Advanced Grammar

Grammar and Pedagogy Lecturer: Hyojung Lee

Some important dates

Add/Drop classes (6-10 March) Labour Day Break (1-2 May) Duanwujie (2 June) Last day of class: 20 June

Assignments
Weekly reflections 3 Assignments Attendance

Textbook and References

Thornbury, S. (2011). How to teach grammar. Pearson Longman.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Biber, D., Conrad, S. & Leech, G. (2002). Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Pearson Education.

Word
Orthographic: written language Grammatical words (part of speech): e.g. orthographically "leaves" is the same, but grammatically it can be a verb and a noun. Lexemes: a set of words which share the same basic meaning, similiar forms and the same word class (or part of speech) e.g. leaves, left, leaving, leave

Phrase
More than one word A group of words They can be embedded: e.g. They passed the table with the two men. Types: head/noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, adverb phrase, prepositional phrase.

Clause
One or more phrases Able to occur independently Five major valency patterns: intransitive, monotransitive, copular, ditransitive, complex transitive.

Back to the WORD 1

Lexical words: They carry the main information in text and speech Function words: prepositions, coordinators, auxiliary verbs, pronouns Inserts: They are found mainly in spoken language Example: "There are important linguistic
features distinguishing speech from writing such as stress and intonation - as well as additional grammatical features."

Word: Closed and open classes

Do you remember which words belong to a closed class and which belong to an open class? What are some reasons to why these words belong to a closed or open class? dark, soon, boy, to, as,

Word: Morphology
Lexical words can have a single morpheme (stem) or a more complex structure through: inflection (by using suffixes to indicate a role within a word class) derivation (by adding affixes creating new lexemes) compounding (another form of derivation)

Word: multi-word units, collocations, idioms

A group of words which function as a single grammatical unit? = of course, on top of A multi-word unit which meaning can't be predicted from each word = fall in love, make up one's mind Two or more independent words which occur frequently together = broad daylight, broad shoulders, wide interests,
wide margin...etc.

Look at the images comparing the fixation points and saccades in reading.

Can you guess?

Dave had been ______ at parties all weekend and did no work at _____ on his course assignment even _______ it was due ____ _____ beginning of the week. But then he worked really ____ on Monday and met the ______ by the skin of his ______ before the office closed ____ Tuesday ___noon. Dave had almost nine days to write the essay but ____ usual, he did it all at _____ _____ moment.

Discussion
What does these images tell you about how people differ in processing multi-word units? What does this tell you about way people process or use language?

Examining the Lexical Word

Morphemes: What forms does the word have? Syntax: What is its syntactic role? Semantics: What type(s) of meaning does the word
convey?

Look at the graph

Graph
What does this information tell you about lexical words? What does this information tell you about the different genres of text / written or spoken language? What does this information tell you about how grammar is used or how it should be taught or learned?

Function Words
determiners pronouns auxiliary verbs prepositions adverbial particles coordinators (also known as conjunction) subordinators

Word class ambiguities

Look at this chart of words showing how English words belong to many word classes. What kind of difficulties might there be for learners? Why?