Navigating English Grammar

Navigating English Grammar presents an engaging and insightful introduction to the structure of English. Lobeck and Denham's inquiry-based approach encourages students to discover the fundamentals of English grammar by investigating their own intuitive knowledge of the language. This popular textbook equips students with a practical set of tools to analyze English in all its varieties and representations.

By exploring how English varies from community to community, and how English has changed over time, students find that English, like any other language, is a dynamic system, and that attitudes about language are often based on social perceptions rather than linguistic fact. In this fully revised and updated second edition of Navigating English Grammar, student-friendly chapters with examples taken from diverse varieties of American English illustrate the grammatical concepts of a living language, whose "rules" are decided by language users instead of language authorities. Accessible to any reader regardless of background in language and linguistics, this important textbook features:

• Entirely revised chapters on clauses, subordination and coordination, and modification
• Basic phrase structure rules and tree diagrams to provide accessible graphic representations of language structure
• Updated language examples drawn from varieties of American English that illustrate English as a dynamic system that changes over space and time
• Revisions and updates to all chapters including new exercises, text excerpts, and boxes
• A completely new capstone chapter that provides an overview of concepts and an extensive set of challenging practice exercises

Assuming no prior familiarity with the study of English grammar, Navigating English Grammar: A Guide to Analyzing Real Language, Second Edition is an excellent textbook for undergraduate courses in English grammar and related courses in English linguistics, second language acquisition, and language education programs. It is also a valuable resource for students studying the linguistics of other languages who want to improve their understanding of grammar.

Auteur

ANNE LOBECK and KRISTIN DENHAM are Professors of Linguistics at Western Washington University, where they teach courses on syntax, English grammar, and linguistics and education, and where they both enjoy making linguistic knowledge accessible and relevant for everyone. In addition to numerous publications on integrating linguistics in education, Lobeck and Denham have also co-edited Linguistics at School: Language Awareness in Primary and Secondary Education (2010) and co-authored Why Study Linguistics (2019) and Linguistics for Everyone (2013).

Texte du rabat

Enables students to understand their assumptions and beliefs about the language they use every day In Navigating English Grammar, Anne Lobeck and Kristin Denham offer an engaging introduction to the linguistic study of the structure of English. Teaching basic grammatical analysis through inquiry rather than memorization, this popular textbook encourages students to use their intuitive knowledge of language to make their own discoveries about the grammatical categories add principles of the grammar of English. The book strikes a balance between basic descriptive grammar and syntactic theory, introducing students not only to the structure of English, but also in some cases to why English has the structure it does. Along the way, students discover how English has changed over time, and how it varies from speech community to speech community. Student-friendly chapters contain numerous examples drawn from different varieties of American English, which illustrate how English grammar is a dynamic system: perceptions of one variety as 'better' or 'more correct' than another, and notions of 'standard' and 'non-standard' English are socially constructed rather than based on linguistic fact. This edition is fully updated with new examples, new text excerpts from a diverse range of written genres and authors, and completely revised chapters and exercises. The book also includes an entirely new final capstone chapter designed to encourage students to apply what they have learned with more challenging practice exercises. Navigating English Grammar: A Guide to Analyzing Real Language, Second Edition is an excellent textbook for undergraduate courses in English grammar, English linguistics, and language education.

Contenu

Dedication v

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xvii

1 What is Grammar and How Do We Study It? 1

Introduction 1

What is English? Language Change and Variation 3

What is Grammar? 5

Prescriptive grammar 5

Descriptive grammar 9

The Components of Grammar 10

Syntax 11

Morphology 13

Derivational affixation 14

Inflectional affixation 14

Analytic and synthetic languages 15

Word formation rules 16

Semantics 16

Phonetics and phonology 19

Summary 20

Exercises 21

2 Nouns 25

Introduction 25

Semantic Distinctions Among Nouns 26

Abstract and concrete 26

Common and proper 27

Count and mass 28

Collective nouns 30

Generic nouns 31

Noun Morphology 32

Inflectional affixation 33

Plurals 33

Possessives 34

Derivational affixation 36

Other ways we form nouns 37

Summary 38

Exercises 38

3 Noun Phrases 43

Introduction 43

Categories that Precede Nouns 44

Determiners 44

Noun phrases without determiners 47

Numerals 48

Quantifiers 49

Order of D, NUM, and Q 51

Partitive, Measure, and Collective Noun Phrases 53

Possessive Noun Phrases 54

NP or N: Pronoun substitution 55

Modifiers of Nouns 57

Adjectives that modify nouns 57

Nouns that modify nouns 59

Verbs that modify nouns 61

Summary 63

Exercises 63

4 Verbs 67

Introduction 67

Main Verbs 68

Main Verb Morphology 69

Derivational affixation and other ways we form verbs 69

Inflectional affixation 70

Infinitives 70

Present tense 73

Past tense 75

What about future tense? 77

Present and past participles 78

Suppletion 79

Summary 80

Exercises 81

5 Verb Phrases 85

Introduction 85

Auxiliary Verbs 86

Auxiliary have 86

Auxiliary be 87

Main verb have 87

Main verb be 88

Modals 89

Semi- modals 91

Verb Strings with Auxiliaries and Modals 91

Aspect 92

Progressive aspect 93

Perfect aspect 94

Habitual aspect 96

Passive Voice and the Passive Verb String 97

Summary 99

Exercises 99

6 The Clause 103

Introduction 103

The Independent Clause 104

The subject position 105

Subjects of passive sentences 106

Pleonastic subjects 106

The complement position 110

The Tense position 113

Subject-auxiliary inversion 114

Tag question formation 115

Negation 116

Diagramming Verb Strings 118

Do Insertion 120

Main verb be raising 122

Summary 123

Exercises 124

7 Adjectives 129

Introduction 129

Adjective Semantics 130

Adjective Morphology 132

Derivational affixation and other ways we form adjectives 132

Participial adjectives 133

Inflectional affixation: comparative and superlative adjectives 134

Adjective Syntax 135

Modifiers of adjectives 136

The degree word test for adjective phrases 137

Adjective phrase positions 139

Adjective phrases as prenominal and postnominal modifiers of nouns 139

Adjective phrases as subjective complements 141

Other subjective complements: NP and PP 142

Direct objects versus subjective complements 143

The seem test for adjective phrases 144

Summary 146

Exercises 146

8 Adverbs 151

Introduction 151

Adverb Semantics 152

Adverb Morphology 153

Derivational affixation and other ways we form adverbs 153

Flat adverbs 154

Inflectional affixation 155

Adverb Syntax 155

Modifiers of adverbs 155

Adverb phrase posi…