Vocabulary Journal 4
morphology
cognates
tree diagrams
syntax
generative grammar
Morphology plays a role in both second language teaching and in teaching reading to both native English speakers and emergent bilinguals. In reading, methods based on a learning view each morphology as a strategy for decoding words. Acquisition view include morphology as a strategy for constructing meaning and developing academic language.
The study of meaningful parts of words.
Krashan's Natural Order Hypothesis (1977) is based on morpheme studies. It is possible to observe the order in which different common inflectional morphemes appear in an emergent bilingual speech.
Words that come from the same root, that were literally "born together".
Using cognates can help students use their knowledge of morphology to develop academic vocabulary. If emergent bilinguals speak a Latinate language, they may understand many academic English words when they connect those words to related words they know in their first language.
Teachers can use things like WordSift, to help students find cognates in a text. WordSift can be customized, and teachers can input a list of cognates as one of the word lists.
Chomsky's theory of syntax. This theory is an attempt to delvelop a small set or rules that could be used to produce, or generate, any sentence in a language. This would be used rather than trying to find a new way to describe the sentence patters of oral language.
More complex model that contains both a surface structure (what we say or write) and a deep structure (roughly, what we mean, our basic ideas). Chomsky argued that there are only a limited number of these deep-structure patterns.
Example: "There's a fork in the road". Fork has two possible means.
Sometimes referred to as phrase markers. Tree diagrams are what linguists use to represent visually the structure of sentences and the functions of phrases, such as NPs, within a sentence. The are referred to as tree diagrams because they sometimes look like upside trees.
Tree diagrams branch out as they move from the level of the sentence to the phrases and down to the words. The top level begins with a simple sentence. The next level has three components of the sentence, NP, Aux, and VP.
While tree diagrams represent the structure of sentences at the deep level they do not at the surface level. Some sentences have to be rearranged in order to represent them in their deep structure level.
The study of how words are combined to create phrases and classes in sentences of language.
Syntax is one component of the grammar of language. In the study of syntax, linguists have attempted to make explicit the implicit rules that humans have acquired that allow them to comprehend and produce language.
Other components of grammar that are not syntax are: phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. Semantics often gets associated with syntax in things like running records.
