engleski

On Words and How to Use Them

This book is intended to serve as a hybrid between a grammar book and a textbook for students of English (primarily first year undergraduate students). Its aim is not to cover the entire grammar of the English language, but to deal with those issues that tend to be problematic for students of English as a second language. The topics discussed in it are chosen on the basis of a fifteen years’ worth of experience in working with students of English at the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Rijeka. This experience has shown that most students, when they begin their studies, feel an aversion towards grammar and grammatical terminology and that they do not understand the terms used in class or the linguistic phenomena that these terms refer to. However, they are usually not ready to admit this, and as a result this can lead to various problems in the use of language. In this book I tried to use a friendly and conversational tone in order to help the students understand the basic properties of English words. The experts might wonder why the chapters do not follow the same methodology – for example the chapter on nouns employs traditional methodology, the chapter on prepositions employs cognitive methodology, while the chapter on articles gives a cognitive explanation but also includes traditional lists of situations in which the definite and indefinite articles are used, that is, of the situations in which no article is used. The reason for this is that in each chapter the methodology to which the students respond the best in class is used, i.e. when explaining nouns to students they seem to respond best to the traditional approach and when explaining prepositions to students they seem to respond best to the cognitive approach. When it comes to articles, students usually say that they find the cognitive approach very helpful, but that they still like having the traditional lists, i.e. lists that include particular situations in which articles are used or not used, available (it would seem that they see these lists as some sort of a safety net). One chapter in particular might seem too basic to experts who might also wonder why go into so much detail on that particular topic. That chapter is the one on numbers. However, students frequently struggle with numbers and quite a few students find even reading more complex numbers (e.g. years, telephone numbers, fractions, etc.) challenging. We as teachers tend to assume that numbers are something basic and that students have mastered all aspects of this word class completely by the time they come to the University. Unfortunately, this is frequently not the case. Another thing that most students have serious problems with are questions. Again, we teachers tend to assume that since students hear so many questions during classes that they do not have problems with them. And it is true that students usually have no problems when it comes to understanding questions. However, forming questions is another matter. Students are accustomed to answering questions, not asking them, and as a result they frequently make mistakes when they find themselves in situations in which they need to use them. For this reason, in the chapter on verbs, detailed instructions on how to form questions are given for every verb form discussed. Another point that some linguists might find controversial is that when explaining the senses of modal verbs in the case of the possibility/probability sense the degree of possibility is expressed using percentages. Naturally, there is no empirical way to determine the exact percentage of possibility/probability expressed by a particular modal verb. However, experience has shown that students make significantly fewer mistakes when using modal verbs for expressing possibility/probability if this sense of a particular modal verb is explained to them with the help of percentages, and this is why this approach is employed in this book. The book is based primarily on those English grammar books that are most commonly used in teaching the English language at a university level: Biber, D., Johnsson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education. ; Eastwood, John (1996). Oxford Guide to English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press ; Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., Svartvik, J. (1994). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London/New York: Longman ; Thomson, A.J., Martinet, A.V. (1986). A Practical English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The chapter on prepositions is primarily based on the work by Lindstromberg (Lindstromberg, S. (2010). English Prepositions Explained. Revised edition. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company) and Tyler and Evans (Tyler, A., Evans, V. (2003). The Semantics of English Prepositions. Spatial scenes, embodied meaning and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Since the book is intended to serve as a textbook there are no references in the text itself, except in rare cases when a direct quote is included in the text. Instead, at the end of each chapter a list of books and papers that were used as sources is given. At the end of the book a complete list of all sources is given.

grammar, nouns, articles, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, verbs

nije evidentirano