hbel4403 assignment 2014 original

5/27/2018 HBEL4403 Assignment 2014 Original

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OPEN UNIVERSITY MALAYSIA

HBEL4403

MORPHOLOGY, SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS

Course Assignment

The Tenses System the Hardest Part of the English Language to

Master

Name :

Matrix No :

Contact No :

January 2014


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TABLE OF CONTENT PAGE

1. Introduction2.

The Description From the Recording

3. The Problems of Tense System among theSecond Language Speakers

4. Analysis of the sentences5. A report on the differences between

the Standard English language rules

6. ConclusionsReferences


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1. IntroductionMany English learners worry too much about tenses. English is use as a second language

in our country. There are teaching and learning of the English language happens in every school

throughout the country. For the student, they have to learn it to pass the English paper on

purpose. Meanwhile, for the teachers they have to study it in and out, concrete and abstract of it

in order for them to cater the students in classroom. There are different elements or parts in

studying English language. As an educator of the language, ones need to master the language

morphology, syntax and language semantics. They have to know the tacit and focal knowledge

of the language. Furthermore, when the teacher wanted to introduce one part of the language

they must know how to explain the use of it and why it is preferable to be use in such situation.

Morphology refers to a study of word formation, teachers of the language need to learn to

analyse words formation such as morphemes, the smallest unit of meaning in English Language.

Morpheme is a division of a word into parts where it have its own meaning and function and

occurs with similar meaning or function as part of other words in the language. Meanwhile

syntax refers to the study of the technical term for sentence structure. Teacher need to master

syntax in order to analyse the groupings and relationship of words, phrase and clauses in a

sentence. The needs to learn syntax is important to all the English language teachers and learners

because we need to get all the fact about the language to be right and the process involves

learning grammar explicitly for tacit and focal knowledge.

2. The DescriptionFriend 1 : Where areyou going Yesterday?

Friend 2 : Igoto cut my hair.

Friend 1 : Thats why, when I passby at the barber shop near the market and I thinkit is you.

Friend 2 : Yes its me, where were youyesterday?

Friend 1 : I gomarket buy some fishes, vegetables and meats for Hari Raya.

Friend 2 : OhI see.

Friend 1 : You arealone wasntyou?

Friend 2 : Yes, my brother sendme there and left to gofor work.

Friend 1 : Oh..thats why I dont seeyour motorcyle nearby.

Friend 2 : I sellit to someone a month ago.


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Friend 1 : Then, how are you goingto work?

Friend 2 : I justbuyone a new Honda Civic.

Friend 1 : Oh how lovely..so why dont you come with your car?

Friend 2 : I putit at the service centre because it already 1000 kilometer. It needto be the first

service.

Friend 1 : Do you still stayingwith your mother?

Friend 2 : Not anymore and I ve got married but sometimes we sleepthere during weekend.

Friend 1 : Owh..what a surprise!

Friend 2 : Its almost two years and we already got a daughter.

Friend 1 : Owhhow lovely. How old is she now?

Friend 2 : She is already 11 month.

Friend 1 : Okay..Ive got to go now. So where are you going now?

Friend 2 : Owhhome.

Friend 1 : How?

Friend 2 : By taxi.

Friend 1 : Come along, Ill send you home.Then we can talk all the way there.

Friend 2 : Thanks.

3.

The Problems Tense SystemMalaysian English language speakers often found that the tense system is the hardest part

of the English language to master. Sometimes the problems under laying the issue being

ignorance since the messages sent between both parties the sender and the receiver were

understood and received clearly and interaction occurs. The diagram below shown the process of

communication.


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Robert L. Heath and Jennings Bryant,Human Communication Theory and Research:

Concepts, Contexts, and Challenges, 2nd ed. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000

Sometimes the both party didnt realized about the mistakes or error in the tense system

during the communication process happened. The situation happened because both parties have

had an experiences, attitudes, have gone through some language skills and clear perceptions

toward the language they use to communicate by ignoring about the morphology, syntax and

semantic or in other words the grammar rules of the language. Why one must has to know about

the grammar rules? Lets those who were in line with the matter think about the problems.

Communication happened everywhere, at the workplace, in every event, at the shop, in the street,

at school and etc. The phenomenon of the tense system as shown in the conversation took place

at one event of opening ceremony of a newly branding company. The conversation occurs

between 2 and more peoples as shown in the dialogue. It is quite difficult to identify the tense

system in informal situation when there were not much focusing point can be taken into

considerations. Below is one of the English Tenses tables.


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Tenses is use to show the time at which the action of a verb take place. In everyday use,

at present and at the present time have a wider application than simply to the present moment

of speech time A distinction can be made between the habitual present, which marks habitual

or repeated action or recurring events and the stative present, which indicates something that is

true at all times. Examples of habitual present include His novel invokes readers mind of

romanticized picture of life in the countryside and She invokes the children of the scary ghost

face. Examples of the stative tense include The world is round and Everyone must die

eventually.

