2009년 7월 11일 토요일

Rules, patterns and words: an exceprt

자료: Google books: Rules, patterns and words


2.4. Class

We have shown in the previous sectio that words relate to patterns. We can think of words which relate to the same pattern as belonging to the same group or class. We looked, for example, at the class of double object verbs, and the class of evaluative adjectives found with ^It + BE + Adj. + to ...^ , and the class of nouns followed by ^of + -ing^. We need to encounrage learners to identify classes of words and relate them to the patterns in which they occur.

There are other classes of word which relate to the grammar of structure. We looked earlier at adverbs of degree which usually come at the end of the clause but are not found immediately after the verb. There is small, but interesting class of adverbs sometimes called broad negative adverbs (^barely, hardly, rarely, scarcely^, and ^seldom^) which are normally found in front of the verb (for a list see Sinclair, 1990):

I could hardly believe my eyes.
You seldom see him nowadays.

But if the verb is the simple present or simple past tense of the verb ^BE^, the adverb comes after the vern:

She is barely six month old.
The office was hardly ever empty.

At an advanced level learners may need to know that these adverbs can come at the beginning of a clause, but they have drastic effects when they do: the verb and the auxiliary are inverted:

Seldom have I seen such incompetence.
Hardly had we reached safety when the avalanche struck.

or an auxiliary ^DO^ must be spplied:

Rarely do you find such an abundance of animals as in this area.

We will have to make teaching decisions at each stage about how much learners need to know about a class of words. At an intermediate stage they need to be aware that broad negative adverbs come before the vern or after the verb ^BE^. These words occur very frequently in these positions, only rarely are they found at the beginning of the clause. For this reason we may postpone giving this information until students have reached an advanced level.

Finally there are classes of word which relate to the grammar of orientation. One such group is uncountable nouns such as ^information, health, water, furniture^, and ^luggage^. These uncountable nouns have no plural form and are not found with the indefinite article:

*I heard some interesting informations this morning.
*She was struggling with a heavy luggage.

Another such group are stative verb like ^understand, believe^, and ^belong^, which are hardly ever found in the continuous tenses. It is most unusual to come across sentences like:

*That book is belonging to me.
*I am not understanding what you say.

The picture which begins to emerge is as follows: we have a set of broad generalisations about the language relating to its overall structure and the grammatical devices which link the message to the real world. But these broad generalisations provide no more than a template, a set of highly abstract guidelines as to what might be done with the language. As soon as we begin to select the words which will realise the framework then pattern grammar take over. The way the structure is realised depends very much on the words which realise the structure. (중략)

There are, therefore, classes of word which relate to all aspects of grammar: pattern, structure and orientation. Once we see language from this perspective then we can see that lexis and the behaviour and patterning of individual words are enormously important. And, if we accept this, then the concept of class becomes central both to language description and to language learning. It is this concept of class which provides a link between grammar and lexis. When we learn words we also need to learn about their behaviour, the way they pattern with other words.

(중략)

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