tailieunhanh - The grammar book teacher course part 6

We have included more material in this text than you can teach in a one-term course that deals with the structure of English for ESL/EFL teachers. To include less would have been unconscionable since we believe that ESL/EFL teachers need to be familiar with all the topics in this book. | Chapter The Lexicon Introduction In this chapter we briefly treat the lexicon of English. The lexicon has been characterized as a mental inventoiy of words and productive word derivational processes. We take a considerably broader view of the lexicon we consider it to comprise not only single words but also word compounds and conventionalized multiword phrases. Despite increasing its breadth our treatment of the lexicon must be cursory although some grammarians might even be surprised to find this topic included in a grammar book at all. Traditionally grammar and lexicon were seen to be two distinct components of language and indeed they still arc treated as such in some grammatical theories. From a pedagogical perspective as well vocabulary and grammar have usually been viewed as two different areas of language. We believe however that it is better to conceive of grammar and lexicon as opposite poles of one continuum and for this reason following Halliday 1994 we prefer to think in terms of lexicogrammar. There arc three reasons for our preference. First is the interlingual argument that which is accomplished grammatically in one language can be realized lexically in another. For example Warao a language from Venezuela attaches a grammatical inflection to a verb that corresponds to the modal verb can a separate lexical item in English Dixon 1991 . Second from an intralingual perspective in keeping with our broader scope of die lexicon we note that many multiword lexical units conform to the grammar of a language that is they adhere to acceptable word order. For example in English the lexical order is always by the way not way by the. Recent work in computer analyses of large corpora of English texts suggests that these patterned multiword phrases are basic intermediate units between lexis words and grammar Nattinger and DcCarrico 1992 . Third when we focus on the extremes at die ends of the continuum the dichotomy between grammar and lexicon seems to hold. For .