|
Grammar and Presidential
Elections: Part One |
Political candidates like to use one or more grammatical
structures when they speak. They use grammatical
structures because they can have a rhetorical effect.
In other words, the order of words and the way they are
used can direct attention to important ideas and help
make points clearer. This clarity, the candidates hope,
will influence likely voters to choose them.
So, what grammatical structures can you find in
political speeches? What can you learn from such
speeches?
In our report today, we explore one grammatical
structure commonly used in the American election
campaign. This structure is called the deliberate
fragment.
Complete sentences and sentence
fragments
In English, a complete sentence has a subject and a
predicate. A predicate is something that expresses what
is being said about the subject.
Consider the sentence "I am going to the store."
The subject is "I" and the predicate is "am going to the
store."
We say the words “am going to the store” are an
incomplete sentence or fragment.
When English speakers use a deliberate fragment, they
often present a noun or verb phrase as a sentence. The
result is that the sentence does not have a subject and
predicate.
So, a sentence fragment might be: "Going to the store."
In this example, the fragment does not have a subject.
The Everyday Grammar team avoids sentences like that. We
know many of our readers are English language teachers.
And we want to give learners a good model of English.
However, when used in a careful and intelligent way,
sentence fragments can have great effect. Poets,
songwriters, politicians and speechwriters have known
this for a long time.
What do these sentence fragments look like?
Let's find some in recent speeches.
Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
used them when they officially accepted their party’s
nominations three months ago.
In their acceptance speeches, both Trump and Clinton
used complete sentences before presenting sentence
fragments. They use these fragments to highlight or
publicize ideas.
Consider these examples:
"Once again, France is the victim of brutal Islamic
terrorism. Men, women and children viciously mowed down.
Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in
mourning."
"Our military is a national treasure. We entrust our
commander-in-chief to make the hardest decisions our
nation faces. Decisions about war and peace. Life and
death."
You may note that both Trump and Clinton begin their
statements by using complete sentences.
Trump says, "Once again, France is the victim of brutal
Islamic terrorism".
Clinton says " We entrust our commander-in-chief to make
the hardest decisions our nation faces."
Both of these statements are complete sentences: they
have subjects and predicates. They are not missing any
important words.
However, after using complete sentences, both candidates
presented sentence fragments.
They use these fragments for rhetorical effect.
Trump's use of fragments
Let's listen again to Trump's statement.
"Once again, France is the victim of brutal Islamic
terrorism. Men, women and children viciously mowed down.
Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. A nation in
mourning."
At the end of the comment, Trump uses a clear sentence
fragment: "A nation in mourning." This sentence has no
verb -- it is only a noun phrase.
This unusual structure directs the listener's attention
to it.
The fragment "A nation in mourning" notes the results of
the terrorist attack. It describes the effect of the
violence, and notes the important point Trump wants to
make: in his opinion, the world is not a safe place
because there have been recent terrorist attacks.
What about the other sentences?
Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives
ruined. Families ripped apart.
Trump is using a form of parallelism and the passive
voice. Parallelism is when something is very similar to
something else. In passive voice sentences, the verb
acts on the subject, not the other way around.
The passive voice does not give information about the
person responsible for the violence. Instead, it only
gives information about the effects of the violence.
You can read about this subject in an earlier Everyday
Grammar program.
The effect of this grammatical structure – using short,
passive sentences and sentence fragments – is to create
a strong mental image of the effects of the attack.
This grammatical choice – to highlight the effects of
the violence – makes sense. Trump wants to persuade
voters that Hillary Clinton will not be able to stop
violence around the world.
Clinton's use of fragments
Now, let's listen again to Clinton's statement.
"Our military is a national treasure. We entrust our
commander-in-chief to make the hardest decisions our
nation faces. Decisions about war and peace. Life and
death."
Clinton also uses sentence fragments after presenting a
complete sentence. She follows her first two statements
with a fragment, "Decisions about war and peace." This,
too, does not have a verb.
Clinton could have said "The commander-in chief makes
decisions about war and peace."
Or she could have said "The commander-in-chief decides
when we go to war and when we remain peaceful."
Both of these possible sentences, even if they carry the
same meaning, are longer and less direct.
By using two fragments – "Decisions about war and peace.
Life and Death," Clinton is able to direct our attention
to the importance of the decisions that the president
makes.
She is telling voters that she understands the
importance of these decisions.
She is also able to keep moving through her sentences
without losing her listeners. She knows that if she
keeps using the same sentence structure in every
sentence, the listeners may soon lose interest in her
ideas.
Should you use sentence
fragments?
Both Trump and Clinton used sentence fragments because
they have rhetorical effect. When they presented these
fragments, they directed listeners’ attention to ideas
that they wanted to publicize. They kept the listeners’
attention because they did not keep using the same basic
sentence structure again and again!
Politics is not the only place you will hear or see
sentence fragments. They also appear in songs, poetry,
books, newspapers, and daily conversations.
Native speakers use sentence fragments because they can
be a useful tool when you want to add something special
to a long series of sentences.
However, in general, fragments are best used only once
in a while – and only if you understand what you are
doing with them!
Instead, you should be working on developing strong,
coherent sentences that have a complete subject and
predicate.
Remember: sentence fragments are like spices. You would
probably never eat a meal that only has spices like
black pepper or paprika. In the same way, you should not
write a story in English that only uses sentence
fragments. Such an essay would quickly become
unreadable, in the same way that a meal made of pepper
would probably be hard to eat!
I’m Jill Robbins.
And I'm John Russell.
John Russell wrote this story for Learning English.
George Grow was the editor. |
|
