Unit – 3:
Areas of Difficulty in the Usage of English Language for the II Language Users
Parts of Speech
A part of speech is a category of words which have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same word part of speech generally display similar behavior in terms of syntax—they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences—and sometimes in terms of morphology, in that they undergo inflection for similar properties.
- noun
- verb
- adjective
- adverb
- pronoun
- preposition
- conjunction
- interjection
- article or (more recently) determiner.
Noun (names)
A word or lexical item denoting any abstract (abstract noun: e.g. home) or concrete entity (concrete noun: e.g. house); a person (police officer,Michael), place (coastline, London), thing (necktie,television), idea (happiness), or quality (bravery). Nouns can also be classified as count nouns or non-count nouns; some can belong to either category. The most common part of the speech; they are called naming words.
Pronoun (replaces)
A substitute for a noun or noun phrase (them, he). Pronouns make sentences shorter and clearer since they replace nouns.
Adjective (describes, limits)
A modifier of a noun or pronoun (big, brave). Adjectives make the meaning of another word (noun) more precise.
Verb (states action or being)
A word denoting an action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be). Without a verb a group of words cannot be a clause or sentence.
Adverb (describes, limits)
A modifier of an adjective, verb, or other adverb (very, quite). Adverbs makes writing more precise.
Preposition (relates)
A word that relates words to each other in a phrase or sentence and aids in syntactic context (in, of). Prepositions show the relationship between a noun or a pronoun with another word in the sentence.
Conjunction (connects)
A syntactic connector; links words, phrases, or clauses (and, but). Conjunctions connect words or group of words
Interjection (expresses feelings and emotions)
An emotional greeting or exclamation (Huzzah, Alas). Interjections express strong feelings and emotions.
Article (describes, limits)
A grammatical marker of definiteness (the) or indefiniteness (a, an). The article is not always listed among the parts of speech. It is considered by some grammarians to be a type of adjective or sometimes the term 'determiner' (a broader class) is used.
Voice
Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages.
Active voice is used in a clause whose subject expresses the main verb's agent. That is, the subject does the verb's designated action. A clause whose agent is marked as grammatical subject is called an active clause. In contrast, a clause in which the subject has the role of patient or theme is named a passive clause, and its verb is expressed in passive voice. Many languages have both an active and a passive voice; this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take thesubject syntactic role.
Example:
The dog bit the postal carrier. (active voice)
The postal carrier was bitten by the dog. (passive voice)
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.
Typically, in passive clauses, what is usually expressed by the object (or sometimes another argument) of the verb is now expressed by the subject, while what is usually expressed by the subject is either deleted, or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. Thus, turning an active verb into a passive verb is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizing process"), because it turns transitive verbs into intransitive verbs.
Tense
In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns.
Basic tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like Chinese, which is traditionally thought to have no tense at all, although recent research suggests that it may possess a future and nonfuture system, which is typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs. recent past, or near vs. remote future.
Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment being spoken about). This is called relative (as opposed toabsolute) tense.
There are four present tense forms in English:
Tense
|
Form
|
Present simple:
|
I work
|
Present continuous:
|
I am working
|
Present perfect:
|
I have worked
|
Present perfect continuous:
|
I have been working
|
We use these forms:
- to talk about the present:
He works at McDonald’s. He has worked there for three months now.
He is working at McDonald’s. He has been working there for three months now.
London is the capital of Britain.
He is working at McDonald’s. He has been working there for three months now.
London is the capital of Britain.
- to talk about the future:
The next train leaves this evening at 1700 hours.
I’ll phone you when I get home.
He’s meeting Peter in town this afternoon.
I’ll come home as soon as I have finished work.
You will be tired out after you have been workingall night.
I’ll phone you when I get home.
He’s meeting Peter in town this afternoon.
I’ll come home as soon as I have finished work.
You will be tired out after you have been workingall night.
- We can use the present tenses to talk about the past...
Modals and Auxiliaries
Modals and auxiliary verbs in English
- Modals
- Auxiliary do
- Auxiliary have
- Be (auxiliary and main verb)
Historically, the modals of English, which are listed in (1), derive from a special class of verbs in Germanic (the ancestor of English and the other Germanic languages).
(1)
|
can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would
|
Modals have always differed from ordinary verbs in Germanic, and in the course of the history of English, they have diverged from verbs even further, to the point where they now belong to a syntactic category of their own. Because many modals have meanings that are often expressed in other languages by verbal inflections, this syntactic category is called I(nflection).
In what follows, we review the ways that modals differ from verbs in English, both morphologically (what forms they exhibit) and syntactically (how they combine in sentences).
