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CONCLUSION
In this final section we will consider some general questions of the structure of Modern English.
Over the last few decades many new problems have arisen in the study of sentence structure. Some of them are strictly grammatical, others tend in some measure to reach into the lexical and semantic sphere. One of these problems is that of autosemantic and synsemantic sentences. These terms denote the difference between sentences whose meaning is clear in itself, and does not require either the preceding or the following environment (we might also say: either the left-hand or the right-hand environment) to make it clear, and sentences whose meaning does require such environment and is not clear without it.
As an example of autosemantic sentences we can take the opening sentence of some text: its meaning can certainly not depend on any preceding (left-hand) environment, since such environment is not available, and it is usually independent of any ensuing (right-hand) environment too.
Here is the opening sentence of the novel Room at the Top by John Braine: I came to Warley on a wet September morning with the sky the grey of Gutseley sandstone. The meaning of the sentence is perfectly clear without any outside help. Now let us take a look at the next sentence: I was alone in the compartment. Here things are different. The implications of the word compartment would not be clear without the preceding sentence. What is meant is of course the compartment of a railway carriage, and the idea of a railway carriage, though not expressly mentioned, is clearly suggested by the phrase came to Warley. Though the reader may not know what Warley is, the turn of the phrase suggests that it is a town and that the narrator arrived in it by train. Thus, the words came to Warley pave the way for a correct understanding of the word compartment. The second sentence in the text is synsemantic.
Now let us consider the beginning of another novel, The White Peacock by D. H. Lawrence. Here it is.
I stood watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the mill-pond. They were grey, descendants of the silvery things that had darted away from the monks, in the young days when the valley was lusty. The whole place was gathered in the musing of old age.
The opening sentence is clearly autosemantic. The second sentence is not. The reader would not know what was meant by the pronoun they which is its subject. Only the connection with the opening sentence makes it clear that the pronoun they replaces the substantive fish, which is the object of the first sentence.
Now let us consider another passage further on in the same text:
Conclusion 347
I was almost startled into the water from my perch on the alder roots by a voice saying:
'Well, what is there to look at?' My friend was a young farmer, stoutly built, brown-eyed, with a naturally fair skin burned dark and freckled in patches. He laughed, seeing me start, and looked down at me with lazy curiosity.
The implication of the word water in the first sentence of this passage is made clear by the preceding text, where both mill-pond and stream occur. As to the words my friend in the second sentence of the passage, their meaning would be unintelligible without the direct-speech sentence that precedes it: 'Well, what is there to look at?'; it is clear from this context that my friend is the person who pronounced those words. Thus we see here again a clear instance of a synsemantic sentence.
Now we consider an example of a somewhat different kind. This is the beginning of the novel The World of William Clissold by H. G. Wells.
Yesterday I was fifty-nine, and in a year I shall be sixty — "Getting on for seventy," as the unpleasant old phrase goes. I was born in November, 1865, and this is November, 1924. The average duration of life in England is fifty-one and a half, so I am already eight years and a half beyond the common lot. The percentage of people who live beyond sixty is forty-seven. Beyond seventy it is thirty. Only one in five thousand lives beyond one hundred, and of this small body of centenarians two-thirds are women.
In this passage all sentences but one are autosemantic, that is, each of them is perfectly intelligible without the help of any other. Only the last sentence but one is an exception. Indeed, if we had come across the sentence Beyond seventy it is thirty, we could not make sense of it — it might even appear to be absurd: how could thirty be beyond seventy? The full version of the sentence, which would make it autosemantic, would run — The percentage of people who live beyond seventy is thirty. As it is in the actual text, the entire phrase the percentage of people who live — has been replaced by the pronoun it, whose right understanding is of course completely dependent on the preceding sentence.
Detailed study of autosemantic and synsemantic sentences would most probably yield important information about the way language works.
Words establishing connections between sentences are of different kinds: here we find personal and possessive pronouns, partly also demonstrative pronouns, pronominal adverbs (such as here, there, now, then), also conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs (such as instead, nevertheless, therefore, however, etc.).
Purely grammatical means of establishing such connections are some verbal forms, e. g. the past perfect, which presupposes that the
848 Conclusion
action expressed by this form preceded some other action, which presumably was (or will be) expressed by the past indefinite, etc.
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