The structure of the language – PARTS OF SPEECH

All languages differentiate among kinds, or classes, of words, or, rather the functions that words have. These different kinds of words are classified into parts of speech. In English, we have eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and exclamations. Most Indo-European languages are similar in the presence of these parts but not necessarily in their forms. Some languages will have other parts of speech. All languages will have to account for these various categories, even if they do it in ways that differ very much from English. We will use English here as the common language for looking at language structure in general.

Nouns, as you probably learned in your English classes in elementary school, are the names of people, places, things, and ideas. In English, there are common nouns (those begin with lower-case letters; they are the “common” words for people, places, and things) or proper nouns (those begin with upper case letters; they are the titles for people, places, and things). Thus, we talk about a doctor (common noun) or Doctor Zhivago (proper noun).We need to know the difference in English so that we use the proper spelling. Some other languages follow the same convention.

 

Nouns in English can be singular or plural: the doctor or the doctors, the bush or the bushes. We usually form the plural in English by adding an ending, but sometimes we use a different word altogether: child, children; mouse, mice. Many languages do something similar: add an ending to make a singular noun plural. Some languages, such as Russian and Czech, where nouns in the singular also have endings, change the endings in the plural. In some Asian languages, such as Thai, Vietnamese, and Cambodian, nouns are not differentiated by singular and plural. If this seems strange, think of collective nouns in English, such as sheep and deer. We say one sheep, five sheep, few deer, many deer. We do not say *five sheeps or *many deers, although that is a common mistake of learners of English as a second language who overgeneralize the more common rule – add -s to make plural – to all categories of nouns, including, erroneously, to collective nouns. (You will very likely do similar things in the language you are studying; overgeneralization is quite natural, especially for synoptic levelers.) Nouns in English are not marked for gender, but they are in some languages. In French and Spanish, for example, nouns can be either feminine or masculine. The article (the words a, an, or the) that goes with them will change depending on the gender of the noun. In German, the article also changes, depending on the gender of the noun, but in this case, there are three choices: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Slavic languages, such as Polish and Serbian, also have the three genders – masculine, feminine, and neuter – but in these cases, there is no article in the language at all and gender is indicated by the ending on the singular noun. This is another area in which learners make mistakes in grammar: if they come from a language without gender markings on nouns, such as English, it is often difficult for them to remember whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter. Moreover, if the learner has studied more than one foreign language, the confusion can be stronger.

 

In some languages, nouns are marked for case. That is, the function of the noun in the sentence can change the article that is used with it or the form of the noun itself. Some languages, such as Finnish, have more than twelve cases. Here are some examples of case:

•  The boy went to school.
• The teacher saw the boy.
• The teacher gave the boy a book.

 

In each of these sentences, the role of the boy is different. In English, that does not matter, and you will find out why in the section below about locus of meaning. In other languages, that does matter. So, let us look at each of those sentences. In the first sentence, the boy is doing the action; that makes the boy the subject

of the sentence.

 

In Russian, that would require the ending -a: mal’chika. In the third sentence, the boy is indirectly the recipient of the action, the book being the direct recipient. In German, that would require the use of the article dem. In Russian, that would require the use of the ending -u: mal’chiku. There are, of course, many more cases.

 

Bibliography:

 

1.    Brown, H.D. (2000): Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. White Plains, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Gass,

 

2.    S.M. I L. Selinker. (2008): Second Language Acquisition. An Introductory Course. New York: Routledge. VanPatten,

 

3.    Leaver, B.L; Ehrman, M; Shekhtman, B. (2005): Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition. CUP

 

4.    B. i J. Williams. (red.) 2007: Theories in Second Language Acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

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