Discourse analysis

What do you think the context or situation was for the different sentences? Who might have said each one? Where? To whom?

☺☺ Activity 3. Look at the 12 sentences below. They all have gap (gaps) which can be filled with one word, but notice how in some of the sentences a much wider range of words is possible then others.
Task 1 1. Fill the gaps with a suitable word.

2. 
   For each sentence find what the grammatical category (part of speech) the word you have chosen belongs to.
   

1. 
   She arrived ………………………
   
2. 
   There’s …………………………………..pen on the table.
   
3. 
   The train now …………………………..at Platform 7 is for London Paddington only
   
4. 
   For the birthday they gave her a …………………………………………..
   
5. 
   Where did you …………………………………………..her?
   
6. 
   ………………………………..did you meet?
   
7. 
   What time …………………………you leave?
   
8. 
   For his birthday they gave him a ………………………………..
   
9. 
   A…………………………………………….cat was sitting outside the door.
   
10. 
    He………………………………………………….hanging out the washing.
    
11. 
    They were …………………………………………….the garden when we arrived.
    
12. 
    If anyone rings, tell …………………………….I’ll call …………………back.
    

Task 2 Answer the questions below with information from the text
Extract from children book
Once on a rainy day there were four small bears in bed: they were called William, Charles, John and Andrew. Robert had already got up to bring the others a cup of tea. Under the bad was a dog, whose name was Fred.
Soon all bears were in the bathroom. William gave his teeth specially hard brush: he brushed his bottom teeth up and his top teeth down, and sideways to the left, and sideways to the right. “I’m hungry”, thought William, “it must be time for breakfast.”
William ate grapefruit, bacon, scrambled eggs, butter, roast and marmalade for breakfast. Charles ate hardly anything at all, for he was reading the cereal packet. On the packet there was a picture of a space suit. “How I would love to have a space suit!” he said; “Wouldn’t you , Andrew?” “yes,” said Andrew, “there is only one thing to do. We shall have to make some space suits.”

1. 
   Who did something to someone else?
   
2. 
   How did someone do something?
   
3. 
   Who had something done to them?
   
4. 
   Where did something happen?
   

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  Both tasks are represent different approaches to learning grammar. Can you say in which way they are different?
  

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  When we speak about language structure we mean Grammar and Vocabulary. Above we discusse about Grammar and now we’ll look into “What is a word”.
  

☺How many words in English?
It is not easy to say how many words there are in the English language. A standard medium-sized monolingual dictionary might contain around 100,000 entries but if technical terms were included from different varieties of English, the figure would rise to well over a million. (Adapted from Arndt,et al (2000) Alive to Language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
An additional difficulty is that the linguistic diversity of English vocabulary can be measured not just by how many words there might be in the language - even assuming it was possible at any one time to count them all - but also by some of the different categories within what is sometimes called the lexicon. Linguists use this term to refer to the collection of all the meaningful units in a language and it therefore includes items beyond the traditional definition of a 'word'. Prefixes, abbreviations, acronyms and idioms, for instance would all appear in a lexicon. Influences at word or item level include hyphens (home-stay or homestay?), capital letters and proper names, while wider concept such as slang, jargon and humor also play an important role. The term lexeme has been adopted by linguists to refer to any unit of lexical meaning: thus educationalists, fighting tooth and nail, put up with, BA, crucial, blotto, OK, bread and butter are all lexemes. The usefulness of this term can be demonstrate if we want to talk about new combinations of words in English. The following are all in the dictionary as single words: seriously, broken, rich, well, but the new(ish) combinations of seriously rich (meaning very rich) and well-broken (meaning broken to a considerable extent) represent patterns of use that are no immediately identifiable by looking only at the individual words.
In English lexical structure there are a number of important elements, including two basic features:

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  polysemy: a general characteristic of some languages including English where one form or word can have several different meanings, for example chip, tall bank
  
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  homonymy: forms which look or sound the same, and which can be divided into:
  

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  homophones: words which have the same pronunciation but a differ spelling: fair/fare, bear/bare
  
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  homographs: words which have the same spelling but a different pronunciation: wind or read
  

Lexical structures are a basic source of language change, which occurs in a variety of forms and processes:

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  affixation: these forms give us prefixes (telescope, semicircle, transplant) an suffixes (.happiness, neighborhood, fifteenth) as well as highly informal in such as absobloodylutely
  
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  conversion: this reflects the fact that English allows the same word to be in different word classes or grammatical categories: bear, paper, bank are all examples of words which can be both nouns and verbs
  
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  compounds: wallpaper, technophobia, scarecrow: these turn more than on< item into a single unit each with its own separate meaning
  
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