Download THE ORGANIZATION OF GRAMMAR

THE ORGANIZATION
OF GRAMMAR
When we speak of the
organization of grammar we are
going to consider two important
concepts:
RANK and CLASS
RANK
It refers to different levels of
organization within grammar
Let’s consider the following example:
People throw stones.
This stretch of language consists of one
sentence and three words.
Sentence and Word are two ranks of
grammatical organization
Let’s compare the following sentence with the
previous one:
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t
throw stones.
Like the previous sentence (People throw stones),
this sentence can be analysed into three units. Two
of these units are regarded as expansions of single
words in the previous sentence.
(i) People who live in glass houses
(expansion of “people”)
(ii) shouldn’t throw
(expansion of “throw”)
(iii) stones
These units are called GROUPS
SENTENCE
W
Group (i)
Group (ii)
W WW W W
W W W
People who live in glass houses
Group (iii)
W
should n’t throw stones
We also need to recognize an additional
rank between group and sentence
Let’s analyse the following sentence:
She’s great fun but her husband is rather dull.
The two underlined units are called CLAUSES
CLAUSE COMPLEX
Clause 1
Clause 2
Group
Group
Group
Group
W
W
W W
W
She
‘s
great fun
Group Group Group
W
W
W
W
W
but her husband is rather dull
CLASS
Terms like noun (N) and verb (V) are names
of word classes, what we know as “parts of
speech”
The words in the sentence
People throw stones.
can be labeled according to their class
N
V
N
People throw stones
The same class labels are also used to
name the groups. Thus,
People who live in glass houses (NG)
shouldn’t throw (VG)
Two other major word classes are:
Adjective:
Adverb:
That’s good!
Fortunately, the situation changed for the
better
The same class labels are used to name the groups:
AdjG: … a letter from a very angry parent
AdvG: It is very deeply rooted in the American psyche.
Some grammars use the term “phrase”
instead of “group”, for instance: noun phrase
and adverbial phrase but in this course the
only kind of phrase which we are going to
recognize is the “prepositional phrase”
What’s the difference between
GROUP
and
PHRASE ?
A group can be thought of as an expanded
word. A phrase, however, is like a mini
clause in the sense that the words which
follow the prepositions are not expansions
of the prepositions but objects of
prepositions
Examples of prepositional phrases:
James is a software designer for a computer
company.
The students in her class are all from
Germany.
Here’s an e.mail in English.
We often go to the mountains.
How many groups can we identify in SFG?
FOUR
Which are they?
 Nominal Group
 Verbal Group
 Adjectival Group
 Adverbial Group
How many phrases can we recognize?
ONLY ONE
The Prepositional Phrase
In today’s class, we are going to focus
on Nominal Group only.
As we said before, groups are
extended words. When analysing a
Nominal Group, we may say that it
consists of a main noun or “head word”
(called the Thing) and has the potential
to be expanded by adding information
before the head-word and/or after it.
If the information is added before the head-word it’s
called “pre-modification”.
If the information is added after the head-word it’s
called “post-modification”.
For example, we could say:
They said they could make him a suit.
or extend the NG further by pre- and postmodification as in
They said they could make him the most beautiful
suit, with magic cloth that only clever people could
see.
Now, Let’s do some recognition practice on
the Nominal Group and the different
functions each component or constituent
performs.
My brother is a History teacher.
His daughter’s name is Lara.
The student bars and cafés are cheap.
That’s one of my sister’s son.
There are too many cars on the streets.
The center of the house is one very big bubble.
too
many
Numerative Numerative
the
Deictic
streets
Thing
cars
Thing
My
Deictic
A
Deictic
His
Deictic
Lara
Thing
brother
Thing
History
Classifier
daughter’s
Deictic
teacher
Thing
name
Thing
The
student
Deictic Classifier
bars and
Thing
That
Deitic
one of
Deictic
my sister’s son
Deictic
Thing
cafés
Thing
The
Deictic
center of
Deictic
one
very
Numerative Epithet
the
Deictic
big
Epithet
house
Thing
bubble
Thing