The chapter mainly covers the concepts of lexical categories, three ways of how languages extend their words, and three morphological systems. There are three ways to identify words’ categories, and they are: related forms, the occurrence of words, and meanings. New words can be formed by adding morphemes to an existing word, borrowing from other languages, and invention. As for the morphological systems, isolating morphology, which is “one morpheme per word,” like Chinese and Vietnamese, agglutinating morphology, whose words can be segmented into parts such as English and Turkish, and inflectional morphology like German and some words in English.
While reading through this chapter it made me to think of my grammar books. It makes sense to me now that why my grammar books introduce these categories one by one: verbs, nouns, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions. Ordinarily, verb category includes transitive and intransitive verbs. Noun category has singular and plural forms, and plural forms have regular, irregular, or same forms. Pronoun category has several subcategories, such as personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, relative pronouns, indefinite pronouns, while conjunction category has two principal, coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. So this reading reflects what I’ve learnt from English grammar somehow.
It is a very good idea to connect the original learning with the new knowledge so that the networking of knowledge can become larger and larger. Good job Lilian
ReplyDeleteLillian, I am curious about your grammar learning - is there a particular category of grammar that was harder for you than others? For example, when English speakers learn Spanish, they usually have a lot of trouble learning subjunctive verb forms, because we have very few subjunctive words in English, but Spanish requires it a lot more. So I was thinking that maybe there are some grammatical features of English that are not used or are uncommon for Chinese speakers. Is this true?
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