Teacher Discussion Forums

Dear Harzer, I have both read many of Chomsky's books and heard him lecture in person. Now, it is possible, as you have suggested that we are being asked to identify the structures the final structures were allegedly generated from, but the poster was not clear. And I very much doubt that the model ...

Dear Harzer, I wasn't attacking you, I was attacking a course or course book that could give the results the original poster came up with. A clause needs a subject and verb; it did thirty years ago, does now, and will in thirty years time. The First two sentences are not "clause + phrase" but "claus...

why would sentences 1 and 2, if they were to be analyzed as "clause + phrase", be included?

Possibly because the book or course you are using is a load of crap?

Surface and underlying structures.

Who knows?
Who cares?

Dear Jackie,
1 and 2 are adverbial phrases. Clauses need a subject and a verb.

3 is, as you said correctly a relative clause

4 is a main clause; the subordinate clause is the one that starts with "Because".

I don't know Halliday. I would divide the sentecnes into theme and focus. The theme would be the given information and the focus would be the new information. So "The old couple" is the theme and "are leaving theri house to their grandchildrent" is the focus or new information. Sometimes the focus c...

Sorry Roger; line of reasoning doesn't work at all. You can write any dialect of English you want. Henderson was writing in Scots in the 14th century but it was still a dialect of Englsih, as was Chaucers. Standard English is just another dialect of English, a social dialect as opposed to a regional...

Management and staff are boht collective nouns and os can take the singular or plural depending on whether you see them as a unit or a collection of individuals. However here you have two nouns joined by and so you have a plural. The general rule for two singular nouns is: A and B Plural A or B Sing...

Roger, Two sayings on this one. Firstly a language is a dialect with an army and secondly a language is a language becaiuse its speakers think it is. Normally however you accept a hierarchy. Various ideolects make up a dialect and various dialects make up a language. You must be very careful to avoi...

I was't impressed by Lindstromberg's arguments. Particularly where he argued against teaching phrasal verbs as separate lexical items.. Sure pick it up is the sum ot its parts but He's picked up a lot recently or I picked up this smashing blonde last night are separate linguistic items.

Is "Tok pidgin" a pdgin, or a creole or a fully fledged language? One definition of a pidgin is that none of the speakers of it are native speakers. So if you have a community of people with no common language, then you will have them speaking a pidgin. However if their chkdren grow up with the pidg...