• Title/Summary/Keyword: English verb patterns

Search Result 16, Processing Time 0.02 seconds

Form-focused Instruction in Incidental Learning of English Verb Patterns

  • Kim, Bu-Ja
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
    • /
    • v.16 no.3
    • /
    • pp.59-80
    • /
    • 2010
  • The present study investigated what kind of form-focused instruction would yield better results for incidental learning of English verb patterns in two experiments. Experiment 1 compared the effectiveness of focus on form (reading + translation) and focus on forms (verb pattern list + translation) tasks in learning new English verb patterns incidentally in Korean EFL college classrooms. The results of Experiment 1 showed significantly higher results for the focus on forms group. Since it was revealed by Experiment 1 that the learners did not notice unknown target verb patterns, Experiment 2 was undertaken to examine whether the difference between the focus on form and focus on forms conditions found in Experiment 1 would be retained even after the isolated form-focused instruction or focus on forms aiming at teaching students how to recognize verb patterns was provided for the learners before the focus on form and focus on forms tasks were carried out. The results showed that the focus on form group yielded significantly higher incidental learning scores than the focus on forms group. The effectiveness rates of the focus on form in Experiment 2 were statistically higher than those of the focus on forms in Experiment 1. The results of the two experiments indicated that the combination of the isolated form-focused instruction and focus on form was significantly more effective in learning English verb patterns incidentally. In conclusion, form-focused instruction including both isolated form-focused instruction and focus on form is an effective way to incidental learning of English verb patterns.

  • PDF

A study on vocabulary instruction to improve English communicative competence: Focus on English verbs (의사소통 능력을 높여주는 어휘 지도에 대한 연구: 동사를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Bu-Ja
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
    • /
    • v.12 no.1
    • /
    • pp.131-158
    • /
    • 2006
  • The purpose of the present study is to explore an effective way of teaching English vocabulary which is geared toward improving students' English communicative competence. This study focuses on English verbs, which may be followed by patterns according to subcategorization. Learning verbs must include learning about patterns as well as meaning in order to improve the ability to use verbs receptively and productively, or communicative competence. On the basis of the language progression proposed by Willis (2003), a teaching strategy which helps learners learn English verb patterns effectively and systematically was proposed. The effect of the teaching strategy was investigated. The subjects of the experimental group who learned English verb patterns intentionally through the teaching strategy proposed by this study significantly improved themselves in the ability to use them receptively and productively. This result shows that the teaching strategy including improvisation, recognition, rehearsal, system building, exploration and consolidation is helpful to improving communicative competence.

  • PDF

A Comparison of the Constructions Make / Take a Decision in Malaysian English with the Supervarieties

  • Christina Sook Beng Ong
    • Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
    • /
    • v.4 no.1
    • /
    • pp.43-59
    • /
    • 2023
  • This study aims to compare the structures of light verb constructions (LVCs) taking decision as the deverbal noun in Malaysian English, British English and American English. A general corpus made up of Internet forum threads from Lowyat.Net, was created to represent Malaysian English while the British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) were used to represent the supervarieties. Light verbs make and take are found to be heading deverbal noun decision. Differences are observed in the use of articles. The frequency of Malaysian English LVCs without article is the highest while supervarieties LVCs prefer indefinite article. The high occurrences of LVCs without articles in Malaysian English can be attributed to the influence from Malaysian substrate languages. Findings also show that descriptive adjective is the most frequently used modifier in all three varieties of English. This suggests the standard LVC structure, comprising a light verb, the indefinite article, and a deverbal noun is no longer rigidly adhered to even among the native speakers of English.

On the Study of the Interaction between Syntax and Semantics in See Verb Construction in English (영어 '보다(see)' 구문에 나타나는 통사와 의미의 상호관련성 연구)

