APPLIED LINGUISTICS

WEEK 2
GRAMMAR
Grammar

◦What is grammar for different people?

◦Do’s/don’ts
◦Rules
Prescriptive grammar

◦Grammars with rules

◦Making distinction between correct/incorrect forms
◦How we ought to speak
This approach was taken by many of influent grammarians mainly
in 18th century English. They set out rules for the proper use of
English and follow from Latin Grammar.
Some familiar example of prescriptive rules for English Sentences.
You must not split an infinitive.
You must not end a sentence with a preposition.
It is worth considering the origin of some these rules and asking
whether they appropriately applied to the English.
Descriptive grammar

◦Don’t make distinction

◦Aims to describe language as it is actually used
◦Describes how natives speak and does not prescribe
how they ought to speak
◦Has detailed look in syntax, morphology, phonetics,
phonology, semantics, lexis (vocabulary)
The descriptive approach

Grammatical description of Latin is a useful guide for some

European, but it is less useful for English.
The categories and rules that were appropriate for Latin grammar just
did not seem to fit these languages.
Analysts collected samples of the language which they were
interested in and attempted to describe regular structure.
 Focus of Applied Linguistics – Pedagogical
Grammar
Pedagogical grammar
◦Designed for the needs of second language students and teachers
◦More descriptive
◦Focuses on standard formal patterns also informal alternatives with
explanation of situation, e.g. job interview, class assignment requiring
formal writing and speaking and casual conversation between friends with
informal expressions.
Rules to describe
◦Auxiliaries and modal auxiliaries
◦Subject-verb agreement (verbs taking the suffix –es if their subject is third
person singular
Forms and functions

Formal Grammar
◦Concerned with forms.
◦Traditional grammar describing the structure of the
sentences.
◦Most influential forms of grammar: Chomsky’s later
version of generative grammar
(Transformational theory of grammar)
Generative theory of grammar

Rationalist approach
◦Represents the speaker’s mental grammar, a set of
abstract rules for generating grammatical sentences
Competence
◦Unconscious knowledge of the system of rules.
Generative linguistics

◦Focus on rule-governed behavior and on the

grammatical structure of sentences
◦Don’t include concerns for the appropriate use of
language in context.
 Functional model (Hymes 1972)
◦ Focuses on appropriate use of language (on how language functions in discourse)
◦ Central concern – communicative competence (appropriate language use in
particular social context. E. g. informal conversation at the dinner table VS formal
conversation at the bank.
Communicative competence
◦ The capabilities of a person, a competence which is dependent upon both
knowledge and use.
◦ Includes not only knowledge but also the ability to use language in various
contexts (pragmatic competence). E.g. direct and indirect questions; (I know how
to formulate indirect but I use it in the particular appropriate context and not
always).
◦ Combines form and meaning
Discourse grammar

◦Analyses of the functional roles of grammatical structures in discourse.

◦Discourse - he organization of language at a level above the sentence or
individual conversational turn – that which connects language at the
suprasentential level.
◦Speakers and writers make grammatical choices that depend on how they
construe and wish to represent the context and on how they wish to
position themselves in it.
◦E.g. speakers use the past perfect tense–aspect combination in English,
not only to indicate the first of two past events, but also to give a reason
or justification for the main events of the narrative.
◦These events are not the main events themselves but, rather, are felt to
be an essential background to what happened
Spoken and written grammar

◦how different types of spoken language can be

classified?
◦how features of written and spoken grammar are
differently distributed?
◦what the status of the spoken language is? (as an
object of study within applied linguistics)
‘descriptions that rest on the written mode or on restricted
genres and registers of spoken language are likely to omit
many common features of everyday informal grammar and
usage’ (Carter and McCarthy, 1995: 154).
◦E.g. the same grammatical repertoires operate in both
speech and writing, although the structures used in each may
occur with different frequencies: grammars these authors
surveyed gave examples of the reporting verb in the simple
past tense (X said that Y), and yet in their spoken corpus they
found various examples of the reporting verb in past
continuous (X was saying Y).
 The interdependence of grammar and lexis

◦it is very difficult to isolate grammar and lexis into completely

separate categories, because grammar does not exist on its own.
◦It is interdependent with lexis and, in many cases, grammatical
regularity and acceptability are conditioned by words.
◦A commonly cited example is the past morpheme -ed, which applies
only where the verb happens to be ‘regular’, as in walked, traded,
wondered. Irregular verbs, on the other hand, take various past
forms, such as drank or ate.
◦Mary is taking a nap indicates a temporary activity, whereas Mary is
taking a class indicates an activity of extended duration.
Learning grammar

