4.4 Beyond word level: syntax and discourse

Question 1

***Are text and speech just words? page 145

Answer 1

Recognising words is only one of the processes involved in comprehension. Text and speech are much more than a simple collection of words, and we need to look beyond word level in order to understand their meaning. Thus,readers and listeners use their knowledge of syntax to interpret how words relate to each other within a given sentence, and they also use their knowledge of discourse to draw meaning from the way in which a given text or speech event is internally organised. how sentences and paragraphs are organised

Question 2

What is an indefinite article? what is the only indefinite articles?

Answer 2

a determiner ( a and an in English) that introduces a noun phrase and implies that the thing referred to is non-specific (as in she bought me a book ; government is an art ; he went to a public school ).

-‘the’ is one of the most common words in English and the only definite article

Question 3

Subject

Answer 3

the part of a sentence about which a statement is made, a question asked, etc. For example, in the sentence, ‘his feet ached all day’, the word ‘feet’ is the subject of ‘ached’.

Question 4

*** Use the Paris hotel on fire to explain the bottom-up and top-down process on trying to use syntax and discourse to work out the meaning of a text

Answer 4

When we use syntax and discourse to work out the meaning of a text we also use top-down and bottom-up strategies. For example, you just saw that the article used in ‘a fire’ tells the reader that this is the first time the fire in question is mentioned, whereas later in the article it is referred to ‘the fire’, indicating that we are still talking about the same fire that was mentioned at the beginning. Therefore, decoding the words ‘a’ and ‘the’ give readers a
clue as to how the article is structured (bottom-up process). On the other hand, knowing that news reports normally answer the question ‘when?’ right at the beginning helps us locate the relevant information and identify the
phrase ‘in the early hours of Wednesday morning’ as the date and time of the incident (top-down process)