Chapter 9, Syntax

Chapter nine, which is based on the structure and ordering of components within a sentence or syntax, which also orginated from greet and means "putting together" or "arrangement", (86). The chapter first talk about generative grammer, system of explicit rulles specifying what combinations of basic elements would result in well-formed sentences, using mathematics, as a comparison. As in algebra their is an endless set of results when 3x + 2y( y=2,1) (x=10,5). the endless set of such results is generated by the operation of the rules. On pages 87 states the grammar will have a finite (limited) number of rules, but will be capable of generating an infinite number of well formed structures.

Surface structure, expalined as for example, charlie broke the window (active sentence) or the window was broken by charlie (passive sentence), the distinction between both is what is called surface structure. In contrast to deep structure explained as it was charlie who broke the window.However the structural ambiguity, two distinct underlying interpretation that is represented differently in deep structure is Annie had an umbrella and she whacked a man with it, or Annie whacked a man and the man happened to be carrying an umbrella.

On pages 88 talk about the rules of grammer and its crucial property of recursion ( repeatable any number of times). For example (on the table ) the gun was on the table. ( near the window , in the bedroom). The gun was on the table near the window in the bedrrom. Furthermore the chapter explores on symbols used in syntactic discription such as the arrow which indicates rewrite as, round brackets [( )], optional constituent or [{ }] curly brackets, one and only one of these constituents must be selected. Otherwise on pages 91 and onward dicusses about lexical,rules, complement, phrases, transformational rules and phrase structure rule. However I am having a hard time distinguishing a noun from a adv and so on , right off the back and also the tree diagram seems to be very confuseing like in chapter eight.

Bill Bryson "where words come from"

Where words come from by Bill Bryson, goes into great detail about words; the different types, how they are formed, or created; or made up. As he said "in Englsih, in short, there are words for almost everything". Starting at pages 67 he supports this by his many examples, just to name a few, there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbor an urgeto look through the windows of the home you pass, also a word for this: crytoscopophilia, and so on. However I would have never thought that words for these actions even existed, however they are not familiar. On pages 68 he continues, that English has the richest vocabulary, for example one word can have several different meanings, all retaining to that word, such as house for home, forceful and forcible. No other langauge has so many words all saying the same thing. "Fine" for instance has forteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun, and two as an adverb and it fills two pages in the oxford dictionary with 5,000 words of discription, ( fine art, fine gold, feeling fine, fine hair etc.). This condition of many meanings is called Polysemy. Furthermore on pages 71 according to Danis linguist Otto Desperson words are formed in one of four ways; by adding them, subtracting them, by making them up and by doing nothing to them. For example words created by error can be called Gost words, such as buttonhold and sweetheart. Also stated, words are formed by backformation, example pea originally pease as in the nursery rhymes. Laze from lazy, greed from greedy etc. For centuries words are adopted by taking them from other countries such as shampoo from India, ketchup from china, sofa from Arabia etc. Often, words are modified in the time it takes to reach us, having undergone various degress of filtering. Also changing meanings as they pass from one nation to another. Adding that this tendency to turn foreign sounds into native speech is common, example New York Flatbush was orginally Vlacht Bos. In the late middle ages the word dog was created, in english it was Hound or hund, however it was displaced. Further examples includes jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat,fun, grease etc. Many words are made up by writers, example shakespeare used 17, 677 words in his writings one tenth has never been used before. The new words of today represent an explosion of technology, pages 76 for example Lunar, module, and myocardial infarction.When a word stays the same but the meaning changes on pages 77, this is compared to as counterfiet once meant a legitimate copy. More than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones, for example Nice 400 years later becomes elegant, strange, unmanly, modest,precise etc. However somtimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expression, like starve orginally to die, came to be to die of hunger. With adding the prefixes and suffixes: pre-, anti-, -ness, -able. English posseses the ability to make new wirds by fusing componds such as airport, seashore, footwear etc.

Reading Log for chapters 6,7 and 8.

Chapter 6, words and words formation process talks about Etymology, which is the study of the origin and history of a word. Also there are many different ways a new word can enter the English language. However coinage is one of the least common processes of word formation in English. For example older words such as aspirin, nylon, vaseline, and zipper. More recent examples include kleenex, teflon,tylenol and exerox. The chapter goes on to discuss about eponyms, words based on the name of a person or a place. For example sandwich/ which Earl Sandwich insisted on haveing his bread and meat together. The word Fahrenheit from the German Gabriel Fahrenheit this is a term based on the names of those who first discovered or invented things. To add to this chapter and the formation process of words borrower, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronyms,derivation all have a specific impact on new words, joining of two separate words, reduction, verbs and nouns.

Chapter 7, focuses on Morphology which is defined to be the basic forms in language. Futhermore discussing on morphemes, a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. There aare free morphemes, morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words , example open and tour. Bound morphemes that cannot normally stand alone Example words that are attached to -re,-ist, -ed, -s, receive, reduce, repeat. However free morphemes are furthered call Lexical morphemes and other type of free morphemes are called Functional morphemes. Examples include, but, when, because, on, near, above in. Bound morphemes which changes the adjectives good to the noun goodness. A list of Derivational morphemes include suffixes such as -ish in foolish, ly in quickly and -ment in payment. The second set of bound morphemes are called inflectional morphemes, used to produce new words in the language. It is also used to show if the word is plural or singular, past tense or not. This chapter also talks about morphs and allomorphs and how morphology works with other languages, furthermore how different forms of language are used to realize morphological processes and features.

Lastly, chapter 8 demonstrates on phrases and sentences: grammar. The process of discribing the structure of phrases and sentences in such a way that we account for all the grammatical sequences in a language and rule out all the ungrammatical sequence is one way of defining grammar. Therefore without knowing the rules to a language it is uncertain to make a well organized sentence. The part of speech helps out with identifying the nouns, articles, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, preposition, pronouns and conjunctions. Furthermore the chapter discusses about grammatical gender, the prescriptive approach, descriptive approach or structural analysis/ immediate constituent analysis.