference. Finally, the phrase his mother in the last sentence of the passage clearly refers back to the identical phrase his mother used in the third sentence.
Further investigation into such means of establishing connections between independent sentences should yield valuable conclusions about logical and semantic structure of larger text units. It is fairly obvious that here grammatical means go hand in hand with lexical ones, and the scholar's task should be to find out the precise part played by each of these, and the way they combine to produce the final result.

Representation and Substitution 851