Author: gustavorernesto

PDF #128 – Hinkel, Eli – Practical Grammar Teaching,_Grammar Constructions and Their Relatives

In the past several decades, a few novel approaches to analysis and teaching of English grammar constructions have been proposed. These are based on several theories that seek to account for how language structures are produced and understood.

After reading “Teacher Goes Outside The Classroom” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #127 – Melinda Tan – Corpus Studies in Language Education

Recent studies in corpus linguistics have shown that intuitions about language use are not always the best way to understand the nature and structure of the language itself

PDF #126 – The Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels was changed. Some consonant sounds changed as well, particularly those that became silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is sometimes used to include these consonant changes.

English spelling started being standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.

What is the Great Vowel Shift?

The Great Vowel Shift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Basically, the long vowels shifted upwards; that is, a vowel that used to be pronounced in one place in the mouth would be pronounced in a different place, higher up in the mouth. The Great Vowel Shift has had long-term implications for, among other things, orthography, the teaching of reading, and the understanding of any English-language text written before or during the Shift. Any standard history of the English language textbook (see our sources) will have a discussion of the GVS. This page gives just a quick overview; our interactive See and Hear page adds sound and animation to give you a better sense of how this all works.

The main difference between Chaucer’s language and our own is in the pronunciation of the “long” vowels. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r’s, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as “kn,” that were later simplified. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. But the “long” vowels are regularly and strikingly different. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift.

Beginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century (but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made).

Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. For example, Middle English “long e” in Chaucer’s “sheep” had the value of Latin “e” (and sounded like Modern English “shape” [/e/] in the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA]). It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. Consequently, one can read Chaucer’s long vowels with the same values as in Latin or any continental European language and come pretty close to the Middle English values.

The Great Vowels Shift changed all that; by the end of the sixteenth century the “e” in “sheep” sounded like that in Modern English “sheep” or “meet” [IPA /i/]. To many it seemed that the pronunciation of English had moved so far from its visual representation that a new alphabet was needed, and in the sixteenth century we have the first attempts to “reform” English spellings, a movement still active today. In 1569 John Hart (in his Orthographie) went so far as to devise a new phonetic alphabet to remedy what he considered a fatal flaw in our system of language. (His alphabet and the work of other language reformers provides us with our best evidence for the pronunciation of English in his time).

After reading “The Great Vowel Shift” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

PDF #125 – Adele E Goldberg and Devin Casenhiser – English Constructions

Constructions have been defined variously in the literature, but the traditional use of the term corresponds to a conventional pairing of form with (semantic or discourse) function. This article provides examples of uncontroversial instances of constructions, clarifies some of the debates surrounding the term currently, and also briefly explores a broad based range of constructionist theories that have converged on the basic idea that traditional constructions play a central theoretical role in language.

It was the Roman orator, Cicero, who in the first Century BCE, provided our first known application of the word constructio (from which English derives the word ‘construction’) to a grouping of words. Half a century later, Priscian (c. 500 CE), began using the word constructio as a grammatical term, and the
Medieval Linguists known as the Modistae (12th Century) spent much of their time considering the nature of the construction itself. Their work centered on defining the construction as ‘an ordering of words that agree and express a complete meaning.’ Their basic criterion for a construction was that it consisted of at least two words in which one of the words was said to ‘govern’ or ‘require’ the other word or words. This notion of construction must be both grammatically well-formed and express a meaningful sentiment. The crowd run, would have been rejected on syntactic grounds (subject-verb agreement), and Colorless green ideas sleep furiously would have been rejected as a construction on the grounds that it is semantically vacuous. In short, the Modistae believed that constructions were not defined simply on the basis of form (i.e., syntax), but also on function (i.e., semantics)

After reading “Goldberg Casenhiser English Constructions” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs and visit my channel by Youtube.