Search results for 'tag:Noun phrases tag:Teaching English' matching tags 'Noun phrases' and 'Teaching English'

Re: Lack of emphasis on NPs in ESL

Kooyeen — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:10:09 GMT

I feel ignorant... I don't know what a noun phrase is. Ok, wait, checking on Wikipedia in progress... found! --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_phrase

If noun phrases are like those, then I don't think they are much of a problem. But it depends on what you really mean... because I think I might agree on the fact certain structures with complex noun phrases are not emphasized while teaching English at all. For example:

Jenny's cat is the biggest I have ever seen. <--- All grammar books are full of these examples.
Jenny's boyfriend's cat is the biggest I have ever seen. <--- Never seen anything like this.

Bob and Mary's house is in Denver. <--- All grammar books cover this.
Me and my partner's house is in Denver. My partner and I's house is in Denver. <--- Never heard anyone trying to explain anything like this, where pronouns are involved.

Is that what you mean? If so, I also have to say there are a lot of other areas that are not emphasized by teachers. A widely neglected one is "weak forms", in my opinion... much, much more than noun phrases.
Just my thoughts...

Re: gerund? participle? adverb? - comments and questions

paco2004 — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 01:31:01 GMT

Hello

Please look at the three sentences below, which I picked up online.
      1. She spent the time in working at home
      2. She spent the time working at home.
      3. The time working at home is gradually increasing.
Sentence #1 was traditionally deemed as a grammatical form, but people nowadays prefer the sentence #2. Sentence #3 seems to have been created by some people who analyzed the cluster of "the time working at home" in #2 as a noun phrase. This would be a good example showing a progress in a language is brought about by people who are not well acquainted with the grammar of their mother tongue. I believe phrases like "a position teaching English" also were created in a similar way.

paco

Re: position teaching

rvw — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 21:01:51 GMT

Paco2004 wrote:
Hello RVW

Thank you for the answer. Your thought sounds someway more reasonable. But still I cannot feel confident. If "teaching English" is appositive to "a position", I think, "She found teaching English at a high school" should be idiomatic, but it is not the case. Furthermore, we cannot use along with "a position" any noun phrase other than --ing. For example, "She found a position instruction of English at a high school" sounds weird. Soâ¦

paco

paco,

I think that position (or job, occupation, vocation) is the setting in which someone performs an action; whereas, teaching is the action performed in that setting. Position and teaching cannot be direct appositives unless some more words are implicitly understood. And I think they are.

She found a job.
She found a setting in which she teaches at a high school.
= She found a job teaching at a high school.

Apparently this is an idomatic construction (one, among many, that I was not aware of). The word position (or job, etc.) requires as its appositive the gerund naming the action carried out in that position or setting.

Paul Newman has a second occupation racing cars.
She found her true vocation climbing mountains.
He turned to his secondary employment robbing banks.

Re: position teaching

paco2004 — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 06:54:35 GMT

Hi Clive

You don't say "a teching English position" but you say "an English teaching position". This "English teaching" is neither a present participle nor a gerund. I take it as a noun phrase made by the nominalization of a verbal phrase "teaching English" and I take you are joining it with "position" to make a noun-noun phrase "an English teaching position". There is almost no grammar rule in making English noun-noun phrases. You use any noun as an attributive to a core noun if you feel thus made noun-noun phrases sound natural.

But in the case of post modification, to my understanding, the English language is not so lenient in forming post modified noun phrases. You cannot use a noun as a backward attributive to a noun without using prepositions. When adjectives including present/past participles are used as backward attributives, their relation to the core noun is commonly explainable with the concept of WHIZ deletions.

paco

Re: position teaching

paco2004 — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 02:33:54 GMT

Hello RVW

Thank you for the answer. Your thought sounds someway more reasonable. But still I cannot feel confident. If "teaching English" is appositive to "a position", I think, "She found teaching English at a high school" should be idiomatic, but it is not the case. Furthermore, we cannot use along with "a position" any noun phrase other than --ing. For example, "She found a position instruction of English at a high school" sounds weird. Soâ¦

paco

Re: Please identify the subject and verb

paco2004 — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 02:55:23 GMT

Your question is quite intriguing. Professsor Okada, a linguist teaching English in a college in Osaka, gives a lecture on this matter. As the original article is written in Japanese, I'll summarize it with my poor English writing skill.

(Query 24) Why is the verb is not "are" but "is" in the following sentence?
"More than one of the students is going to study abroad".

