Understanding English Grammar: A Course Book for chinese Learners of English

Introduction

1 Introduction What Is Grammar? This book is about English grammar. We hope that, at the end of it, you will get a better understanding of how English grammar works, and that your own ability to use it will also be improved. But first, what do we mean by ‘grammar’? We all know what words are. Here are a number of words from English: met she yesterday her friend On their own, one at a time, words tell us very little. But here is the most powerful feature of all human languages — we can combine words to make sentences, which can tell us a lot more. For example, we can combine the above words to make strings of words like the following: 1. She met her friend yesterday. 2. Yesterday she met her friend. 3. She yesterday met her friend. 4. She met yesterday her friend, etc. They all seem to mean something more than the words do on their own. Now, the important question is this: are the results always acceptable or grammatical? 2 Understanding English Grammar QUESTION 1 Which of the above combinations (1–4) are acceptable or grammatical in English? Answer: [NB: When you see a double line like this, do not proceed further until you’ve answered the question.] Most of you will have found only two of the four sentences above to be acceptable in English: 1. √ She met her friend yesterday 2. √ Yesterday she met her friend 3. * She yesterday met her friend 4. * She met yesterday her friend [NB: From now on we’ll use an asterisk * to indicate that a sentence is unacceptable or ungrammatical.] QUESTION 2 Can you say what is wrong with sentences 3–4 above? Answer: Introduction 3 At this point some of you may be thinking to yourselves: Isn’t the meaning of sentences 3– 4 just as clear as in 1–2? May be so. But here is the important point: in English (as in any other language), it is not enough just to put words together to make meaning. To put it simply: • There are only certain ways in which words can be put together to form acceptable or ‘grammatical’ sentences. Other ways of putting words together (as in 3–4) are ‘ungrammatical’. That is the first thing that we need to know about grammar. Let’s check this out further and compare how words are put together in another language, Chinese. We’ll stick to the same combinations of words given in sentences 1–4. Try replacing each English word with an equivalent Chinese word, look at the results and mark each sentence below with a √ or * to show whether it is grammatical or ungrammatical in Chinese: 1. She met her friend yesterday (Chinese:  !"#$%) 2. Yesterday she met her friend (Chinese:  !"# $%) 3. She yesterday met her friend (Chinese:  !"#$%) 4. She met yesterday her friend (Chinese:  !"#$%) What you have discovered about the above sentences will have led you to a second, equally important conclusion: • Different languages have different ways of putting words together. Our next step is to try and see if we can describe these differences. Our purpose is not to write detailed ‘grammars’ of English and Chinese, but to become more sharply aware that there are systematic differences between them, and to avoid making the mistake that what works in Chinese will work in English. QUESTION 3 Compare the Chinese and English sentences in 1–4 in terms of which combinations are grammatical or ungrammatical. What differences do you find? English: Chinese: 4 Understanding English Grammar QUESTION 4 Now take each of the following sets of words, and try to combine them into sentences in both English and Chinese. Write out both the grammatical and ungrammatical combinations in each language: 1. our teacher, left, the classroom, suddenly 2. I, bought, a house, last year 3. He, opened, the window, with a screwdriver English Chinese Grammatical: 1. 2. 3. Ungrammatical: 1. 2. 3. Compare the grammatical and ungrammatical combinations in English and Chinese in the above examples. Try to think about them not as isolated examples, but as a group of data illustrating a particular pattern (or patterns) in the two languages. [NB: A ‘pattern’ is a regular ‘behaviour’ or way of doing things: e.g. in Hong Kong, you observe that all cars drive on the left side of the road, and that in mainland China, they drive on the right side...