Focussing on Decoding Contractions in English Sentences to Inform ESL Educational Practice

Dennis Michael Bryant

Abstract


The thesis presented herein is that English is obsessive towards some of its character-set, and this is evident with the grammatical use of letters D, S, M, R, L and V. It is expected that critical investigation of this obsession will inform Educational Practice – especially Teaching and Curricula – and this could enable increased success for ESL student cognizance of grammatical associations, thereby supplanting the need for rote-learning, to some degree. This is not to say that teachers must become concerned necessarily with grammar research at a macro-level – and accordingly this paper concerns itself with informing the readership on micro-level grammar. This goal is to be achieved through a method of providing a suite of examples, and while noting grammatical inter-relationships, also acknowledging that the examples conform to an underlying but seldom (if at all) mentioned theme of operation in English; namely, a penchant for reuse.


Full Text:

PDF

References


Bolinger, D. (1968). Aspects of Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Borsley, R. (1991). Syntactic Theory. London: Edward Arnold.

Bryant, D. (2019a). Focussing on Promotion in English Sentences to Inform ESL Educational Practice. Language, Literature and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 3, 108-113. Extracted from http://www.aascit.org/journal/archive?journalId=932.

Bryant, D. (2019b). Focussing on Building up ESL Perception of Verb Slot Complexity to inform Educational Practice. Language, Literature and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 3, 133-138. Extracted from http://www.aascit.org/journal/archive?journalId=932.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. New York: Harper & Row.

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Mouton: The Hague.

Cook, D. (1961). The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. New York: Anchor Books.

Everett, D. L. (2016). An Evaluation of Universal Grammar and the Phonological Mind. Frontiers in Psychology, 7:15.

Everett, D. L. (2005). Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã. Current Anthropology, 46(4), 621–646.

Greenberg, J. H. (1973). Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements. In J. H. Greenberg (Ed.), Universals of Language (pp. 73-113). London: MIT Press.

Gunn, J., & Eagleson, R. (1966). English Language for Senior Students: Survey of Language (Vol. II): Angus and Robertson.

Langacker, R. W. (1973). Language and its Structure: some fundamental linguistic concepts (Second ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, Inc.

Matthews, P. (1991). Morphology (Second ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitchell, A. G. (1962). The Use of English. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

Mitchell, B. (1995). An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Pienemann, M. (1998). Language processing and second language development: Processability Thoery. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Swick, E. (2009). Verbs and Essentials of Grammar for ESL Learners. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Shakespeare, W. (1962). The Tempest. London: Longmans, Green and Co Ltd.

Shakespeare, W. (1965). The Merchant of Venice. New York: The New American Library.

Torres-Gouzerh, R. (2019). Practice Makes Perfect: Intermediate English Grammar. (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education.

Truss, L. (2003). Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. London: Profile Books.

Van Valin, R., & Lapolla, R. (1997). Syntax: Structure, Meaning and Function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wrenn, C. L. (1949). The English Language. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.5296/ijch.v6i2.15892

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2019 Dennis Michael Bryant

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

To make sure that you can receive messages from us, please add the 'macrothink.org' domain to your e-mail 'safe list'. If you do not receive e-mail in your 'inbox', check your 'bulk mail' or 'junk mail' folders.

Copyright © Macrothink Institute   ISSN 2332-5518