5.4 Putting words together Flashcards
What is syntax and why is it important to create a meaningful message?
what about the visuals?
–Knowing what words to use is, of course, not enough to produce a
meaningful message. Words need to be grouped into larger units. The rules for combining written words into sentences and spoken words into utterances constitute the syntax of a language
–In any language, whether you are writing or speaking you need to follow a set of syntactic rules in order to convey your meaning accurately
–In the case of written language, words also need to be presented
in a visual form, so you begin by looking at different ways in which humans go about arranging words on the page to create a piece of writing. There are different writing systems, including iconic scripts, such as those used by the Sumerians, and symbolic scripts, such as the Latin alphabet.
***Why is vocabulary not enough?
When you study a foreign language, you will probably devote a substantial amount of time to learning new vocabulary. However, vocabulary alone does not enable you to convey more sophisticated meanings, let alone produce
grammatically correct sentences in the language in question. Once the
relevant words have been chosen, these must be arranged in a certain order to indicate how they relate to each other within the sentence.
give an example of how the word order change from language to language and another one in the same language
—In English, for example, the
acronym ‘NATO’ stands for ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’, but the
French equivalent ‘OTAN’ (Organisation du traité de l’Atlantique Nord) shows how the equivalent words are used in reverse order
—In English, the order in which words are presented determines their function within the sentence ‘boy likes girl’ and ‘girl likes boy’
Explain how subject and object are placed in English
The pattern for word order in English sentences is subject-verb-object (or ‘SVO’).
‘boy likes girl’ and ‘girl likes boy’. A noun that is placed beforeaverb is
usually the subject of the verb in question, while a noun placed after the verb is its object. Thus, in the first sentence, the subject doing the liking is the boy while the object of that liking is the girl. In the second example, it is the other way round.
Case and declension. Explain them using the German ‘boy’ example
–Are there declensions in English?
In certain languages, such as German, nouns undergo changes in form according to their function in a sentence, so the word ‘boy’ used as a subject in ‘boy likes girl’ would be Junge, but has a different form, Jungen, in ‘girl likes boy’. These different forms are known as cases, and are grouped in a type of paradigm called declension.
—Declensions have almost disappeared in modern English, although some traces survive, for example, in personal pronouns, as in the difference between ‘he left’ (subject) and ‘I saw him’ (direct object).
Declension
the variation of the form of a noun, pronoun or adjective, by which its grammatical case is identified. For example, Latin and German have declensions for nouns; this means that nouns have one form when they are the subject of a verb (nominative form) and another for the object (accusative form). Declensions also indicate the number and gender of a word
Case
in a declension, each of the different forms that nouns, adjectives
or pronouns can adopt in order to express their semantic relation to
other words in the sentence, e.g. as subject or object of a verb, object of
a preposition, etc. For example, ‘he left’ (subject) but ‘I saw him’
(direct object). Terms such as ‘nominative’, ‘accusative’, ‘genitive’ and ‘dative’ refer to different cases.
inflexions in English compared to other languages and what’s the consequence of that
English morphology does not use as many inflections as other languages to signpost the function of different words within a sentence, for example, nouns have no cases, verb forms do not vary for every person and adjectives do not agree in gender with the nouns they refer to. Therefore, such functions must be indicated through word order. (SVO…)
However, spoken English is more flexible than the written language
in terms of word order. For example, someone could quite easily say
something like, ‘Happy, I most certainly am not!’, which breaks the written rules but, in a particular context, would be perfectly acceptable in spoken interaction.
*** this is a sentence you could use in the assignment (change it a bit though)
the author’s difficulties in choosing the correct case in German sentences
*** With such complex systems of rules, how is it that native speakers seem to be able to produce the correct forms and word order without even thinking about it? Why is so difficult for a person learning a new language and what should we do about it?
This is because they have been exposed to the language from the
start of their lives and over a period of years, so the use of these language forms has become automatised. When learning a foreign language we need to
cram in the same rules within a much shorter period of time, and the best way to do this is by making a conscious effort to study the rules in question
—Applying the rules, as Mark Twain illustrates, is a controlled process which at first requires your full attention, unlike the kind of automatic processing that native speakers do. When trying to construct a sentence you have to consider the grammatical options one at a time and regular study will gradually help develop fluency. Even if you start studying a language as an adult you can develop the automatisms in due course, it just
seems to take a bit longer. It should be pointed out that even a native speaker may sometimes need to pause and think, for example, when writing complex sentences in an essay. Native speech is naturally full of inaccuracies.
