
- •2. The Noun. The Case. The Article Determination. The Category of Case of the Noun
- •5. The Periodization of the History of English
- •6. Extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors.
- •7. Establishment of the Spoken Standard
- •8. Communicative types of sentences. The Simple Sentence.
- •9. Listening comprehension skill
- •10. Main phonetic changes within the historical context.
- •Quantitative:
- •2 . Qualitative:
- •12. The Verb. Non-finite forms.
- •13. The Noun. Main characteristics
- •14. Developing reading skills
- •15. Classification of English consonants
- •17. Vocabulary development within the historical context.
- •18. Classification of English vowels
- •19. Developing writing skills
- •21. Varieties of the Spoken English
- •23. Developing speaking skills
- •25. The subject-matter of phonetics and phonology
- •26. Teaching phonetic, lexical, grammatical skills.
- •27. Productive and non-productive ways of formation
- •28. Language skill control.
- •30. Lesson
27. Productive and non-productive ways of formation
Word-formation is the process of creating new words from the material available in the language after certain structural and semantic formulas and patterns. Two types of word-formation may be distinguished: word-derivation and word-composition (compounding).
Word-derivation implies only one derivational base and one derivational affix (prefix, suffix). The basic ways of forming words in word-derivation are affixation and conversion. Word composition implies two or more root morphemes (forget-me-not, looking-glass, water-fall). Minor ways of word-formation are: –shortening (graphical and lexical: Street-St., labortaory-lab.), –sound-and stress-interchange (full — to fill, food — to feed, blood — to bleed, bath — to bathe, ´absent a — to ab´sent) –postpositions (look after, passer-by) –clipping (radarman) –blending (polutician (from pollute and politician), smog (from smoke and fog), ballute (from baloon and parachute), foolosopher echoing philosopher).
Besides, distinction should be made between productive and non-productive ways of word-formation. Those ways that are used in present-day English for the creation of new words are called productive. Other ways which cannot now produce words are called non-productive.
The agent suffix -er is to be qualified both as a productive and as an active suffix. The adjective suffix -ful is described as a productive but not as an active one, for there are hundreds of adjectives with this suffix (e.g. beautiful, hopeful, useful, etc.), but no new words seem to be built with its help.
Non-prod. suffixes are –th, -hood, -en, -ly, -some, -ous.
28. Language skill control.
Language educators have long used the concepts of four basic language skills:
Listening
Speaking
Reading
Writing
The four basic skills are related to each other by two parameters:
the mode of communication: oral or written
the direction of communication: receiving or producing the message
Listening comprehension skill
Listening comprehension is a receptive kind of communicative activity which aims at speech understanding and audio perception at the moment of its production. It is derivative, secondary to speaking, it accompanies speaking and is simultaneous to it.
Teaching aids: records (separate phrases, dialogues, monologues, interviews, songs, films, TV programmes).
Principles for developing listening ability: ● listening develops through focusing on meaning and trying to learn new and important content in the target language. ●l-g develops through work of comprehension activities. ●l-g develops through attention to accuracy and analysis of form.
Stages of l-g comprehension: 1)pre-listening (introduction of new words, brainstorming, questions, lexical tests); 2) while-listening stage (exercises: paraphrasing, matching, detection of mistakes, selection of the titles to the paragraphs); 3) post-listening (answering questions, retelling, summarizing, compiling dialogues,etc).
Developing speaking skills
Speech has a set of specific features: motivated character, activity, purposefulness, independence, connection with personality, with communicative thinking, with the situation.
Stages of teaching speech: 1) formation of speaking skills 2 substages: semantization – introduction of lexical units; and automation), 2)improvement of sp. skills (is realized through different forms of communication: monologue, dialogue, polylogue), 3)development of sp. skills (students start expressing their thoughts without preliminary preparation; role play, discussion, spontaneous speech).
Here are some of the micro-skills involved in speaking.
The speaker has to: ▪ pronounce the distinctive sounds of a language clearly enough so that people can distinguish them.▪use stress and rhythmic patterns, and intonation patterns of the language clearly enough so that people can understand what is said.▪use the correct forms of words. ▪put words together in correct word order.▪use vocabulary appropriately.▪use the register or language variety that is appropriate to the situation and the relationship to the conversation partner.▪make clear to the listener the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, by whatever means the language uses.
Developing reading skills
Reading is the receptive skill in the written mode. It can develop independently of listening and speaking skills, but often develops along with them, especially in societies with a highly-developed literary tradition. Reading can help build vocabulary that aids listening comprehension at the later stages, particularly.
Here are some of the micro-skills involved in reading. The reader has to: ▪ decipher the script (this means establishing a relationship between sounds and symbols; or associating the meaning of the words with written symbols); ▪recognize vocabulary;▪pick out key words, such as those identifying topics and main ideas;▪figure out the meaning of the words, including unfamiliar vocabulary, from the (written) context.
