Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Grammatical properties
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Grammatical category. We know that the word ‘man’ is either a noun (‘a man’) or
a verb (‘to man’), that is to say, we know the grammatical category or categories
that each word belongs to. This dictates how it behaves in the structure of the
sentence; as a noun ‘man’ can be part of a noun phrase acting as the subject or
object of the sentence ‘The man left’, ‘They shot the man’; if it is a verb, it can be
part of the verb phrase ‘They manned the barricades’. Like most nouns, it will
have a possessive form ‘man’s’ and a plural ‘men’. While ‘man’ as a noun occurs
58,769 times in the BNC, as a verb it only occurs 12 times.
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Possible and impossible structures. We know the types of structure that ‘man’ can
be used in. When ‘man’ is a verb, the sentence must have a subject that is ani-
mate ‘She manned the barricades’, not ‘It manned the barricades’; and it must
have an object ‘They manned the barricades’, not ‘They manned’. This is called
the ‘argument structure’ of the verb – which arguments (subject, object, etc.)
may or may not go with it in the structure of the sentence. The Universal
Grammar model of language acquisition, described in Chapter 12, claims that
the argument structure of words is pivotal in language acquisition. Maurice
Gross (1991) found 12,000 ‘simple’ verbs in French of which no two could be
used in exactly the same way in sentences.
Learning and teaching vocabulary
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argument structure: the aspect of a word that dictates the structures in which it
may be used, for example, the verb ‘give’ requires an animate subject, a direct
object and an indirect object: ‘Peter gave a stone to the wolf’
Keyword

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Idiosyncratic grammatical information. The plural spoken form of ‘man’ is /
men/;
the written form is 
men, that is, we know that it is an exception to the usual
rules for forming noun plurals in English. In addition, the noun ‘man’ can be
either countable ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ or uncountable ‘The proper study of
Mankind is Man’, depending on the sense with which it is used.
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Word building. There is a whole family of related words to ‘man’, such as ‘man-
nish’, ‘manlike’, ‘unmanly’. These are made by adding various prefixes such as
‘un-’ and suffixes such as ‘-ish’ to the stem ‘man’.