The text encourages users to develop a solid understanding of the use and function of the grammatical structures of American English so that they can better appreciate the language difficulties of ESL/EFL learners. Discussions of areas of potential difficulty for ESL/EFL learners are included throughout the text.
Section 1: Grammarians and Grammar
However, for most speakers of American English, it sounds slow or affected, especially in spoken English and in informal written contexts, such as e-mail or personal correspondence. While such an argument may be true for Latin and other languages such as Spanish or German, there is no basis for it in English.
Section 2: Language and Change
Were any of your responses different from your responses to the sentences in Discovery Activity 1. This is in contrast to the examples in Discovery Activity 1, where even highly educated speakers produce such sentences except in more formal contexts.
Section 3: Linguists and Grammar
Language Is Rule-Governed
From the position of the word Xhub xhub before the bird, we know that Xhubxhub is describing something about the bird. This skill is part of your knowledge of the basic patterns, or grammar, of English.
Section 4: Prescriptive Grammar and Descriptive GrammarGrammar
Prescriptive Grammar
An example of a change that has become widespread and accepted is the loss of the distinction between who and whom. In the first sentence, who is the object of the verb. In the second sentence, it is the object of the preposition for.
Descriptive Grammar
After completing Discover Activity 4, check your answers against those found at the end of the chapter in the section labeled Answer Key. After checking your answers to Discovery Activity 4, try Discovery Activity 5. Think about how you would explain the italicized words to an ESL/EFL student.
Summary
Practice Activities
Do the lists include errors such as the following sentences made by ESL/EFL learners? In another part, the same author wrote: Her mother called out: "Someone has left the bag in our house."
Answer Key
This sentence changes the tense from the present tense to indicate that an action is taking place in the immediate future (see Chapter 5). e) The flight leaves in 20 minutes. However, as in sentence d, adding a sentence in the next 20 minutes changes the time reference to the near future (see Chapter 6).
Section 1: Word Classes
Context and Function
A reader's attention is drawn to headlines, which often play on the different meanings of words that have the same form. Words that look the same can have different meanings and functions depending on where they are in a sentence. a) practice the action word (verb) that refers to what I (the subject) is doing.
Parts of Speech or Lexical Categories
1 See Appendix D for more information on structure words. . Dog); the verb can have three different endings (went, goes, gone); and adjective numbers can have two different endings (higher, highest). If we e.g. say: I went to the store, this sentence has a different meaning than if we say: I passed by the store. The only difference between the two sentences is the change of prepositions from totoby, but it is these words (prepositions) that indicate a difference in the relationship between I went and the shop.
Major Parts of Speech
We will look at other types of adjectives and words that can function as adjectives in more detail in Chapter 4. However, as we will see in Chapter 4, adverbs are difficult to define because the label adverb refers to many different types of words that perform different functions.
Section 2: Morphology
Bound and Free Morphemes
We call words like blizzard, never, surprised, or mercy-free morphemes because they are meaningful units that do not need to be attached to another morpheme to have meaning. Since they cannot occur alone and only function as parts of words, they are called bound morphemes.
Derivational and In fl ectional Morphemes
Inflectional morphemes do not change the class a word belongs to, nor do they change the meaning of a word. Another reason why students may have difficulty with the inflectional morphemes is that there may not be anything comparable in their language.
Summary
Although English has relatively few inflectional morphemes, some of the most frequent student errors are in the correct use of these inflections. Although last week indicates that the event took place in the past, English still requires the declension morpheme oncall.
Practice Activities
Nile Cruise won two prestigious food and service awards last year and aims to be number one in the industry. He found that the caves served as a kind of storage for boats. about 4600 years ago…Tallet realized that he was dealing with the oldest known papyri in the world….
Answer Key
Developed in the 1990s, Google quickly became one of the largest and most popular search engines on the web. It has since come to mean to become violent or go berserk, the latter itself a borrowed phrase that first appeared in standard American English in the early 1800s.
Section 1: Identifying Nouns
Semantic Clues
In other words, several types of words can be grouped or classified together because they share internal meanings. ESL/EFL learners—especially if their language is unrelated to English—and they must rely on other clues to help them determine which words function as nouns.
Structural Clues
There are three other types of clues we can use to help us identify names: structural clues, which we will introduce briefly here and discuss later in Section 3.3, and derivational clues and morphological, which you met in chapter 2.
Morphological Clues
Thus, words that are plural or take possessive provide morphological clues to identify them as nouns. While this is helpful, not all nouns can form the plural, nor can all nouns take the possessive inflection.
Section 2: Count, Non-Count, and Crossover Nouns
Count Nouns
Many irregular nouns are nouns that have been borrowed from Latin or Greek and have a Latin or Greek plural form. This is why we see words like curriculum that have two plural forms, the original curriculum and the English curriculum.
Non-Count Nouns
See the box below to clarify the difference between countable and non-countable nouns. In Discovery Activity 2, see how well you can differentiate between countable and non-countable nouns.
Crossover Nouns
Discuss whether or not they have different meanings if they have both count and non-count uses. Discuss what phrases can come before any of the uncountable nouns to make them countable.
