Language Acquisition 3

Week 1

Grammar: 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)