Category: applied linguistics
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Form and meaning in linguistics
Form in linguistics and language refers to the symbols used to represent meaning. Each form has a particular meaning in a particular context. This cannot be stressed enough. It implies that a form can have different meanings in different contexts. However, the range of meanings for a form is usually limited to a prototype or…
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Sometimes the adverb is obligatory and unmovable
Consider this sentence: (1) He put the bag down. The parts of the sentence are He (S) / put (V) / the bag (O) / down (A). The removal of A (adverbial) would render the sentence incomplete. In other words, the A is obligatory. Some teachers call this sentence SVO but that would make “the…
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Finding the subject of a sentence
Perhaps the biggest problem with understanding long sentences is that they seem to be a lot longer than the basic syntax unit. Today we accept that there are seven basic sentence pattern types, where the possible number of obligatory units is between 2 and 4 (SVOC, SVOO and SVOA). Yet a sentence with, for example,…
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Grammar or experience?
What is wrong with the idea of “universal” in the Universal Grammar of Chomsky? It is that what is taken as being universal is wrong. It is not the grammar in the brain that is universal, but rather it is the human experience that is universal. We all have the same set of senses and…
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Why syntax over morphology
Over the years of teaching and writing I have noticed how much more emphasis had been given to words (morphology) over sentences (syntax). Perhaps it is because sentences are mistakenly thought of as so much harder to pin down. When people see a sentence of twenty words they think of twenty things. Rarely do they…
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Dealing with long difficult to understand sentences
I have talked about the seven sentence patterns here. Those are all simple sentences. A simple sentence contains a single verb, that is, one clause. Complex sentences contain more than one verb, or two or more clauses. An SVO sentence theoretically can have three clauses, having one each for the subject, verb and object. It…
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What is morphosyntax?
Morphosyntax is another word for grammar. Grammar can be divided into morphology and syntax. Morphology is the study of words and their rules of formation. And syntax is the study of sentences and their rules of formation. Essentially, morphology and syntax are studies of the same thing – formation rules of a language – but at differing “levels”.…
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Don’t blame the computers for poor scores
Recent PISA score (shown in today’s newspaper) from the OECD has shown Japan has dropped from 4th to 8th in the ranking for Reading. A government official was quoted as saying the lower score was due to the change to an all-computerised testing system, and that students were confused as to how to answer questions.…
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Big data, Japan and education
I like data. And I like data when it is big. The Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture and Science and Technology (MEXT) in Japan announced that it will promote the use of big data. According to a source quoted in an article in today’s Japan News only 6.8 percent of 1,100 companies surveyed said they utilise big…
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Who is the next Natsume Soseki? Scholarships and the Japanese people
This year is the 100th anniversary of the death of the Japanese novelist, Natsume Soseki. Until recently he had been featured on the Japanese one-thousand yen banknote (about USD10). He had studied in London on government scholarship for two years from 1900. This month the Soseki Museum in London privately run by Ikuo Tsunematsu, a scholar,…
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