THE BASICS of ENGLISH SYNTAX: the SIMPLE SENTENCE Teaching
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VILNIAUS PEDAGOGINIS UNIVERSITETAS UŽSIENIO KALBŲ FAKULTETAS ANGLŲ KALBOS DIDAKTIKOS KATEDRA Valerija Norušaitienė Jurgita Trapnauskienė THE BASICS OF ENGLISH SYNTAX: THE SIMPLE SENTENCE Teaching Aid Vilnius, 2008 UDK 802.0-56(075.8) No-95 Metodinė priemonė apsvarstyta Vilniaus pedagoginio universiteto Užsienio kalbų fakulteto Anglų kalbos didaktikos katedros posėdyje 2008 m. lapkričio 4 d. (protokolo Nr. 8), Užsienio kalbų fakulteto tarybos posėdyje 2008 m. lapkričio 5 d. (protokolo Nr. 2) ir rekomenduota spausdinti. Recenzavo: dr. Jurga Cibulskienė (Vilniaus pedagoginis universitetas) Birutė Bersėnienė (Vilniaus pedagoginis universitetas) ISBN 978-9955-20-383-4 © Valerija Norušaitienė, 2008 © Jurgita Trapnauskienė, 2008 © Vilniaus pedagoginis universitetas, 2008 CONTENTS PREFACE 5 INTRODUCTION 6 I. PRE-READING REMARKS 9 Symbols in the Text 15 II. STRUCTURAL TYPES OF SENTENCES 16 Two-member and one-member sentences 16 Elliptical (incomplete) sentences 18 Practice Section 19 III. COMMUNICATIVE TYPES OF SENTENCES 21 Declarative sentences 22 Interrogative sentences 23 General questions/Yes-no questions 23 Alternative questions 24 Suggestive questions 26 Tag/Disjunctive questions 27 Special questions/Pronominal questions/Wh-questions 29 Rhetorical questions 32 3 Imperative sentences 33 Exclamatory sentences 38 Practice section 40 IV. SYNTACTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF A SIMPLE ENGLISH SENTENCE 42 The Subject: types, kinds and ways of expression 45 The Predicate 52 The Object 56 The Adjuncts 59 The Independent Elements of the sentence 62 Summary: Ways of expanding an English sentence 63 Practice Section 64 V. NEGATION 68 Practice Section 74 VI. INVERTED WORD ORDER (INVERSION) 77 Practice section 80 REFERENCES 81 4 PREFACE This book is meant, first and foremost, for the bachelor students of English as well as for in-service teachers of English at the Competence Development Centre at Vilnius Pedagogical University. Other readers interested in English syntax may also find something of interest in the comprehensive approach towards the subject under discussion. It provides answers to the following questions about the English simple sen- tence: • What are structural and communicative types of the English sim- ple sentence? • What does the simple sentence consist of? • How can a sentence be expanded to express an idea as fully and clearly as necessary? It also provides Practical sections to enable the reader to use the acquired knowledge of sentence characteristics. We express our sincere gratitude to the Lect. Birutė Bersėnienė and Dr Jurga Cibulskienė who kindly agreed to review the book. We also appreciate the goodwill of Ms. Gwyneth Fox, the Associate Editor of the Macmillan English Dictionary for permission to include some examples from the dictionary ma- terials as illustration to our statements. 5 Mend your speech a little, lest it mar your fortune. Shakespeare, King Lear INTRODUCTION Successful communication is a most efficient way to contribute to and even ensure a person’s as well as a society’s well-being, both emotional, physical, social and material. It is usually based on one’s natural and/or developed ability to communicate, i.e. to convey the intended infor- mation in a most proper and understandable way in order to establish friendly long-standing relationships. One of the expected preconditions to establishing harmonious relationships is knowledge of linguistic units reflecting the communicated reality and ways of their proper arrange- ment alongside the psychology of communication. Since language learners are apt to make use of mostly verbal communication, they ex- pect to acquire both lexical and grammatical competence to success- fully communicate. With all this in mind, the present study of the English simple sentence aims at sharing our knowledge and understanding of the subject with language learners to facilitate their learning of the structural, semantic and communicative aspects of both the simple sentence and its constitu- ent parts. This will involve an integrated approach towards lexical, mor- phological and syntactic features of syntactic units, from basic to most complex ones, which will surely enable the learner to clearly put across the intended message. We sincerely believe that the learner, on the basics of the acquired know- ledge of the above-mentioned characteristics of English collocations and 6 sentences, will be able to develop the following competences in order to achieve their communicative aims: 1. Linguistic – semantic and grammatical, which will result in a correct and reasonable way of conveying the intended message from a struc- tural point of view, i.e. what word or phrase to begin with and what structure should follow the said. 2. Communicative – oral and written, which will enable the learner to choose linguistic units in accordance with the communication aims that are closely related to and determined by the circumstances and surroundings the learners find themselves in; in a friendly circle of peers, short, even irregular structures and emotionally coloured lex- emes are preferred, while at an official meeting or conference the lis- teners expect precisely worded sentences; the latter is also required in writing articles or longer texts, especially academic ones. This com- petence involves the following competences: • Receptive, the learners’ ability to understand what they hear or read: I think I’m gonna need some help = I think I am going to need some help. This skill is especially important in informal conversa- tions, while watching films or listening to songs. • Productive, the learners’ ability to properly express their intentions and wishes: ‘I’ll do it’ is used for an ordinary future action and ‘I will do it’ for a future action arising from a speaker’s wish or desire. 