Me Talk Pretty One Day

After reading "Me Talk Pretty One Day," I have seen that this story, is a humorous story of a non English speaker's daily misuse of words. In the reading, I found many grammatical errors in his sentences, but one that really grabbed my attention was a sentence said by one of his classmates, which was "Sometimes 'me' cry alone at night." As you can see, the sentence is grammatically wrong because of the misuse of a pronoun. Instead of using "I," in the first person's point of view, the student used the word "me," to refer to himself. Therefore, I believe the correct sentence should have been "Sometimes 'I' cry alone at night."

Also, after reading this story, I was able to make a connection to a personal experience, in where I remember hearing my mother, trying to learn English. As I mentioned in my "Relationship to Language" story, my mother had a really hard time learning English. But now, thanks to the reading and the many new things I have learned about language, I realized she had a really hard time learning it, because as well as Sedaris' classmate, my mother had the same problem of misusing pronouns. Instead of 'I' she would use 'me' and instead of 'me' she would use 'I'. Everything was just very confusing for both of us, because everything seemed very similar to her and she just talked the language with whatever word she could remember first, to explain that she was addressing herself. Therefore, after seeing that, I would always try to explain to her, that she wasn't using the correct part of speech, and this just seemed to confused her even more.

Yule's Chapter 9 "Syntax"

In Chapter 9, Yule teaches us about Syntax. Syntax is a word that originally comes from Greek and it means putting together or arranging the elements in a linear structure of a sentence. It is the analysis of the structure of phrases and sentences. Therefore, Chapter 9 is basically about the rules we use to form a sentence.

In Syntax, there are many different forms or structures that help make a sentence. For example in this chapter, I learned about the Deep and surface structure. I also learned about generative grammar and its “all and only” criterion, which means that the grammar we use must generate all the grammatical sentences and only the grammatical sentences, nothing else. I also learned in the chapter that deep structure is when we use phrase structure rules, while surface structure is otherwise known as a transformational grammar. It is the structure of individual sentences, after the applications of transformational rules.

In chapter 9, I also learned about the symbols used in syntactic description. For example, I learned that there are symbols such as ‘S’ for sentence, ‘NP’ for noun phrases, ‘N’ for noun, ‘Art’ for article and so on. On the other hand there are also many different symbols that are used, such as brackets and parenthesis. When parenthesis are used, it means that whatever occurs inside of them will be treated as an optional constituent, while brackets represent the only elements that must be selected.

Lastly in this chapter, I learned that syntax has many different rules, such as Lexical and transformational rules, which have to do with phrase structure rules. I also learned about tree diagrams and how it’s a diagram that is divided into many different branches, that show the “hierarchical organization” of sentence structures.

Where Words Come From

In this chapter, “Where Words Come From,” Bryson is basically explaining some of the terms we read in Yule’s book. He is explaining to us, how words in the English language are formed and where they all come from. As I read along in the chapter, I saw that he believes that many words are “borrowed from another language, and created by mistake” (71). Therefore, he decided to explain himself in this chapter, by dividing his theory into five ways in which he believes words were created.

In the first one he says “words are created by error”(71). He states that many words, such as sweetheart, pea and cherry, owe their existence to mishearing, false analogy or backformation. In the next way, he believes “words are adopted”(73). He believe this because he says we take words from almost everywhere in the world. For example, ketchup is adopted from China, potato is adopted from Haiti and sofa from Arabia. The third way, is when, “words are created”(75). He states in this section, that for a century and a half, English “flowed” with many new words. Between 10,000 and 12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist today. But he also explains, that he believes many words are also made up by writers. In the fourth way, “words change by doing nothing”(77). He believes this means, that words stay the same, but often the meaning changes. Frequently, the meaning of a word becomes its opposite or something very similar to it. Lastly, he believes words are finished off by, “adding or subtracting something”(80). In this section, he explains certain terms we read in Yule’s book and went through in class. For example, he states that English has more than a hundred common prefixes and suffixes, such as able, ness, ment, pre and many more, that help form and reform many words with great ability.

Overall, I really found this chapter very interesting. The reason why is because I never really took the time to think about all of the ways words could be created and where they really came from. But now, after reading this chapter, I am aware that words come from all over the world and are created in many different ways; which are often “borrowed” by other languages.

Reading Log for Chapter 6, 7 & 8

After reading chapters 6, 7 & 8 in Yule's book, I have learned many new things about language. For example, I learned that the study of the origin and history of a word, is known as Etymology. Also, in chapter 6, I learned about words and word formation processes. I have learned that the least common processes of words formation in English is Coinage. The term Coinage means the invention of completely new terms and Borrowing means taking over words from another language. I have also learned in this chapter, the differences between compounding and blending. Compounding is the joining of two separate words to produce a single form. On the other hand, the term Blending is the combination of two separate forms to produce a single new term. Along with these processes, I have also learned about many others such as clipping, backformation, conversion, acronyms, derivations and many other ones.

In chapter 7, I learned about Morphology. The term Morphology is better known by scientists as "the study of forms." In chapter 7, Yule teaches the basic elements in a language, which are known as Morphemes. In this chapter he talks about the types of morphemes used in English, which are "Free and Bound Morphemes." The "Free Morphemes" are separated into two different sections, which are the Lexical Morphemes and the Functional Morphemes. On the other hand, the "Bound Morphemes" are broken down into Derivational Morphemes and Inflectional Morphemes.

Lastly, in chapter 8, I learned about Grammar phrases and sentences. I have learned that Grammar is basically, the correct use of language. In this chapter, Yule’s talks about grammar and it's many parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns and many other. He explains little by little the meaning of each of the parts of speech and he uses examples to get his point across. He also talks about different approaches, that we have somewhat spoken about in class, which are the prescriptive and descriptive approach. The Prescriptive Approach to grammar is a grammar that tries to legislate what our grammar should be, while the Descriptive Approach to grammar represents the unconscious linguistic knowledge or capacity of it's speaker, meaning us.