The second phrase refers to the past perfect tense verb phrase. The tense were form from

verb to have and past participle regular verb. The word potrayed is a regular verb where in the

past perfect tense the past participle verb will be addeded to the base form. This mean that the

action is already in the past and still being said and remember in the present.

The past tense refers to an action or statement which has taken place before the presenttime. The word wiped in the text is a regular action verb that represent the action or statement

that has been done before. The English past tense is the morphologically and semantically

marked form. Morphologically, majority of the verbs have a distinctive past form and

semantically in that the past tense wiped refers to an action that is visualized as remote either in

time or as unreality.


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From the dialogue we knew that both speakers were using present tense form instead of

past tense because the action had happened yesterday. It has been done and should be in form of

past tense. Refer to the words highlighted in black for verbs that reflected to the tenses problems.

4. Analysis of the sentencesExample sentences taken from the dialogue

i. Where areyou going yesterday?ii. Igoto cut my hair.iii. when I passby at the barber shopiv. I thinkit is youv. I gomarket buy some fishes, vegetablesvi. I dont seeyour motorcyclevii. I putit at the service centre because it already 1000 kilometer. It needto be the first

service.

viii. Do you still stayingwith your mother?Those were the example of problematic sentences in the aspect of past-tense. Past tense

reflected the used of verb in the sentences. The clue words that shown the sentences were in past

tense are many such as yesterday, long time ago, last week and so on. The verbs included in the

English language wer verb to be, verb to have, verb to do and action verb. Every verb consists ofsingular and plural. The verb to do consist of do, does, did and done for participle. The verb to

have consisted of have has and had. Verb to be consists of is, are, am, was and were.

Meanwhile, an action verb consists of both regular and irregular verb. The regular action verbs

need to be addedd, -ed or -ied at the end of the words for example verbs that end with e will

be added d by the end of the word such as in die died, Action verbs root words that end

with y will drop the y and added with ied such as in crybecome cried. The action verbs

that end with other consonant letter will be added with ed to the root words such as in walk

become walked

The irregular verbs refer to the action verbs that totally change the spelling of the words

without changing the meaning. The words such as go went, ran ran and there is also

irregular words that never change the spelling such as sit, beat, put and so on.


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The first sentence (Where areyou going yesterday?) refers to the use of verb to be. The

sentence should be Where wereyou yesterday? The clue words yesterdaymade the sentence

to form into past-tense. Were is a plural verb use together when the subject of the sentence is

plural in past-tense form.

The words pass and need in the iii and vii sentences were regular verbs. Those verbs

need to be add with ed when the sentences was in the form of past-tense. The root words

pass and need when change to past-tense form will be passed and needed without

changing the meaning.

The words go and think were irregular verbs and those verbs were totally changed in

form of the spelling but not the meaning. The words go will change to went and the word

think changed into thought inthe past-tense form.

The word put was alsoan irregular verb. This type of verb will never change it form

and meaning whether in form of past and present tense. Some scholar would say this kind of verb

is a jail verb or odd verbs. The forms of singular and plural subject dont seem to effect the

sentences.

5. A report on the differences between the Standard English language rules of thelanguage aspect and the way it is realized by the Malaysian speakers of the English

language.

The problems in teaching English as second language among L2 learners is they are

thinking in their first language and tend to translate in L2. The problems occur in the structure of

Bahasa Malaysia and English. The structure of English language is different from Bahasa

Malaysia. The second problem is the habit of L2 leaners where they intended to use the words

which native speakers of the second language didnt use or even mention about it such as, when

people invite them to a party, such as, L1 Will you come to the Thirsty Thursday tonight L2

will answer Can, can. The question is do English, Malaysian speakers end up attending to,

understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak

different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important

implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these


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questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time

considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new

cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we

see the world. The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries;

Charlemagne proclaimed that "to have a second language is to have a second soul." But the idea

went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity

in the 1960s and '70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human

languages essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways.

And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went; it made no sense to ask

whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking. The search for linguistic universals

yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal

has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or

so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged. Of course,

just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the past

decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they

think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as

space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the

indigenous languages don't use terms like "left" and "right." Instead, everything is talked about interms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like,

"There's an ant on your southwest leg." To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, "Where are you

going?", and an appropriate response might be, "A long way to the south-southwest. How about

you?" If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely

on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such

languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in

unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond

human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing

space, trained by language.

Differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial

knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time,


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number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think

differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

In morphology, syntax and semantics aspect, sentences consist of words, but not every

line of words constitutes a sentence. The network of relations between the words of a sentence is

called structure. There are many aspects that influence the structure of a sentence. We can affirm

that the most important one is a word order. The different order of the words in a sentence can

change the meaning of the sentence. A different in words order does not imply a different in

meaning; sometimes it simply entails a difference in emphasis. The structure of the sentence also

depends on the individual meaning of the words or group words to make up the sentence.

