More Than One Is Sometimes One

An early obstacle one comes up against on the road of grammar and style is the towering habit English has of using a string of words as one part of speech. The science of grammar, as opposed to its art, is meant to give us the rationale by which to revise skillfully what we have managed to get down in a first draft. Without a working set of principles in our mental kit, we are like the proverbial monkey pounding playfully at the keyboard: yes, he might, just might, through the reaches of infinite time compose a Rachmaninoff prelude, but it’s the long way home. A little science can shorten the artful road quite a bit.

Take, for example, this not uncommon sentence: He denies that he ever said that. How should we go about analyzing it in an effort to become more comfortable (because more conscious of principles and techniques) in revising our work? We begin, always, by isolating what we are about to examine in order to focus our attention and limit the number of possible questions we could ask. We can do this by rewriting the sentence, by speaking it aloud, by placing brackets around it—whatever works to keep our eyes on just this specimen we’ve put under the grammatical microscope.

Next, we frame out the sentence by placing a vertical bar (literally or mentally) between the subject and predicate of every clause we find in the sentence. Here our framing would look like this: He | denies that he ever said that, and with that simple device we discover that the predicate is fairly elaborate, comprising six of this seven-word sentence. That observation will help us in our analysis, because after identifying such an unelaborated subject, we can focus our attention another degree more precisely on the heart of the statement. Whereupon we now find that denies is the verb, the central axis of a predicate; and finally we determine  that this verb is transitive, which means it will require a direct object to complete its predication.

Now things get logically interesting, because how, really, are we to answer the question what did he deny? Or to put the query grammatically, what is the direct object of the transitive verb denied? Our temptation, no doubt from our school days, is to look for one word, perhaps because we were taught that every word must take on a grammatical role in a sentence. That, of course, is true, but the practical work of revising (and the logical work of comprehending) is very often accomplished from some altitude over the grammatical ground. That is to say, we cannot answer what he, the subject, denied by any one of the remaining five words of the predicate alone. He did not deny that, he did not deny he, he did not deny ever: he denied that he ever said that, which in grammatical composition is a noun clause.

A noun clause? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? We think of a noun most often as one word, and we have learned that a clause is a group of words with a subject and verb of its own. How could a clause, then, be a noun? The answer, practical and practicable, is that grammatical analysis is always twofold: we must account for both form and syntax, or grammatical element (word, phrase, or clause) and the acting part of speech (one of the eight categories of noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, verb, conjunction, preposition, interjection). Realizing, then, that we can only know how a sentence is operating by understanding both these modes—what we are looking at (form) and how it is functioning grammatically at the moment (syntax), the contradiction of the term noun clause is only apparent. All of those five words, that he ever said that, are cemented together into the form of a subordinate clause as the direct object of the transitive verb denies. We have, thus, reduced a quintuple problematic to a unitary answer.

And that bit of grammatical science can yield other artful possibilities: he denies he ever said that, he denies ever saying that, he denies his ever having said that—or perhaps simply he denies it. The choice is now the writer’s, but it will be an informed choice made confidently.

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