Page 37 - EL108 Learrning Module

2. Communicative perspective of the language

It focuses more on the overall message being communicated and the
interpretations that this message might invoke. “Grammar” is treated as one

of the many resources for accomplishing something with language.

Corpus Linguistics

The most common practice of compiling linguistic corpora, or large and
principled collections of natural, authentic spoken and written texts. It shows how

often and where a linguistic form occurs in spoken or written text.
It provides information on patters of variation in language use, language

change, and varieties of language. It also provides information on the different

semantic functions of lexical items, distributional and frequency information on the
lexico-grammatical features of the language.

It challenges languages teachers to rethink how they view the content of a
language curriculum and the manner in which this curriculum is presented to

students.
Katz and Fodor (1963) found that in addition to encoding semantic features

and restrictions, a word also contains a number of syntactic features including the

part of speech (noun, verb, adjective), countability (singular, plural), gender
(masculine, feminine), and it can mark prepositional co-occurrence restrictions

such as when the word think is followed by a preposition (about, of, over) or is
followed by a that-clause. Katz and Fodor called this ‘the grammatical dimension

of lexis’.

Theories of Communication

1. Systemic-functional grammar
Context and meaning take precedence over linguistic form. It

typically describes features of grammatical form that are used to express

meaning beyond a single, context-free utterance. Rather, grammatical form
is seen as having a symbiotic relationship with meaning and pragmatic use,

where each influences and shapes the other within and across utterances.

Teaching and Assessment of Grammar 25