Range of forms
Modals and verbs differ in the range of forms that they exhibit. English verbs appear in a number of distinct forms (see Finiteness), whereas modals have a single, invariant form. Modals never end in-s, even in sentences with third person singular subjects.
(2)
|
a.
|
*
|
She { can-s, may-s } play the piano.
|
b.
|
She { can, may } play the piano.
|
Finally, modals lack present and past participles; the missing forms must be paraphrased.
(7)
|
a.
|
*
|
{ Cann-ing, may-ing } play the piano pleases her greatly.
|
b.
|
{ Being able, being allowed } to play the piano pleases her greatly.
| ||
(8)
|
a.
|
*
|
She has { cann-ed, may-ed } play the piano.
|
b.
|
She has { been able, been allowed } to play the piano.
|
Nonfinite contexts
A further difference between modals and verbs is that modals, unlike verbs, can't occur in nonfinite contexts (for instance, in to infinitive clauses or after another modals). Once again, the missing forms must be paraphrased.
(9)
|
a.
|
In to infinitive clause,
|
modal
|
*
|
She wants
|
to can speak Spanish.
|
b.
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paraphrase of modal
|
She wants
|
to be able to speak Spanish.
| |||
c.
|
verb
|
She wants
|
to speak Spanish.
| |||
(10)
|
a.
|
After (another) modal,
|
modal
|
*
|
She must
|
can speak Spanish.
|
b.
|
paraphrase of modal
|
She must
|
be able to speak Spanish.
| |||
c.
|
verb
|
She must
|
speak Spanish.
|
Do support contexts
The inability of modals to appear in nonfinite contexts gives rise to three further differences between verbs and modals, all of them manifestations of an important phenomenon in the grammar of English called do support.
Emphasis. In the simplest case, do support affects affirmative sentences containing a finite verb whose truth is being emphasized. It involves replacing the finite verb by the verb's bare form and adding a form of auxiliary do to the sentence in the appropriate tense (either present or past tense). This form of do then receives emphatic stress, as indicated by underlining in (11).
(11)
|
a.
|
Unemphatic (without do support)
|
He dances; she sang.
| |
b.
|
Emphatic (with do support)
|
He does dance; she did sing.
|
By contrast, emphasizing the truth of a sentence that contains a modal is achieved by simply stressing the modal. Do support with modals is ungrammatical.
(12)
|
a.
|
Emphasis without dosupport
|
He can dance; she will sing.
| |
b.
|
Emphasis with do support
|
*
|
He does can dance; she does will sing.
|
Negation. Do support with verbs occurs not only in emphatic contexts, but in two further syntactic contexts: negation and question formation. In both of these cases, the form of do that is added to the affirmative or declarative sentence doesn't necessarily receive emphatic stress (although it can).
In English, sentences containing modals are negated by simply adding not (or its contracted form n't) after the modal. Do support is ungrammatical.
(13)
|
a.
|
Negation without dosupport
|
He { may, must, should, will, would } not dance.
| |
b.
|
Negation with dosupport
|
*
|
He does not { may, must, should, will, would } dance.
|
Sentences without modals, on the other hand, require do support in English. As in the case of emphasis, the verb appears in its bare form, and an appropriately tensed form of the auxiliary verb dois added to the sentence, followed by negation.
(14)
|
a.
|
Negation with do support
|
He { does, did } not dance.
| |
b.
|
Negation without do support
|
*
|
He not { dances, danced }.
He { dances, danced } not. |
Question formation. The final difference between modals and verbs concerns question formation. If a declarative sentence contains a modal, the corresponding question is formed by inverting the modal with the subject. Do support is ungrammatical.
(15)
|
a.
|
Question without dosupport
|
{ Can, may, must, should, will, would } he dance?
| |
b.
|
Question with dosupport
|
*
|
Does he { can, may, must, should, will, would } dance?
|
Again, however, in a sentence without a modal, question formation requires do support. That is, it is an appropriately tensed form of do, rather than the verb itself, that inverts with the subject.
(16)
|
a.
|
Question with do support
|
{ Does, Did } he dance?
| |
b.
|
Question without do support
|
*
|
{ Dances, Danced } he?
|
This section summarizes the properties of auxiliarydo, introduced in the previous section in connection with do support. Auxiliary do belongs to the same syntactic category as the modals---namely, I(nflection), because it shares their properties with one exception (in contrast to modals, it has an -s form).
The goal of the previous section was to establish the special status of modals, and we used the facts of do support as a criterion for distinguishing modals from verbs. In this section, we consider some of the same facts, but with a different focus. Rather than focusing on the distinctive properties of modals, we focus on the morphological and syntactic properties of auxiliary do itself.
