- Teacher: habib madani
Cours de grammaire deuxième année licence
- Teacher: Djilali MOURI
- Teacher: habib madani
- Teacher: habib madani
- Teacher: habib madani
Voici les leçons du premier semestre 'Part of Speech'
- Teacher: latifa chikhi
Introduction
Grammar
is the system of a language. As defined by David Crystal: “Grammar is the business of
taking a language to pieces to see how it works.” Languages started by people making
sounds which
evolved into words, phrases and sentences. No commonly-spoken
language is fixed.
All languages change over time. What we call "grammar" is simply
a reflection of a
language at a particular time.
Grammar, being the mental system of rules and categories, allows humans to form (productive) and interpret (receptive) the words and sentences of their language. It also adds meanings that are not easily inferable from the immediate context. The kinds of meanings realised by grammar are principally:
A)
Representational - that is, grammar enables us to use language to
describe the
world in terms of how,
when and where things happen.
B) Interpersonal - that is, grammar facilitates the way we interact with other people when, for example, we need to get things done using language.
Linguists attempt to codify the language system from the phonological (sounds), morphological (structure and form of words), semantic (meanings), pragmatic (functions of language and its use in contexts) and syntactic (arrangements of words into larger units) viewpoints. It is the last aspect that we try to focus on through the current handouts designed for first year BMD students of English as a foreign language. It is also addressed to novice teachers who are in charge of teaching the syntactic system of the English language to these university goers.
Broadly speaking, the handouts are concerned with aspects of grammar. Grammar is traditionally subdivided into two different but inter-related areas of study – morphology and syntax. Morphology is the study of how words are formed out of smaller units (called morphemes), and so addresses questions such as ‘What are the component morphemes of a word like antidisestablishmentarianism, and what is the nature of the morphological operations by which they are combined together to form the overall word?’ Syntax is the study of the way in which phrases and sentences are structured out of words, and so addresses questions like ‘What is the structure of a sentence like What’s the president doing? And what is the nature of the grammatical operations by which its component words are combined together to form the overall sentence structure?’ In this module, directed to first year students, we take a look at the approach to syntactical aspects of the issue as adopted by grammarians and linguists.
The chief assumption underpinning syntactic analysis in traditional grammar is that phrases and sentences are built up of a set of components (i.e. syntactic units), each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function. Given this postulate, the task of the linguist analysing the syntactic structure of any given type of sentence is to identify each of the constituents in the sentence, and to say what category each constituent belongs to and what function it serves. For example, in relation to the syntax of a simple sentence like:
Example: People complained furiously.
It would traditionally be said that each of the three words in the sentence belongs to a specific grammatical category (people being a plural noun, complained a regular past tense verb, and furiously an adverb modifying the verb complained) and that each serves a specific grammatical function (complained being a predicate, people being its sole argument and functioning as the subject of complained, and furiously being an adverb – i.e. an expression which provides additional information about manner of an event). The overall sentence ‘People complained furiously.’ has the categorical status of a clause which is finite in nature(by virtue of denoting an event taking place at a specific manner), and has the semantic function of expressing a proposition which is declarative in force (in that it is used to make a statement rather than e.g. ask a question).
The purpose of these handouts is to provide students with basic syntactic rules in contexts that will help them improve their linguistic competence and refine their oral and written outputs. In other words, the mastery of the linguistic system of the target language offers the learners the means for a potentially limitless linguistic creativity. To allow the materialization of this goal, a careful selection of lessons and exercises has been made.
Some of the chapters will be re-studied in second year for the sake of reinforcement, consolidation, deepening and remediation if any.
