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Language Acquisition 3
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Lecture notes of 37 pages for the course Language Acquisition 3 at UL (Notes on La 3)
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Week 1Grammar: who needs it?
Different ways to study grammar:
Memorize the grammar book
Ask yourself what grammar means:
o Traditional school grammars: morphology and syntax
o Is that all there is?
Defining grammar:
Is this sentence grammatical?
o I am dead and not dead.
Nothing wrong with phonology, morphology, or syntax!
Semantics: branch of linguistics that deals with meaning
o This sentence is ungrammatical
But what about vampires?
Dracula lives and is dead at the same time
If Dracula is the speaker, then the sentence is correct
Explanation?
Two types of meaning:
Semantic meaning:
o The literal meaning of the sentence
Pragmatic meaning:
o The speaker or writer’s meaning
o Real-world meaning
o Context
I am dead and not dead is okay!
Our definition of grammar:
Pragmatics
Semantics
Syntax
Morphology
Phonology
Phonetics
Do we need to know grammar?
Define know and grammar and we
What does “knowing grammar” mean?
,Competence vs Performance:
Noam Chomsky (1928 –)
Competence:
o Native speakers’ tacit knowledge of language
Performance:
o What people say or how they understand others
Competence and performance may differ:
o Hesitations
o Effects of tiredness or drunkenness
o ‘Freudian slips’
Native speakers know their language, but they don’t always ‘perform’ well
In practice:
Grammar books for foreigners focus on competence
They are prescriptive and proscriptive:
o Thou shalt or shalt not say x
Two ways to talk about grammar:
Descriptive:
o Some people say x, others y
Difference between grammar in Linguistics courses and grammar in Language
Acquisition:
o “Whereas traditional grammars concentrate on grammaticality…work…within
the Chomskyan paradigm tends to focus much more on explaining
ungrammaticality.” (Radford 1997, p. 4)
Defining we:
Native speakers?
o Grammar is a given
o No explicit instruction is needed to perform, but people with ‘bad’ grammar
are considered dumb
Social pressure sociolinguistics
Linguists and language teachers?
o Yes: otherwise, we’d go hungry
What about foreign learners?
o At basic level words are more important
o Foreigners are given more leeway
o Correct grammar may be more important for writing
But seriously:
Understanding language learning:
o Pienemann’s Processability Theory:
Acquisition of syntactic and morphological features depends on how
easy they are to process
Processability depends on the position of features in the clause
,Grammar and academic writing:
Features of academic writing:
o Descriptive and argumentative
o Generalizing
o Formal and economical
Grammar is your toolbox
Language learning: fluency and accuracy
Week 2
Tense and Aspect:
What even are verbs?
Verbs are relational
Semantic definition:
o Conceptually dependent
o Relational
o Unfolding/transitory
Time and Tense:
‘Time’ is not a linguistic term:
o Physical and/or psychological phenomenon
‘Tense’ is a linguistic term:
o Refers to ‘the way a language grammaticalizes (encodes) the real-world
concept of time’ (Aarts 2011: 243)
Classifying verbs: finiteness
Finite
Non-finite
Non-finite verbs:
Infinitive:
o To be or not to be;
o To sleep: perchance to dream
o It’s always good to see Lauren.
Imperative:
o Shut your piehole!
o Take care!
o Fold along the dotted line
Participle:
o Present:
Climbing up on Solsbury Hill, I could see the city lights.
o Past:
Lost in space, she was unable to order pizza.
, Finite verbs:
Locate situations in time by means of tense
There are only 2 tenses in English:
o Present (I am, I have been)
o Past (I was, I had been)
Is there no future?
English uses Futurates:
o Constructions to express future time
Futurate constructions:
Will (1st pers. Shall) + infinitive:
o Spontaneous, unplanned future:
I just heard Tony’s ill. I’ll drop by his place with a pizza.
o Future for which there is no present evidence:
Don’t worry, sooner or later it will rain.
Be going to + infinitive:
o Planned future:
I’m going to graduate next year.
o Future for which there is present evidence:
Look at those clouds: it’s going to rain.
Present progressive:
o Arrangements for the near future:
I’m meeting Mo for drinks this evening.
Present simple:
o Timetable future:
The train leaves at 4.18.
Be about to + infinitive:
o Imminent future
Future past?
Tenses can be absolute when they locate an event (E) directly to the time of speaking
(S) (e.g., past = E before S). When tenses are relative, they do not locate an event to
the time of speaking but to a reference point (R):
o E after R before S:
“The voice actress behind Siri had no idea she would become Siri.”
“At that time, Beame worked in the city budget office; thirty years later
he would become mayor of the city.”
Tense versus Aspect:
Tense:
o When is a situation true?
Aspect:
o How does a situation unfold in time?
Grammatical: overtly marked
Lexical: inherent to verb (phrase)
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