  • Kim, Mija
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
    • /
    • v.39
    • /
    • pp.329-354
    • /
    • 2015
  • The major goals of this paper are to identify the degree into which the meanings of 'see' verb can be extended, focusing on the extended meanings shown in the expressions that denote our instinctive actions for survival, such as eating or drinking, etc., and to clarify the doubt on whether any syntactic pattern can be associated with the meaning in the process of meaning extension of 'see' verb. For doing this task, this paper picked out 2,000 examples randomly from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), in which the verb 'see' is used. This paper classified the sentences into thirteen different sentence types, according to the syntactic patterns. This research showed that these thirteen syntactic types lead us to figure out the process of the meaning extension of the verb 'see'. With this result, this paper made an attempt to provide the four steps toward the meaning extension of verb 'see'. The verb 'see' in the first step denotes the meaning of purely seeing the visualized objects. This verb in the second step expresses the shifted function, under which the agent in the subject position takes the seeing action as a secondary task in order to carry out other main task. The verb in the third step denotes the extended meanings irrelevant to the seeing action, because the sentences on this step do not contain any visualized objects. In the last step this verb functions as conventional implicature whose meaning does not contribute to the whole meaning of a sentence. In addition, this paper identified that the syntactic properties are deeply associated with the process of meaning extension of the verb 'see', and tried to formalize this relationship between the syntax and semantics within the framework of Construction Grammar based on A. Goldberg.

Against the Asymmetric CP- V2 Analysis of Old English

  • Yoon, Hee-Cheol
    • Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics
    • /
    • v.4 no.2
    • /
    • pp.117-149
    • /
    • 2004
  • The paper is to argue against the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis of Old English, according to which finite verbs invariably undergo movement into a clause-final T within subordinate clauses and reach the functional head C within main clauses. The asymmetric CP-V2 analysis, first of all, faces difficulty in explaining a wide range of post-verbal elements within subordinate clauses. To resolve the problem, the analysis has to abandon the obligatoriness of V-to-T movement or introduce various types of extraposition whose status is dubious as a legitimate syntactic operation. Obligatory V-to-T movement in Old English lacks conceptual justification as well. Crosslinguistic evidence reveals that morphological richness in verbal inflection cannot entail overt verb movement. Moreover, the operation is always string-vacuous under the asymmetric CP- V2 analysis and has no effect at the interfaces, in violation of the principle of economy. The distribution of Old English finite verbs in main clauses also undermines the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis. Conceptually speaking, a proper syntactic trigger cannot be confirmed to motivate obligatory verb movement to C. The operation not only gets little support from nominative Case marking, the distribution of expletives, or complementizer agreement but also requires the unconvincing stipulation that expletives as well as sentence-initial subjects result from string-vacuous topicalization. Finally, textual evidence testifies that Old English sometimes permits non-V2 ordering patterns, many of which remain unexplained under the asymmetric CP-V2 analysis.

  • PDF

A Study on the Focus Realization in Intransitive Verb Sentences (영어 자동사 문장에서의 초점 실현 양상에 관한 연구: 영어원어민화자와 한국인화자 비교)

  • Kim, Hwa-Young;Lee, Hyun-Jung;Kim, Kee-Ho
    • Speech Sciences
    • /
    • v.9 no.3
    • /
    • pp.251-266
    • /
    • 2002
  • This paper aims to compare and analyse the pattern of the pitch accent realization between the English native speakers and the .Korean speakers, using the sentences by the scope of focus including intransitive verbs; unaccusative, unergative, and passive, based on the previous studies. The results show that the English native speakers produce the intonational patterns similar to the previous study (Hoskins, 1996), which showed that English native speakers deaccented after the focused word for unaccusative and passive verbs in broad focus. Korean speakers, however, have a tendency not to deaccent after the focused word for both verbs. In the narrow subject focus condition, Koreans do not deaccent the verbs after the focused subject. In the narrow verb focus condition, they produce the pitch accent on verbs as the English native speakers do, but they tend to produce the pitch accent on subjects that should not be given any pitch accent. Therefore, unlike the English native speakers, the Korean speakers have a tendency not only that they do not produce three types of intransitive verbs with proper intonation, but also that they do not realize the focus structure itself properly.

  • PDF

Implementing an Inflection Analyzer Program for English Verbs in a Word-and-Paradigm Morphology. (낱말.패러다임 형태이론에 입각한 영어동사 굴절 해석 프로그램의 구현)

  • No, Yong-Kyoon
    • Language and Information
    • /
    • v.2 no.2
    • /
    • pp.121-154
    • /
    • 1998
  • The morphological analyzer is expected to tell attested word forms from imaginable yet unattested ones. An account of the inflectional morphology of English verbs is given in the framework of Word-and-Paradigm morphology, developed mainly by Matthews (1972, 1974, 1991) and further by Aronoff (1994) and Zwicky (1985, 1988), which is free of overrecognition. Thirteen inflectional classes are identified according to the patterns each of them exhibits in filling the slots in the paradigm. Peculiarity in orthography is also considered in assigning each verb lexeme to a class. Modules of a C program which gives associated morphosyntactic properties to all and only attested verb forms are written so that details of this framework can be evaluated explicitly. This program is shown to be superior to existing programs in economy and in the generality it achieves.

