Week 12: Pragmatics

Chapter 8 deals with language information structure, what is called “pragmatics.” While syntax and semantics are sentence base, information structure needs to take discourse context into account. In the textbook, Finegan lists six categories of information structure and gives a little explanation for each category. These categories are given information and new information, topics, contrast, definite expressions, referential expressions, and generic and specific expressions. In addition, Finegan refers seven strategies as well as giving examples of how these strategies are used differently in languages. These strategies are new-information stress, grammatical morphemes, fronting, left-dislocation, clefting transformations, passives, and word order.

Week 11’s class (3/26)

We had Dr. Kimberly Contag joined our class today. She shared her experience in Ecuador with our class. It was kind of surprise to learn that almost 30% of Ecuadorians do not continue beyond the 6th grade because they chose to work. In addition, more girls than boys who continue their education after they turn 12 years old so that the classes are populated with many more girls than boys.

Later, we moved to small group to go through and discuss the quiz questions which were assigned to each group. After few minutes, we moved back to the main discussion room again. I found that I didn’t really consider the relationship between a prepositional phrase and a verb phrase or a noun phrase. I was having a misunderstanding on the number 3 of diagram tree: I know the guy in this picture. In this case, “in this picture” is used to give more information about the guy so it should be under the noun phrase (the guy). Even though I was wrong in quiz, I’m glad that I knew it now.

Week 11: Registers, Styles, and Dialects

This week’s readings mainly deal with language variation across situations of use and among social groups. Each speech situation is determined by topics, locations, activities, goals, people, and their roles. These aspects will come together in a particular choice of language variety. Chapter 10 also talks about the speech situation in formality and informality and similarities and differences between spoken and written registers, and how they serve different purposes. On chapter 11, the differences in speech ways may result from geographical separation and social distance. These two views separate people and may eventually lead to distinct speech patterns. The example for geographical separation is Proto-Indo-European language. This language was spoken six thousand years ago, and has now come to many various languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Germanic, and so on. An example for social distance would be African-American English. The partly reason why it remains distinct from American English is because of the social distance between whites and African Americans. In addition, this chapter also examines the principal varieties of English throughout the world. English can be simply divided into British and American types. The difference is not just only between the spelling, but also between pronunciation as well as syntax and grammar. Moreover, it is quite interesting to learn a certain number of characteristics of African-American English and Chicano English.

Week 10’s class (3/19)

Today we’re divided into small groups to discuss semantic categories. At the beginning I was kind of lost because I thought I was assigned to antonym group. But after making it clear, I realized I should go to hyponymy room.

At the last section of today’s class, students are all divided into small groups and expected to work on the sample writing for our final project. It’s always good to have a sample practice before our quizzes and final project. You could learn from group work and have a taste of how the assignments should look like. Aaron, Brain, Rachel, and I are in the same group for this sample writing. We’ll work on it next week.

Week 10: Semantics

This week’s reading mainly covers the study of meaning: semantics. First, three types of semantics are introduced in the book, and they are: linguistic meaning, social meaning, and affective meaning. Our focus on this chapter is the very first one, which includes sense and referential meaning. Besides, Finegan also deals with a number of concepts of lexical semantics, such as hyponymy, part/whole relationships, synonymy, antonymy, converseness, polysemy, homonymy, and metaphor. I personally think, for me, metaphors are the hardest part of the English learning at the stage where I'm now. Metaphors are the use of a word beyond its primary sense and it is so living and creative that it sometimes doesn’t reach into my understanding. For example, “It is raining cats and dogs.” I would never know why cats and dogs are related to raining if my teacher didn’t explain it to me. But I know this is the interesting, rich, and highlighting part of languages.

Week 8's class (3/5)

I enjoy this week's reading and also like drawing tree diagrams. It is a good idea to use white board as a media of collaborative work. However, due to the technology problem we couldn’t accomplish much class work today successfully. But unless you try it, you would never know what is going to happen.

Week 8: Syntax

This week’s reading, the study of syntax, is quite interesting to me. In fact, it is much fun to draw tree diagrams. Tree diagrams are a good approach used to analyze a sentence structure and see what components form it. With the use of the tree diagram, it is a suitable pedagogical solution for beginning or intermediate learners to learn a languages like English, I think. I remember when I first got the United States; while reading textbooks, I took some long sentences apart and analyzed the grammatical structures on the books. Without the analysis, I couldn’t really get the whole sentence’s meaning. It took me a while to get familiar with the English structures, but now I seldom set them apart. Of course it is not necessary for ESL learners to draw a tree diagram, but it is one of ways for them to better their understanding of a sentence structure of English.

Week 7’s class (2/26)

We discussed our assignment in small groups today. After that, we moved back to the big discussion board and shared what we talked about and our questions. Even though I've learned these English lexicon knowledge in high school, I still had a few mistakes in the assignment activities. Taking an example, I was misunderstanding “this” only belonged to pronoun category, and never thought about it could be also in another category at the same time, which is in determiner category. With these activities, it gave me a clear picture of these lexical categories, and especially is helpful to taking quiz 2.