3. Professional, which will result from the trainee teachers’ essential knowledge and skills of personal, impersonal or formal communica- tion in the teaching process with the aim of achieving educational aims both at school, in the family and various social events. Following the proverb ‘Like teacher, like pupil’ all communication partners ex- pect and welcome appropriate and easily understandable messages supported by a friendly atmosphere. 7 In order to successfully acquire the material discussed in the present study by addressing both instructive and practical tasks, the learner is ex- pected to be familiar with a couple of general statements which will add to developing one’s communicative and professional competences: • Successful communication is usually based on a speaker’s positive attitude towards the communication partner(s). If the attitude is somewhat negative, the speaker should postpone the conversa- tion or, if need be, limit oneself to a civil way of transmitting in- formation, beliefs or attitudes to the audiences, with special at- tention to the modality of utterances, actually occurring pieces of language, completely specified at all levels of structure, including its full contextual meaning on the particular occasion of use (i.e. speaker’s meaning) (Croft 2000: 244). • Any communication process is usually affected by certain factors, such as the age and social status or even appearances of the com- munication partners as well as the time and place and the topic of the conversation, which will call for a careful choice of appropriate linguistic units. 8 I. PRE-READING REMARKS Alongside the general statements it is important to keep in mind some specific points related to the linguistic nature of the simple sentence, which are also observed in all inflectional languages, Lithuanian among them. This will provide practical possibilities for the learner to compare the foreign and native languages in ways of expressing intended messages. 1. Most messages, especially in informal oral communication, may be passed on in a) basic or kernel, i.e. one-word structures and b) full or extended, i.e. phrases, forms: ‘Yes’ and ‘I’ll do it’ for agreement. As extended linguistic units – phrases/sentences – consist of individual lexemes, let us remember that the latter are part of the morphological system of language which possesses its own characteristics, impor- tant in the syntactical arrangement of the elements. 2. Morphology is a part of grammar which deals with a) morphemes – the smallest structural units that have meaning (Biber 2002:458) in- cluding prefixes (un-, re-, etc.), suffixes (-able, -ful, etc.) and one-root/ stem lexemes (work, luck, victory, etc.) as well as b) word classes – groups of words possessing common grammatical (morphological and syntactic) and semantic properties. The word classes which play an important role in constructing an English simple sentence are as follows: • The Noun, a word class used to refer to and name a concrete ob- ject, substance or entity or an abstract idea, quality or state and 9 is characterized by the grammatical categories of number, gender and case: a book – books, love, carefulness, government, etc. • The Adjective, a word class that refers to such qualities of a noun as size, colour, origin, etc., possesses the grammatical category of degrees of comparison for qualitative adjectives as well as the abil- ity to be partially or fully substantivized, i.e. to become a noun in meaning and form: good – better – best, blue, wooden, national, the young (= young people, youth), conservatives (= people with con- servative beliefs or members of the Conservative party). • The Numeral, a word class that refers to a definite number of ob- jects or people or their position in a series presented in the cardi- nal and ordinal forms respectively: one – first, etc. The indefinite number is usually expressed by adjectives or pronouns: many, (a) few, some, etc. • The Pronoun, a word class that is employed to substitute a noun in its common or genitive case in order to convey a most general meaning: ‘he’ may stand for ‘the man’, ‘Mr. Brown’, ‘my dog’, etc. as well as an adjective: some names, any help, every book, etc. It may have some nominal grammatical categories (number, case): this – these, somebody’s bag, etc. • The Verb, a word class that refers to an action in process or state directly: to speak, to stay, etc.