Like all English auxiliaries (the others are be andhave), auxiliary do is homonymous with an ordinary verb - in this case, main verb do. The examples that follow explicitly contrast main verbdo with auxiliary do.
Range of forms
As just mentioned, the only difference between auxiliary do and the modals is that it has an -sform. In this respect, it patterns with ordinary verbs, including its main verb counterpart.
(17)
|
a.
|
Modal
|
I can dance the polka.
| |
b.
|
He { can, * can-s } dance the polka.
|
Nonfinite contexts
In all other respects, auxiliary do behaves like a modal rather than like an ordinary verb. For instance, it is ungrammatical as a to infinitive, after modals, or as a gerund. Notice the clear contrast between the judgments for auxiliary do in (22) and main verb do in (23).
Auxiliary have
Let's now turn to auxiliary have, which combines with past participles (-en forms) to form theperfect forms of verbs. Auxiliary have behaves like a V with respect to its morphology and its occurrence in nonfinite contexts, but like an I with respect to do support. Specifically, auxiliary have,like auxiliary do, shares all the morphological properties of its main verb counterpart. In addition, it can appear in nonfinite contexts (unlike auxiliary do). With respect to do support, however, auxiliary have differs from its main verb counterpart and patterns together with the modals and auxiliary do. The complex behavior of auxiliary have can be captured by saying that it moves from V to I in the derivation of a sentence ((29) and (30) show that auxiliary have, like auxiliary do (cf. (18)), behaves morphologically like its main verb counterpart in having an -s form.
(29)
|
a.
|
Auxiliary have
|
I have adopted two cats.
| |
b.
|
She ha-s adopted two cats.
| |||
(30)
|
a.
|
Main verb have
|
I have two cats.
| |
b.
|
She ha-s two cats.
|
Auxiliary have differs from auxiliary do (cf. (22)) and resembles main verb have in being able to appear in nonfinite contexts.
(31)
|
a.
|
Auxiliary have,
|
to infinitive
|
They claim to have adopted two cats.
| |
b.
|
after modal
|
They must have adopted two cats.
| |||
c.
|
gerund
|
I do not regret having adopted two cats.
| |||
(32)
|
a.
|
Main verbhave,
|
to infinitive
|
They claim to have two cats.
| |
b.
|
after modal
|
They must have two cats.
| |||
c.
|
gerund
|
I do not regret having two cats.
|
On the other hand, just like auxiliary do (cf. (26)) and in contrast to main verb have, auxiliary have is ruled out in do support contexts.
(33)
|
a.
|
Auxiliary have,
|
after emphaticdo
|
*
|
He does have adopted two cats.
|
b.
|
negative
|
*
|
He doesn't have adopted two cats.
| ||
c.
|
question
|
*
|
Does he have adopted two cats?
| ||
(34)
|
a.
|
Main verbhave,
|
after emphaticdo
|
He does have two cats.
| |
b.
|
negative
|
He doesn't have two cats.
| |||
c.
|
question
|
Does he have two cats?
|
Be (auxiliary and main verb)
The examples in (35)-(40) illustrate the behavior of auxiliary be, which is used to form the progressive (is coming, was dancing) and the passive (is abandoned, was sold) in English. Auxiliary bebehaves just like auxiliary have. In particular, it has an -s form (irregular though that form is), and it can appear in nonfinite contexts, but it is excluded from do support contexts. As a result, auxiliary be can be treated just like auxiliary have: as belonging to the syntactic category V, but moving from V to I in the course of a derivation.
Main verb be differs from main verb have and main verb do in behaving exactly like auxiliary be.In other words, main verb be is the only main verb in modern English that moves from V to I.
(35)
|
a.
|
Auxiliary be,
|
non-third person
|
I am learning Spanish; I am invited to the ceremony.
| |
b.
|
third person
|
She i-s learning Spanish; she i-s invited to the ceremony.
| |||
(36)
|
a.
|
Main verb be,
|
non-third person
|
I am happy.
| |
b.
|
third person
|
She i-s happy.
| |||
(37)
|
a.
|
Auxiliary be,
|
toinfinitive
|
They claim to be learning Spanish; they claim tobe invited to the ceremony.
| |
b.
|
after modal
|
They must be learning Spanish; they must beinvited to the ceremony.
| |||
c.
|
gerund
|
I don't regret being invited to the ceremony.
| |||
(38)
|
a.
|
Main verb be,
|
toinfinitive
|
They claim to be happy.
| |
b.
