A Study on English Sentence Patterns and Its Application : English 5 verb patterns revisited

Jung, Duk-Kyo

Korean Journal of General Education 2010;4(2):177-204.
Published online December 30, 2010.

Duk-Kyo Jung

영어 문장형식의 연구 및 적용

정덕교

Abstract

English 5 sentence patterns, which has taken deep root in Korean English education since the Japanese colony period, originated from an English linguist, C. T. Onions(1904). When Hosoe Izuki(1917) introduced the concepts of Onions 5 predicate forms into Japan. those concepts were rapidly absorbed into Japanese school grammar and had settled down as essential elements in Japanese English education since, which came into Korea directly during the Japanese colonial rule. However, there have been so many confusions in sentence analysis using the English 5 sentence patterns among teachers, and college students as well as element and secondary school students that the sentence patterns have been blamed for hindrance to understanding diverse forms of sentence and to generating precise styles of sentence. The present paper examined the intrinsic problems in both Onions 5 predicate forms and English 5 sentence patterns popular in Korea in the light of Bae(2003) and tried to resolve the following problems: lack of consistency in classification, counter-generalization of grammatical rule that denies the syntactic common grounds of tensed clause, infinitive clause and small clause, the presence of sentences defying the application of sentence classification by the 5 forms or patterns, and obligatoriness of locative adverbials. Following Han(2007), efforts to strengthen ‘functional approach’ which was the intrinsic key criterion of Onions predicate form classification turned out to accommodate obligatoriness of adverbials while getting rid of the 5th form, which connotes theoretical redundancy, and consolidating it into the 3rd form. As a result, the author suggested English 4 predicate forms as the alternative to English 5 sentence/predicate/verb forms for teaching English sentence patterns acknowledging the obligatoriness (argumenthood) of locative complement whose syntactic form is adverbials.

Key Words: English 5 sentence/verb/predicate patterns, 5 predicate forms, sentence classification, sentence patterns, obligatory adverbials, complement, tensed clause