Grammar I LV/JVG LESSON 1: WHAT IS GRAMMAR?

Graciela Palacio1 2012

Today we will look at a passage taken from a storybook for children called Mr. Funny, by Roger Hargreaves. The passage reads as follows:
Mr. Funny lived in a teapot! It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room, and it suited Mr. Funny very nicely. One day, Mr. Funny was having lunch. He wasnt very hungry, so he only had a daisy sandwich and a glass of toast! Delicious, he murmured to himself as he finished his funny lunch. After lunch Mr. Funny decided to go for a drive in his car. Mr. Funnys car was a shoe! Have you ever seen a car that looks like a shoe? It looks very funny! As he drove along, everybody who saw him laughed to see such a funny sight.

This passage is part of a longer text. Now what is a text? According to Quirk et al2 (1985) a text is: 1. a semantic unit and 2. a pragmatic unit A text constitutes a semantic unit in the sense that it must be internally coherent (i.e. it must make sense). If you look at the passage given above closely, you will see that there are words that help to create some kind of internal unity. For example, the use of the word he to refer to Mr. Funny, the repetition of the word lunch, the use of the word funny, with its two senses or meanings (Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar), and even the use of tenses. A text constitutes a pragmatic unit in the sense that it has to be coherent in actual use. This paragraph is part of a story for children so it would be appropriate in a bedtime situation. A sign with the word danger on it at the side of a road where there is some kind of danger constitutes a text if it makes sense in the context where it has been placed. According to Quirk et al (1985) a text may be spoken (as are the vast majority) or it may be in writing. It may be the product of a single speaker (as with an announcement on an airport public-address system) or of several speakers engaged in conversation. And it may be long or short (i.e. its length is irrelevant, it can even be made up of one word as in the example of the road sign danger mentioned above). Semantics is the discipline which deals with the study of meaning. When dealing with meaning we might say, for example, that the word funny is ambiguous.

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This lesson was partly modified thanks to comments made by Sergio Rodriguez Ramos. et al. abbreviation for: et alii [Latin: and others]. It is used especially in writing, after a name or list of names: Quirk wrote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language together with three other writers. Their names are listed in the references.

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Pragmatics is the discipline which deals with the study of language use. From a pragmatic point of view, we might point out that this text would also be appropriate in a classroom situation where the nature of texts is being discussed. Now this is a grammar course, so the next question we need to address is how to define the term grammar. In a narrow sense, grammar is that part of linguistics which studies the internal structure of words, i.e. morphology, and the way in which words combine to form sentences, i.e. syntax. Therefore, in this course, we will concentrate on morphology and syntax. Notice that in the text given above the expressions a daisy sandwich and a glass of toast are semantically odd but still syntactically perfect, i.e. they are possible grammatical combinations that the brain of the native speaker produces. The author breaks semantic rules to cause a certain effect. The study of texts presupposes the grammar of the sentence, so it is logical to begin with the study of the sentence. As was said above, a text is a semantic and a pragmatic unit, not a grammatical unit. Which are the grammatical units, then?

Lesson 1 Activity 1: (To be handed in as Assignment 1) Answer the following questions and hand them in: 1. 2. 3. 4. What is a text? What is semantics? What is pragmatics? What is grammar?

REFERENCES: Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, J. Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman. Hargreaves, R. (1990) Mr. Funny. Egmont World Limited.

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