|
after modal
|
They must be happy.
| |||
(39)
|
a.
|
Auxiliary be,
|
after emphaticdo
|
*
|
She does be learning Spanish; she does beinvited to the ceremony.
|
b.
|
negative
|
*
|
She doesn't be learning Spanish; she doesn't beinvited to the ceremony.
| ||
c.
|
question
|
*
|
Does she be learning Spanish? Does she beinvited to the ceremony?
| ||
(40)
|
a.
|
Main verb be,
|
after emphaticdo
|
*
|
She does be happy.
|
b.
|
negative
|
*
|
She doesn't be happy.
| ||
c.
|
question
|
*
|
Does she be happy?
|
Direct and Indirect Speech
What is Direct Speech?
l Consider the following sentence:
Rama said : ' A fine lesson will be taught to the wicked Ravana.'
The given sentence is in direct speech.
Here the exact words of the speaker have been put within quotation marks.
There is a colon after 'said'.
The first word inside the quotation marks starts with a capital letter.
What is an indirect speech then?
• Let's consider the indirect speech of the sentence under consideration ,
Rama said (that) a fine lesson would be taught to the wicked Ravana.
In Indirect speech
• The quotation marks as well as the colon after said are removed.
• The conjunction “that” introduces to us the words (not exact) spoken by the speaker.However the latest trend is to drop 'that'.
RULE ONE:-If in direct speech you find say/says or will say then DO NOT CHANGE THE TENSE that you can find within the quotation marks
EXAMPLES-RULE ONE
I say ' I am elated”
I say I am elated
He says,” I was a fool then”
He says he was a fool then.
She says,” I will be more experienced then”
She says she will be more experienced then
I will say,” He loves cricket”
I will say he loves cricket
She will say,” He was in the land of nod then”
She will say he was in the land of nod then.
They will say,” We will achieve greatness”
They will say we will achieve greatness.
RULE TWO
• If in direct speech the words within the quotation marks talk of a universal truth or habitual action then RULE ONE is followed or in other words the tense inside the quotation marks is not changed at all.. For e.g.
• The teacher said,” The sun rises in the east”
· The teacher said the sun rises in the east
RULE THREE
If there is 'said' in the direct speech then the tense of the words inside quotation marks is changed to the past tense.
I said,” I am suffering from a fit of ennui”
I said I was suffering from a fit of ennui.
Kinds of Sentences
There are mainly four types of sentences:
- Declarative
- Imperative
- Interrogative
- Exclamatory
The declarative sentence merely makes a statement. The imperative sentence expresses a command, order or request. The interrogative sentence asks a question and the exclamatory sentence expresses a sudden emotion.
Read the following sentences and state their kind.
1. Please leave your footwear outside.
2. Will you wait here?
3. Where have you been all this while?
4. We will not tolerate this.
5. I am your friend.
6. My sister lives in Mexico.
7. What did you do then?
8. Do be a bit more careful.
9. Never speak to me like that again.
10. Always remember what I told you.
11. The ball rolled slowly into the goal.
QUESTION TAGS
Question tags are short questions at the end of statements. A question tag or tag question (also known as tail question) is a grammatical structure in which a declarative statement or an imperative is turned into a question by adding an interrogative fragment (the “tag"). For example, in the sentence "You're John, aren't you?” the statement "You're John" is turned into a question by the tag "aren't you". The term "question tag" is generally preferred by British grammarians, while their American counterparts prefer "tag question".
They are mainly used in speech when we want to:
- confirm that something is true or not, or
- to encourage a reply from the person we are speaking to.
Question tags are formed with the auxiliary or modal verb from the statement and the appropriate subject.
A positive statement is followed by a negative question tag.
- Jack is from Spain, isn't he?
- Mary can speak English, can't she?
A negative statement is followed by a positive question tag.
- They aren't funny, are they?
- He shouldn't say things like that, should he?
When the verb in the main sentence is in the present simple we form the question tag with do / does.
- You play the guitar, don't you?
- Alison likes tennis, doesn't she?
If the verb is in the past simple we use did.
- They went to the cinema, didn't they?
- She studied in New Zealand, didn't she?
When the statement contains a word with a negative meaning, the question tag needs to be positive
- He hardly ever speaks, does he?
- They rarely eat in restaurants, do they?
Intonation
When we are sure of the answer and we are simply encouraging a response, the intonation in the question tag goes down:
- This is your car, isn't it?
(Your voice goes down when you say isn't it.)
When we are not sure and want to check information, the intonation in the question tag goes up:
- He is from France, isn't he?
(Your voice goes up when you say isn't he.)
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