[...]... Introduction grammar, ” they must learn and conform to the standards that were said to typify the language of the most prestigious speakers of their wider speech community (The standards have many names, including the judgmental “good grammar ; we call them standard written English. ) In contrast to prescriptive grammar is the form of language analysis known as descriptive grammar; this is the type of analysis... the schwa, represented by the symbol /ə/ The ə/ is shown on our charts as mid central and often sounds like / /, the chevron, as in the word above / ə b v/ On other occasions the sound / ə / approaches the sound of the lax front closed /i/ When a syllable lacks stress, the schwa often appears Stress refers to vocal emphasis Stress involves any of the following phenomena, alone or together: pitch (the. .. from the start through the end of the word, whereas in bus (/b s/), vibration will occur only for the /b/ and the / / but not for the /s/ English vowels are distributed on a vowel trapezoid (fig 1b) Its six descriptors—front/central/back and closed/mid/open—refer to the part of the mouth that the tongue is in when saying the vowel For closed vowels (/i i υ u/), the blade of the tongue is close to the. .. conjugate them by putting them in other tenses, persons, or numbers.) Example of how to proceed: X They waved at the wave in the ocean Waved is a verb because it comes second in its clause and thus obeys the SVO Rule It is also a verb because its tense can change: They were waving at the wave in the ocean Wave’s tense cannot be changed: *They waved at the were waving in the ocean 1 He tried out the new... mess they left invited Rollie to all their parties 4/2/07 6:05:25 PM The Most Important Parts of Speech 6 and , the indentured servants 13 heaved the great big blocks of stone up the face of the monument 7 The mean and cruel overseer working whipped the ones who were PRONOUN “Pro” + “noun” typically means “in place, of, instead of a noun or a noun phrase Pronouns, then, replace nouns (Joe was tired,... what do these words mean? A phone is the actual sound itself; a phoneme is an abstract unit of sound that serves to distinguish meaning The following will illustrate the difference between phones and phonemes: American English contains four sounds that are similar but are not pronounced identically: the [t ] of ε of tell ([t εl]), the [t] of style ([stajl]), the [t¯] of wait ([wet¯]), and the [D] of waiting... Mexico), a friend of the textbook since 1990; and Julian Tarango (El Paso, Texas), a real-world lodestar in language and living alike xi 00i-xiv.Teschner.FM.indd xi 4/2/07 6:02:41 PM Introduction Analyzing the Grammar of English (which we abbreviate AGE) is an analysis of the grammar of a particular language (English) and not an introduction to linguistics whose examples end up coming from English A textbook... prescriptive grammarian would simply condemn them out of hand, whereas a descriptive grammarian seeks to describe the conditions under which they are produced and the phonetic processes by which Did you eat yet? gets changed into Jeet jet? AGE, then, is a frankly descriptive grammar that, nonetheless, is fully aware of prescriptivist norms Above all AGE seeks to analyze the grammar of English so that... alone or together: pitch (the tone—relative highness/lowness of a sound due to the frequency of vibration the number of times the object vibrates per unit of time); volume (the loudness of a sound due to the forcefulness of the vibration and its amplitude); and length (how much time is spent pronouncing the sound) English has three types of stress: strong, weak, and null (no stress) When transcribing,... subjects Other English noun or pronoun cases are the object case and the genitive/ possessive case The object case n/p receives the action of the verb The genitive/possessive case n/p indicates possession, that is, it tells us who the owner of something is Here are some examples of each case—genitive, object, and subject: GENITIVE/POSSESSIVE CASE [38] Yvonne’s daughter was my father’s cousin [39] The store’s . rules of language usage on the unanalyzed language they already spoke proficiently. To do so, they were often told to change the way they spoke, and they. xiii Introduction Analyzing the Grammar of English (which we abbreviate AGE) is an analysis of the grammar of a particular language (English) and not an introduction