Topic 4 (session A) - The grammar of simple sentences > Style, meaning & the structure of sentences > Task A

Style, meaning and the structure of sentences

Accessible / text version of Task A

In the first two cases, you should feel that the ordering of the elements in the clause or simple sentence is unusual.

Sort the words into what you feel is the correct order, and work out why it is that your ordering feels more usual than the one Hughes uses, and why you think Hughes uses the ordering he does. Then compare your thoughts with what we say.

Where helpful, we have supplied some of the previous sentence to help you understand better the sentence/clause we want you focus on (which we have emboldened).

Clause 1

Daylong this tomcat .... sleeps till blue dusk. Then reapear his eyes.

Our comments for clause 1

Clause 2

Over the roofs go his eyes and outcry.

Our comments for clause 2

Clause 3

The next example does not involve reordering, but it is still deviant grammatically. How is it deviant? Compare what occurs with the structure you think is normal in order to isolate the effect you think Hughes is trying to achieve, and then click on the button below to compare your thoughts with ours. (Remember we are concentrating on the emboldened words).

[The tomcat still grallochs the odd dog on the quiet, will take the head clean off your simple pullet.] Is unkillable.

Our comments for clause 3

Our commentary for clause 1

The noun phrase 'his eyes' is acting as the subject to the verb (predicator) 'reappear', and subjects in English clauses normally come before the predicators they are acting as subject to. By using the unusual ordering, Hughes foregrounds the clause, and also positions subject at the end of the clause, thus helping to 'enact' grammatically the idea of the eyes appearing out of nowhere (akind of 'grammatical symbolism', if you like: cf. the remarks we made about mimicry on other language levels when we looked at sound symbolism earlier.

Note also that there is another deviation at the semantic level which is important here. We would normally expect a noun phrase referring to a whole person or thing (the cat in this case) to appear as the subject to 'reappear', not just a part of it. By having 'his eyes' as subject to the predicator, it is almost as if the eyes act independently of the cat as it slowly wakes up.

Back to clauses

Our commentary for clause 2

This time two reorderings have to be undertaken. The complex noun phrase ('his eyes and outcry') acting as subject to the predicator 'go' needs to be placed before that predicator. In addition the prepositional phrase 'over the roofs', which is acting as an adverbial of place here, needs to go at the end of the sentences (the normal position for such adverbials in English sentences). Hughes's deviant grammatical structure, like that we saw in 'Then reappear his eyes' in 1, pushes the subject to the end of the sentence, a subject which is also semantically deviant, with 'his eyes and outcry' as subject to 'go' rather than 'the tomcat'. The foregrounding and grammatical/semantic symbolism that is achieved is thus rather similar to what we saw in the first example.

Back to clauses

Our commentary for clause 3

What is deviant, about this sentence is that the verb 'is' has no subject. In English sentences, subjects are normally obligatory (indeed, we often use pronouns as 'dummy subjects' to fill up the subject slot when there is nothing appropriate to occupy it semantically, as in 'It is raining' or 'It's cold today'). Contextually, it is clear that the sentence is still describing the tomcat, and the easiest way to normalise the structure would be to remove the sentence boundary and incorporate the sentence into the previous sentences, as a clause: the final clause in what would be a three-part list: 'The tomcat still grallochs the odd dog on the quiet, will take the head clean off your simple pullet, is unkillable.' When clauses are listed together like this in English sentences, only the first clause needs to specify the subject (unless the subject changes, of course), which is then 'understood' to apply to the other clauses too.

If we compare the above version with the original, we can see not just that the original is foregrounded, but also that Hughes's version 'chops off' the final clause, raising it to sentential status and increasing its importance, something which is appropriate semantically as 'Is unkillable.' appears to be a kind of climactic summary of the things the tomcat can do (which in the poem as a whole include not just disembowelling dogs and killing chickens with ease, but also killing knights in armour).

View this stanza of the poem.

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