(Okada's Answer)
English speakers say like the way as these (note o: correct, and x: incorrect).
[1] (o) More than one of the students is going to study abroad.
[2] (x) More than one of the students are going to study abroad.
[3] (o) Fewer than two of the students are going to study abroad.
[4] (x) Fewer than two of the students is going to study abroad.
"More than" or "fewer than" does not work as the ruler of the verb form. What rules the verb form is the noun phrase that comes after "more than" or "fewer than". That is, "one of the students" is the ruler in [1] and "two students" in [3].

As for the usage of fractions, English speakers say like:
[5] One third of the milk was spilled.
One third of the men were bachelors.
[7] Two thirds of the milk was spilled.
Two thirds of the men were bachelors.
The part ruling the verb form is not the fractional phrase ("one third of" or "two thirds of" ) but the form of the noun that follow the fractional phrase.

paco

Adverbial objectives

paco2004 — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 06:59:15 GMT

Many English nouns and noun phrases can be used as adverbs. They are called "adverbial objectives". From the standpoint of word order, an adverbial objective is put as if it were an objective of a verb, but actually it works as an adverbial modifier of the verb. This sort of constructs comes from an Old English grammar rule that allowed ti use accusative cases of nouns as adverbs. For example, let's take an Old English sentence "He eode ham"[=He went home]. From the view of current English the word "ham" [home] would be treated as an adverb but it was the accusative of the noun "ham" in Old English. In current English this sort of noun phrase uses is prominent especially in the case the noun phrases means "time/duration", "space/direction/distance", "measure/degree", "manner" and others.

Time/Duration
[1.] Did you see him this morning?
[2.] What time shall we go?
[3.] She is thirty years old.
[4.] I'd like to start Wednesday, the first jury day. ["the first jury day" is appositive to "Wednesday"]
[5.] Please tell me what day you are free.
[6.] The parcel arrived last week.
[7.] They prayed all night in the cathedral.
[8.] They walked two hours.
Some other examples of noun phrases of this use:
every day, next week, next Monday, the day after tomorrow, one of these days, one day, any day in this week, etc.

Space/Direction/Distance
[1.] Today I came a different way. ["Today" is a TIME ad. ob.]
[2.] Elms stood either side of the street.
[3.] Let's go some place.
[4.] He lives next door.
[5.] She'll come home soon.
[6.] Come this way, please!
[7.] We wandered north and north.
[8.] We walked ten miles.

Measure
[1.] She was thirty years old.
[2.] The bottles was about three quarters full.
[3.] They stood up together *** high in the sea.
[4.] He stands head and shoulders above his fellow.
[5.] Her skin was snow white.
[6.] It was pitch dark inside the room.
[7.] Stars are diamond bright and there is no dew.
[8.] The sea went mountains high.

Degree
[1.] I should not mind a bit.
[2.] She blamed herself no end.
[3.] She used to laugh a good/great deal.

Manner
[1.] Don't look at me that way.
[2.] He speaks good English
[3.] He came full speed.
[4.] He stood there sailor-fashon.
[5.] She run upstairs two steps at a time.
[6.] They walked barefoot.
[7.] Our ship sailed first thing in the morning.

Noun Couplets
[1.] Bind him hand and foot.
[2.] He smote them hip and thigh.
[3.] We all got to go sometime reason or no reason.
[4.] Let's fight tooth and nail.
[5.] They discussed the matter heart to heart.
Some other examples of couplets: day after day, year after year, face to face.

The Superlative and the Comparative
[1.] My father liked this hat the best.
[2.] He runs the faster.
[3.] She couldn't know which she liked the better.
[4.] I don't know whose eyes would be the widest open.

Distribution
[1.] She visited the States twice a year.
[2.] He paid $ 20 a pair for my shoes.

To my guess, these collocations are so common that most of native speakers could acquire them even without knowing the concept of "adverbial objectives". And (therefore?) many of grammar books currently available don't mention this, and dictionaries give a definition to a noun used as an adverbial adverb as an adverb separately from the definition as a noun. As for the complex adverbial objectives, they are explained as simple idiomatic phrases without giving any grammatical explanation. Accordingly, in teaching English as a second language too, the concept of "adverbial objectives" is rarely taught at the beginner's stages in school at least in Japan. So many of English learners in Japan (including me) learned theses expressions one by one without knowing the mechanism why native speakers use nouns as adverbs. I sometimes feel it might be better to let students know the concept of "adverbial objectives" at an earlier stage of English learning and it could be helpful for them to learn this kind of noun usage more efficiently. But I'm not sure. I would like to hear opinions from English teachers (especially those who teach English to ESL students) about this.

paco