Page 127 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

NOUNS ANDTHE NOUN PHRASE
113
(listening activities, automobile production),
constructions (setup, handout, wash-back effect).
texts have found that these are far more common in written than conversational genres, that noun compounding represents a highly productive structure, and that formal written texts include more of these constructions than informal varieties (Biber et al., 1999).
In L2 texts, one of the typical errors is pluralization of the descriptive nouns in the compounds (e.g., *afive-credits_-hours course, *a 20-years_-old student}. Relativelyspeaking, avoiding these errors is easy to teach. In Eng- lish, adjectives do not take plural, and the structures *blues books and *bigs blue books are incorrect because only the main (head) noun can be used in plural. Similarly, withcompound nouns, the firstjob isto identify the main noun (usually the last one in the string of nouns) that can take the plural:
a five-credit-hour course(s), a 25-year-old woman (women)
(for an in-depth discussion of adjectives see chap. 9).
In most compound noun phrases (e.g., the vegetable garden), only the last (head) noun takes the plural marker -s, and other nouns that de- scribe it do not.
Exceptions to this rule are few, and they almost always include "exclusive plurals" (Quirk et al., 1985) when it is known that the descriptive noun includes more than one entity (e.g., arts degree, customs officer; it is also possible to say art degree when one type of art is involved).
Another typical problem with compound nouns is that compounding can take place only if an adjective form of a particular noun does not exist:
vegetable soup, noodle dish, rice bowl, table top (there are no adjectives that can be derived from vegetable, noodle, rice, or table). In contrast, compound structures such as
*nationflag, *economy data, *culture norms
are incorrect because adjectival forms of nouns have to be used if they exist—national, economic, and cultural.
A word of caution is necessary when it comes to adjectives derived from nouns because the meaning of the adjectives can be quite different from that of the noun:
composition teacher vs. compositional teacher book vs. bookish
territory vs. territorial
CHAPTERSUMMARY
To deal with shortfalls in students' repertoire of nouns prevalent in aca- demic texts, a concerted effort has to be made to increase the learner's vo-
and fused verb + particle Corpus studies of academic
TLFeBOOK