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Notes and Answer Key
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In this section, you will find answers to the questions in the main text, which will enable you to check your own answers without the help of a teacher. Please do not look at these answers until you have attempted to do the questions yourself! Here you will also find further explanations of some of the more complicated points of grammar introduced in the main text. Introduction The purpose of the Introduction is to make you more aware of an important point, i.e., every language has its own ways of putting words together to form sentences — this is what we call grammar. To know English is not just to know English words, but to know how to put the words together to form grammatically correct sentences. It is important that you think about the regular patterns in which words are put together. Once you have acquired a grammatical pattern (such as ‘subject + verb + object’), it is extremely powerful, because it will enable you to produce an infinite number of sentences of the same pattern in English. The good news is that the number of possible grammatical patterns in any language (including English) is rather limited. So it’s well worth your effort, and within your power, to acquire them. The ‘bad’ news is that it is no use just learning the ‘rules’. The so-called ‘rules’ of grammar are merely statements about the grammatical patterns of a language. ‘Knowing’ them is not the same as acquiring the ability to produce grammatical sentences. I can tell you the rules and you may remember them for a day and then forget them. To really acquire 10 Notes and Answer Key 160 Notes and Answer Key the grammar of English, it would be much more helpful for you to start with the data — i.e. grammatical as well as ungrammatical sentences — and work out for yourself the grammatical patterns behind these sentences. In this way, you can build up your own ‘internal’ system of grammar, which is likely to stay with you much longer than any list of rules that are handed down to you by the teacher. To benefit from this course, you must take the time and effort to work out the answers to the questions, even if some of them may appear to be quite simple. As in mathematics, there is no value in finding out the answers from someone else — you’ll learn nothing that way. The learning is in the effort that you put in to work out the answers for yourself. The teacher’s role is to guide you through the more difficult problems, and to make sure that the patterns that you have generalized from the data are on the right track. Suggested answers (NB: These brief answers are only meant as a check on whether you’re on the right track, and are not meant to be ‘learned’. The real learning is in trying to find your own answers to the problems.) QUESTION 1 Nos. 1 and 2. QUESTION 2 There’s something wrong with the word order: the adverbial ‘yesterday’ is in the wrong place. QUESTION 3 For Chinese, the results are (* = ungrammatical): 1. √ Yesterday she met her friend. ( !"# $%&) 2. √ She yesterday met her friend. ( !"#$%&) 3. * She met yesterday her friend. ( !"#$%&) 4. * She met her friend yesterday. ( !"#$%&) In English but not Chinese, an adverbial like ‘yesterday’ can occur at the end of the sentence; in Chinese but not English, ‘yesterday’ can occur between the subject and the verb. QUESTION 4 There may be more than one possible answer (for both the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences), but the following seem to be the most ‘natural’: [35.168.113.41] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:21 GMT) Notes and Answer Key 161 a. Grammatical Sentences English Chinese 1. * Our teacher left suddenly the * ‘Our teacher left the classroom suddenly.’ classroom. ( !"#$%&'()*) 2. * I last year bought a house. * ‘I bought a house last year.’ ( !"#$%&') 3. * He with a screwdriver opened * ‘He opened the window with a screwdriver.’ the window. ( !"#$%&'() b. Ungrammatical Sentences English Chinese 1. Our teacher left the classroom ‘Our teacher suddenly left the classroom.’ suddenly. ( !"#$%&'()*) 2. I bought a house last year. ‘I last year bought a house.’ ( !"#$%&') 3. He opened the window with ‘He with a screwdriver opened the window.’ a screwdriver. ( !"#$%&'() QUESTION 5 In both English and Chinese, the subject regularly precedes the verb, and the verb regularly precedes the object. In English but not Chinese, an adverbial (about time, manner, place, etc.) can occur at the end...