Section 3: Structure Words that Signal Nouns .1 Noun Signals.1Noun Signals
To answer this question, compare the use of the article anandthein Discovery Activity 6 with their use in the following sentences:. The answers to this discovery activity can be found in the answer key at the end of the chapter.
Section 4: Pronouns
Types of Pronouns
Object position means that the noun or noun phrase receives the action of the verb. For ESL/EFL learners, confusion in the use of possessive pronouns with indefinite pronouns is part of the common problems they have with pronoun use.
Summary
In addition, students exposed to casual spoken English may become confused between what they hear and read and what they may have been taught regarding appropriate or correct pronoun use with indefinite pronouns. For ESL/EFL learners and native speakers alike, it is important to distinguish between informal and formal language, whether written or spoken.
Practice Activities
As you have seen in this chapter, nouns in English can be classified into two broad categories, count and non-count nouns. For those names you listed under the Cross Names column, discuss the differences between the count and non-count meanings.
Answer Key
In Sentences (c) and (g), plants and dollars are plural nouns and must be preceded by many. ESL/EFL learners often find it easier to use many rather than many, since many can be used for either count or non-count nouns.
Section 1: Adjectives
- Semantic Clues
- Morphological Clues
- Structural Clues
- Order of Adjectives
- Special Types of Adjectives
The boy refused to give up his toys. angry, small (a) The dog bit the man. c) Engineers failed to understand the impact the project would have. Branch was a small squat man with bushy black hair. e) Rapunzel's long golden hair was wrapped in a priceless silk scarf. f) The flower consists of delicate flowers on a slender green stem with broad rectangular leaves. g).
Section 2: Adverbs
Subclasses of Adverbs
We can distinguish their function because when these words are used as nouns, they are the subject of the main verb. Discuss how the change in sentence position of the italic focus adverb affects the meaning of the sentence. a) Lauren especially wants to attend this dance.
Summary
Practice Activities
Consider Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of the Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting in the world. If you are unsure whether a word is an adjective or an adverb, try using one of the test frames described in the chapter.
Answer Key
The intonation and stress of a word or phrase combined with the different positions of the focused adverb will convey different meanings. Verbs express what the subject is doing or describe something about the state or condition of the subject.
Section 1: Identifying Verbs
Semantic Clues
Earlier we said that a verb tells us something that the subject does or something about the subject's state of being.
Morphological Clues
Structural Clues
Why do you say that these two sentences consist of more than one part of the verb. The answer to this question leads us to the next section, Main Verbs vs. Auxiliary Verbs.
Section 2: Main Verbs Versus Auxiliary Verbs
The Primary Auxiliary Verbs Have, Be, Do
Simple present and simple past are called simple tenses because they do not consist of an auxiliary + main verb. ESL/EFL learners must learn to use do, to inflect it correctly, and not to inflect the main verb.
Section 3: Transitive and Intransitive Verbs
- Transitive Verbs
- Intransitive Verbs
- Verbs that Are Transitive and Intransitive
- Linking Verbs
You can check your answers in the answer key at the end of the chapter. When you have finished, compare your answers with those in the answer key at the end of the chapter.
Section 4: Verbs Followed by Gerunds and In fi nitives
Verb/Gerund Variations
Section 5: Phrasal Verbs
Phrasal Verbs Versus Verb + Preposition/Adverb
Note that the last three sentences have phrasal verbs with more than one preposition/adverb, which is not unusual. Discovery Activity 14 will help you identify phrasal verbs using either of these two tests.
Types of Phrasal Verbs
Unlike the other two types, these phrasal verbs allow variable clause position when the object is a noun or noun phrase. Another difficulty is producing correct structures with phrasal verbs that are transitive and separable when the object is a pronoun.
Summary
If there is no auxiliary verb, place the auxiliary verb before the subject and leave the main verb in its singular or base form.
Practice Activities
Both cities are full of Renaissance and medieval houses... Many house paintings celebrated knightly virtues and victories. The Historic Speedwell in Morristown is the site of one of America's greatest achievements.
Answer Key
In Sentences 1 and 2 it has no semantic meaning, but indicates time; it shows whether something is present or past and combines with the past participle (–ed) of the main verb to form a verb phrase. In Sentences 3 and 4, be has no semantic meaning, but indicates time and person/number; it shows whether something is present or past and combines with the present participle (–ing) of the main verb to form a verb phrase.
Section 1: Verbs and In fl ections
Time, Tense, and Aspect
A progressive verb phrase consists of the auxiliary verb in either present or past tense + the present participle of the main verb. A perfect verb phrase consists of the auxiliary has either present or past tense + the past participle of the main verb.
Section 2: Present .1 Simple Present.1Simple Present
Present Progressive
These verbs are used in the present tense, even when describing something that is happening now. Some stative verbs have different and often idiomatic meanings when used in the present progressive.
Section 3: Past .1 Simple Past.1Simple Past
Past Progressive
The past progressive and the past simple are often used together to contrast two actions or events. According to the rules of imperative grammar, while must occur before the past progressive and when before the simple past.
Section 4: Future
- Will 2
- Be Going To
- Present Progressive for Future
- Future Progressive
When we refer to a past plan or intention about a future event, we prefer to use go to. When referring to a prior plan or intention about a future event, native speakers use go to.
Section 5: The Perfect .1 Present Perfect.1Present Perfect
Past Perfect