  • PDF

Target Word Selection for English-Korean Machine Translation System using Multiple Knowledge (다양한 지식을 사용한 영한 기계번역에서의 대역어 선택)

  • Lee, Ki-Young;Kim, Han-Woo
    • Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
    • /
    • v.11 no.5 s.43
    • /
    • pp.75-86
    • /
    • 2006
  • Target word selection is one of the most important and difficult tasks in English-Korean Machine Translation. It effects on the translation accuracy of machine translation systems. In this paper, we present a new approach to select Korean target word for an English noun with translation ambiguities using multiple knowledge such as verb frame patterns, sense vectors based on collocations, statistical Korean local context information and co-occurring POS information. Verb frame patterns constructed with dictionary and corpus play an important role in resolving the sparseness problem of collocation data. Sense vectors are a set of collocation data when an English word having target selection ambiguities is to be translated to specific Korean target word. Statistical Korean local context Information is an N-gram information generated using Korean corpus. The co-occurring POS information is a statistically significant POS clue which appears with ambiguous word. The experiment showed promising results for diverse sentences from web documents.

  • PDF

Lexical Semantic Information and Pitch Accent in English (영어 어휘 의미 정보와 피치 액센트)

  • Jeon, Yoon-Shil;Kim, Kee-Ho;Lee, Yong-Jae
    • Speech Sciences
    • /
    • v.10 no.3
    • /
    • pp.187-209
    • /
    • 2003
  • In this paper, we examine if the lexical information of the verb and its noun object affects the pitch accent patterns of the verb phrase focus. Three types of verb-object combinations with different semantic weights are discussed: when the verbs have optional direct objects, when the objects have the greater semantic weight relative to verbs, and when the verbs and the objects have equal semantic weight. Argument-structure-based works note that the pitch accent location in a focused phrase is closely related to the argument structure and contextual information. For example, it has been argued that contextually new noun objects receive accent while given noun objects don't. Contrary to nouns, verbs can be accented or not in verb phrase focus regardless of whether they are given information or new information (Selkirk 1984, 1992). However, the production experiment in this paper shows that the accenting of verbs is not fully optional, but influenced by the lexical semantic information of the verbs. The accenting of noun objects with given information is possible and the deaccenting of new noun objects also occurs depending on the lexical information of the noun objects. The results demonstrate that in addition to argument structure and information by means of context sentences, the lexical semantic information of words influences the pitch accent location in focused phrase.

  • PDF

Korean Speakers' Realization of Focus and Information Structure on English Intonation in Comparison with English Native Speakers (초점과 정보 구조에 따른 한국어 화자의 영어 억양 실현 양상)

  • Um, Hye-Young;Lee, Hye-Suk;Kim, Kee-Ho
    • Speech Sciences
    • /
    • v.8 no.2
    • /
    • pp.133-148
    • /
    • 2001
  • Focus and information structure are closely related with the distribution of pitch accents. A focused word conveys new information and bears a pitch accent. A content word can usually get a pitch accent, but it can be deaccented if it is mentioned earlier in the discourse. In this paper, we test how English native speakers and Korean learners of English realize pitch accents according to focus and information structure of a sentence. The production experiment shows that English native speakers give a pitch accent to narrow-focused items, deaccenting all the other items of the sentence. For VP broad focus, native speakers give a pitch accent either to both the verb and its complement or to the complement only. On the other hand, it is found that Koreans give pitch accents to most content words regardless of focus and information structure. Moreover, the perception experiment confirms that Koreans' intonation patterns, which are not appropriate in terms of focus and information structure, may jeopardize listeners' comprehension. This paper shows that Korean speakers have little knowledge about focus and information structure for intonational realization, and that such notions should be applied to teaching of English intonation.

  • PDF