◦During the middle of the previous century, for instance, grammar learning
was thought to take place through a process of verbal ‘habit formation’.
◦Habits were established through stimulus-response conditioning, which
led to the ‘overlearning’ of the grammatical patterns of a language.
◦teachers conducted pattern practice drills of various types: repetition,
transformation, question and answer, etc.
◦Teachers introduced little new vocabulary until the grammatical patterns
were firmly established.
◦Language use was also tightly controlled in order to prevent students
making errors that could lead to the formation of bad habits that would
later prove difficult to eradicate.
◦With the rise of generative grammar and its view of language as a
system of rules, grammar learning was seen to take place through a
process of ‘rule formation’, which itself was brought about when
students formulated, tested and revised hypotheses about
grammatical structures in the target language.
◦students were seen to play a much more active role in the classroom
than they had earlier.
◦students’ errors were not to be feared, but rather welcomed as
evidence that students were attempting to test their hypotheses and
receive feedback, with which they could then revise their hypotheses.
◦In the classroom, students were given written grammar exercises so
they could induce the grammatical rules that would allow them to
generate and understand novel sentences.
communicative approach to language teaching

◦ grammar learning took place implicitly and most effectively when students’ attention
was not on grammar at all.
◦ grammar was best learned subconsciously when students were engaged in
understanding the meaning of the language to which they were introduced (Krashen
and Terrell, 1983).
◦ Those that adhered to a Chomskyan universal grammar (UG) perspective felt that
target language input alone or input with negative evidence (that is, evidence that a
particular form is ungrammatical) might be sufficient to have learners reset the
parameters of UG principles in order to reflect the differences between the native
language and target language grammars (White, 1987).
◦ explicit grammar teaching had a role (Norris and Ortega, 2000), with some claiming
that explicit attention to grammar was essential for older language learners whose
ability to acquire language implicitly, much as children learn their native language,
was no longer possible, or at least no longer efficient.
◦SLA (Second Language Acquisition) research tells us that an analysis of
the language that learners use, their ‘interlanguage’, reveals that
grammar is not acquired in a linear fashion, one structure being
mastered after another
◦It can easily be seen that many learners’ utterances are
overgeneralizations. For example, learners of English produce ‘eated’ for
‘ate’, interpreted by some researchers as evidence for the process of
rule formation in SLA.
◦Learners also use forms that do not resemble target forms, and they do
so consistently, such as using pre-verbal negation during early English
language acquisition (for example, ‘no want’), regardless of the native
language of learners.
◦New structures are not simply assimilated one by one, but rather as a
new structure makes its appearance into a learner’s interlanguage, the
learner’s system begins to shift. Thus, learning does not add knowledge
◦Repeated exposure to target language forms contributes to the
strengthening of connections in neural network models.
◦The models simulate rule-like grammatical behaviour even though
no rules or algorithms are used in constructing the model.
◦Emergentists believe that rather than speakers’ performance being
managed by a ‘top-down’ rule-governed system, learners’
interlanguage emerges from repeated encounters with structures
and with opportunities to use them.
◦language learning is an iterative process, revisiting the same or
similar territory again and again.
◦grammar learning is facilitated by the frequency of use of the forms
in the language to which the learner is exposed.
Teaching grammar

◦an explicit rule, a greater variety of means, some far more implicit or
interactive, is favoured these days.
◦An example of an implicit means of promoting student noticing is the
use of some sort of input enhancement (Sharwood Smith, 1993).
◦‘input flooding’, that is, increasing the number of times that students
encounter the target structure in a particular text.
◦teacher and students collaborate to produce a co-constructed
grammar explanation. Awareness may also be heightened through
peer interactions
Peer interaction
◦Peer interaction has also been used effectively in promoting noticing
through the use of specific ‘consciousness-raising’ tasks (Fotos and Ellis,
1991) in which students are given data, such as a set of grammatical and
ungrammatical sentences, and are encouraged to discover the grammatical
generalization for themselves.
◦For example, they may be given the following sentences in order to figure
out the rule about English word order with regard to indirect and direct
objects:
◦Sandy bought Margaret a gift.
◦Sandy bought a gift for Margaret.
◦Sandy bought it for her.
◦*Sandy bought her it.
◦students might be asked to talk about their family
members’ or friends’ daily routines, in which they will
have ample opportunity to use the third person
singular form of verbs.
◦asking students to role-play a situation that calls for
advice to be given to a supervisor versus to a friend
invites those students to select the appropriate form
of modal or other structure with which to offer such
advice.
Feedback
◦Feedback mechanisms span the spectrum from direct correction by
the teacher to recasts, in which the teacher reformulates correctly
what the learner has just said erroneously, to giving students the
space to correct themselves (Aljaafreh and Lantolf, 1994; Lyster and
Ranta, 1997).
◦Some applied linguists have even suggested that students should be
encouraged to make errors by being ‘led down the garden path’.
◦For example, students might be given a rule without being told that it
has exceptions. It is assumed that when students do overgeneralize
the rule and commit an error, the negative feedback they receive will
be more successful in their acquiring the exceptions than if they were
given a list of exceptions in advance (Tomasello and Herron, 1989).
Homework: Vocabulary

◦Schmitt, N., Rodgers, M. P. H. (Eds.) (2020). An introduction to applied linguistics. pp.

35-54.