The run an analysis to the concept of the sentence given, the following analysis can be done.

i. Words can be grouped into lower constituents.ii. Words can be represented in diagrammatic form.

We take a look at this example The long eight-wheeled truck overturned unexpectedly

and hit the wall with a bang and burned. We can group words into lower constituents, for

example long eight-wheeled modified truck, so the sequence (long eight-wheeled truck) is a

phrasal constituent of the sentence. Following the analysis, unexpectedly modified overturned so

the sequence (overturned unexpectedly) forms a single structural unit, a constituent of thesentence. The same happens in the sequence (a bang). Furthermore, also the sequence (hit the

wall and with a bang) are another constituent. The transformational grammar, the phrase

(overturned unexpectedly), (hit the wall) and (with a bang and burned) all modify truck, then

the whole sequence (overturned unexpectedly and hit the wall with a bang and burned) is also a

constituent.

The explanation on the second analysis, the information can be represented in a

diagrammatic form. Each point in the tree-diagram is called a node, each node represented a

constituent. Since nodes are predictable, later they suppressed in subsequent tree-diagrams. The

tree diagrams did not provide any representation of the intuition about which constituent is

constituent of the same type. The former way in describing the similarities and differences

between constituent is to say that they belong to categories of various types. The same happens

to the phrase. Lastly, the whole sequence (The long eight-wheeled truck overturned unexpectedly


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and hit the wall with a bang and burned) is a special type of constituent formerly termed a clause

or sentence.

There are four levels can be use to analyze sentences, the word-level, phrase-level,

clause-level and sentence-level which is called the rank scale. We can analyze the sentence using

labeled tree-diagram which represents the categorical constituent structure of the sentence. The

diagram provides visual presentation of categorical of the sentence. It shows how sentence is

structure out of its constituent phrases, and how each phrases is structured out of its component

words and also it provides a visual presentation of phrase structure of sentence. The type of tree-

diagram used is referred to as a Phrase-marker (P-marker) because it marks the hierarchical

group of words to phrase and phrase into sentence. The tree-diagram represent the fact that (the

long eight-wheeled truck) and (the wall) are noun phrase, that (overturned unexpectedly) and (hit

the wall) are verb phrase. That (with a bang and burned) is a prepositional phrase and (The long

eight-wheeled truck overturned unexpectedly) is a clause (S). The sentence is of a compound

sentence. The use of sentence connector or conjunction and helps two or more sentence

combine together making a sentence. For example, we can assume that The long eight -wheeled

truck overturned unexpectedly is the first sentence and The truck hit the wall with a bang and

The truck hit the wall and burned.

The long eight-wheeled truck is a noun phrase and also called the subject of the

sentence, and (overturned unexpectedly) and (hit the wall) is a verb phrase and one of it is theadverbial phrase. (with a bang and burned) is a prepositional phrase. Verb phrase and

prepositional phrase do not have head. In the verb phrase all the constituents are always verbs

and none of them can replace with other.

Finally, as the most important idea in relation with the phrase is that they are usually

constituents of sentences but they are also being constituents of other phrases.

6. ConclusionsThe study of morphology, syntax and semantic include the study of how words are

combined to make up the larger units, such as sentences. Like words, sentences are difficult to

define rigidly and objectively. Yet we all have the intuitive knowledge of what a sentence is. As


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an appreciation on this teacher needs to master the tacit and focal knowledge of the language in

order to be a good presenter and guidance.

References

Ferreiro, E. & Pontecorvo, C. (1999). Managing the written text: the beginning of punctuation in

childrens writing.Learning and Instruction, 9(4), 543-564.

John F. Fanselow, (1987);Breaking Rules: Generating and Exploring Alternatives in Language

Teaching Longman.

Lera Boroditsky (2010), Lost in Translation, new cognitive research suggests that language

profoundly influences the way people see the world, a different sense of blame in

Japanese and Spanish. The Wall Street Journal, Asia Edition.

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Bhd.

Nunan, (1999). Language Learning and TechnologyVol.3 No.1 July, pp. 52-74

Nunan D (1999). Second Language Teaching and Learning, Newbury House, Teacher

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Harold F. Schiffman (2000), Aspect and Variability in Tamil. University of Pennsylvania

Haoll, J.K. (2007). Redressing the roles of correction and repair in research on second and

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Luz Marina Vsquez Carranza (2007). Correction in the ESL Classroom: What teacher di in the


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classroom and what they think they do Revista Pensamiento Actual, Universidad de

Costa Rica Vol. 7, N. 8-9, 2007 ISSN 1409-0112 84-95.

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practice and future direction,International of English Linguistics. Vol. 1, No. 1, March

2011.

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