▪recognize grammatical word classes: noun, adjective, etc. ▪detect sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, prepositions, etc. ▪recognize basic syntactic patterns; ▪reconstruct and infer situations, goals and participants; ▪use both knowledge of the world and lexical and grammatical cohesive devices to make the foregoing inferences, predict outcomes, and infer links and connections among the parts of the text.
get the main point or the most important information.
distinguish the main idea from supporting details;▪adjust reading strategies to different reading purposes, such as skimming for main ideas or studying in-depth.
There are 3 stages: 1) pre-reading (the introduction of the topic, giving the reasons for reading, providing the necessary info for the text); 2) while-reading (understanding the author’s message, studying the structure of the text, clarifying the content of the text); 3) post-reading stage (learner’s reflection on the text, investigation of the problems raised, topical debate).
Developing writing skills
Writing implies the successful transmission of ideas from an addresser or to an addressee via a text and encourages the development of language skills.
Micro-skills involved in writing. The writer needs to:
▪use the orthography correctly, including the script, and spelling and punctuation conventions.▪use the correct forms of words.▪put words together in correct word order.
▪use vocabulary correctly.▪use the style appropriate to the genre and audience.▪make the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, and object, clear to the reader.▪make the main ideas distinct from supporting ideas or information.▪make the text coherent, so that other people can follow the development of the ideas.▪judge how much background knowledge the audience has on the subject, etc.
Value of writing: wr-g reinforces the knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, spelling; fulfills the communicative purpose – conveys info, expresses feelings, ideas. Traditional classroom writing involves: group brainstorming on a topic; collaborative writing; individual essays; writing workshops or in-class writing.
29. Methods of Lexicological Research The main methods of investigation in linguistics are: – distributional (дистрибутивный) – transformational – componental (компонентный) – statistical – immediate constituents (метод непосредственно составляющих) – contextual Distributional analysis depends on the structural use of the words in the sentence. The following coding system is accepted: N. – nouns and words that occupy in the sentence the same position as nouns, and personal pronouns (N.p, N.m) V. – verbs A. – adjectives and their equivalents D. – for adverbs Prepositions and conjunctions are not coded. Example: He made me laugh. N.p+make+N.obj+V.inf make a machine – make+a+N. make sure – make+A. Transformational analysis is the changing of a sentence, phrase or formulae according to a prescribed model and following certain rules. These rules concern the introduction of new elements into a kernel sentence, the rearrangement of the elements. cf. his work is excellent -> his excellent work -> the excellence of his work -> he works excellently.
replacement — the substitution of a component of the distributional structure by a member of a certain strictly defined set of lexical units, e.g. replacement of a notional verb by an auxiliary or a link verb, etc. Thus, in the two sentences having identical distributional structure He will make a bad mistake, He will make a good teacher, the verb to make can be substituted for by become or be only in the second sentence.
additiоn (or expansion) —in the process of translation we may add some words in order to clarify or specify the meaning.
deletion — a procedure which shows whether one of the words is semantically subordinated to the other or others, i.e. whether the semantic relations between words are identical. For example, the word- group red flowers may be deleted and transformed into flowers.
Immediate constituents analysis is used to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one another. The fundamental aim is to segment a set of lexical units into 2 maximally independent sequences (immediate constituents). Example: My elder sister wanted to go to the cinema. 1) my elder <–> sister 2) wanted <–> to+go <–> to+the+cinema S+P Contextual analysis is based on the assumption that difference in meaning of linguistic units is always indicated by a difference in environment. No changes are permitted in linguistic data, no conclusions can be made unless there is a considerable number of examples to support their validity. Example: move smth. (change the place of smth.), move+adv. (to go). Componental method is used to determine the features which help to distinguish lexical units. In this analysis linguists proceed from the assumption that the smallest units of meaning are sememes (or semes) and that sememes and lexemes (or lexical items) are usually not in one-to-one but in one-to-many correspondence. For example, in the lexical item woman several components of meaning or sememes may be singled out and namely ‘human’, ‘female’, ‘adult’.
Statistical methods have been also applied to various theoretical problems of meaning. An interesting attempt was made by G. K. Zipf to study the relation between polysemy and word frequency by statistical methods. Having discovered that there is a direct relationship between the number of different meanings of a word and its relative frequency of occurrence, Zipf proceeded to find a mathematical formula for this correlation. He came to the conclusion that different meanings of a word will tend to be equal to the square root of its relative frequency (with the possible exception of the few dozen most frequent words).
Though numerous corrections to this law have been suggested, still there is no reason to doubt the principle itself, namely, that the more frequent a word is, the more meanings it is likely to have.