TABLE OF CONTENT 3INTRODUCTION 31 1 Rationale 31 2 Aims of Study 31 3 Research questions 41 4 Scope of the Study 5DEVELOPMENT 5CHAPTER I LITERATURE REVIEW 52 1 Overview of traditional grammar 52 1 1 What is traditional grammar? 62 1 2 What is the difference between traditional grammar and modern linguistics? 72 1 3 Concepts in traditional grammar 102 2 Previous research 102 2 1 Types of sentence structures 112 2 2 The sentence elements 122 2 3 Clause types 122 2 4 The complex sentence 122 2 4 1.
Trang 1TABLE OF CONTENT
INTRODUCTION 3
1.1 Rationale 3
1.2 Aims of Study 3
1.3 Research questions 3
1.4 Scope of the Study 4
DEVELOPMENT 5
CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW 5
2.1 Overview of traditional grammar 5
2.1.1 What is traditional grammar? 5
2.1.2 What is the difference between traditional grammar and modern linguistics? 6
2.1.3 Concepts in traditional grammar 7
2.2 Previous research 10
2.2.1 Types of sentence structures 10
2.2.2 The sentence elements 11
2.2.3 Clause types 12
2.2.4 The complex sentence 12
2.2.4.1 Finite, non-finite and verbless clause 12
2.2.4.2 Nominal Clauses 13
2.2.4.3 Adverbial clauses 15
CHAPTER II: ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSIONS 16
3.1 Analyzing the patterns of sentences in a part of The Little Match Girl 16
3.2 Analyzing the elements of sentences in a part of The Little Match Girl 18
3.3 The author’s style of using grammar structures in The Little Match Girl 23
Trang 24.1 Recapitulation 24
4.2 Concluding Remarks 24
REFERENCES 25
Trang 3INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale
It is claimed that fairy tales are wonderful presents for children duringtheir childhood and nurture young generations' souls when their personalitiesbecame formed such as kindness, graveness, and truthfulness
From my perspective, fairy tales always consist of special situationswith valuable lessons And The little match girl, a narrative from Andersen’sancient stories is one of the tales that I remember most
The Little Match Girl story tells about a little girl who lost her mother,and on New Year's Eve, she couldn't sell a single matchbox, so she dared not
go home Her dreams are shown one after another through the times she lightmatches while sitting on the street And in the end, she died in the cold ofNew Year's Eve
The Little Match Girl is a short story that clearly shows thehumanitarian heart, rich in love of the author with small, poor, unfortunatepeople, especially children in society at that time
Through the story, I have felt a profound message and the benevolentheart of the author That was the main reason that helps me to take sentences
of The Little Match Girl to serve grammar structures’ analysis in thisassignment
Trang 42) What are concepts of Traditional grammar?
3) What are types of sentence structure?
4) What are sentence elements?
5) How to analyze the sentences in The Little Match Girl according toTraditional grammar theory?
6) What are comments given to the way of grammar patterns andstructures using of the author according to mentioned grammar’s theory?
1.4 Scope of the Study
This study analyzed clause patterns and their function based onTraditional grammar theory in a selected passage in the first part of a famousshort story written by Hans Christian Andersen entitled The Little Match Girl
1.5 Research Methods
In this work, the methods of data collection and data analysis aremostly used
DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER I: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Overview of traditional grammar
2.1.1 What is traditional grammar?
Traditional grammar is applied to summarize the range of methodsfound in the pre-linguistic era of grammatical study The whole approach of
Trang 5this method emphasizes on correctness, linguistic purism, literary excellence,the priority of the written mode of language and the use of Latin models.
Traditional grammarians considered Latin as their model becauseEnglish is a part of the Indo-European family of languages, and to whichLatin and Greek also belong It did have similar grammatical elements If youstudy the form of traditional grammar, the rules of classical languages werefollowed considering that English did not have grammar of its own AndEnglish followed Latin grammar Besides the parts of speech, traditionalgrammatical analysis also makes use of numerous other categories, just like'number', 'gender', 'person', 'tense' and 'voice'
The collection of prescriptive rules and concepts about the structure oflanguage that is commonly taught in schools Traditional English grammar(also known as school grammar) is largely based on the principles of Latingrammar, not on current linguistic research in English
“We say that traditional grammar is prescriptive because it focuses onthe distinction between what some people do with language and what theyought to do with it, according to a pre - established standard The chiefgoal of traditional grammar, therefore, is perpetuating a historical model ofwhat supposedly constitutes proper language.” (Williams, 2005)
“Why do the media cling to traditional grammar and its sometimes dated rules? Mainly because they like the prescriptive approach of traditionalgrammar rather than the descriptive approach of structural and transformationalgrammar…” Why? Inconsistencies in the style of a newspaper, online newssite, magazine or book draw attention to themselves when readers shouldinstead be concentrating on the content “But the prescriptive rules have to
out-be amended occasionally to reflect not only changes in the language but alsoresearch that proves traditional advice may have been inaccurate The work of
Trang 6linguists is essential for making such calls on the best evidence available.”(Brooks, Pinson, and Wilson, 2005).
Firstly, modern linguistic is descriptive (to describe the way peoplespeak), while traditional grammar is prescriptive (to prescribe the way peoplespeak, or simply, to tell people how to speak and let people know the correctway of their speaking)
Secondly, traditional grammar pays more attention to the written form
of language, while linguistics attaches more importance to speaking thanwriting
Thirdly, traditional grammar has been restricted mainly to SYNTAX,that is, the way of words making patterns to form sentences, while linguisticshas a boarder scope for researching, E.g Pragmatics, psycholinguistics,sociolinguistics
2.1.2 What is the difference between traditional grammar and modern linguistics?
Best answer there is no difference All grammar is traditional There is
a difference between formal or written grammar, which insists on certaindistinctions, as between who and whom, the appropriate use of subjunctiveand the indicative moods and agreement of subject and verb, and informal orcolloquial grammar which does not Modern English grammar, as thedescription of modern English usage characteristic of people under the age offorty, certainly suffers from the reduction of distinctions, the loss ofrefinement and the tongue - tied confusion of tenses and moods which is theinevitable result of having its standards set by the most careless speakersrather than by the most careful Traditional grammar doesn't let you write likeyou talk It doesn't, among other things, let you end a sentence with a
Trang 7preposition or start a sentence with the word "and" Some English teachersstill insist that people comply with each and every one of those archaic rules,but many writers have accepted and even recommended the use of moderngrammar instead.
Traditional grammar is a framework for the description of the structure
of language
2.1.3 Concepts in traditional grammar
The subject (abbreviated SUB or SU) is one of the two main
constitutes of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back toAristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammar; the otherconstituent is the predicate According to another tradition, i.e the oneassociated with predicate logic and dependency grammars, the subject is themost prominent overt argument of the predicate Both traditions see thesubject in English governing agreement on the verb or auxiliary verb thatcarries the main tense of the sentence, as exemplified by the difference in verbforms between he eats and they eat
The predicate in traditional grammar is inspired by propositional logic
of antiquity A predicate is seen as a property that a subject has or ischaracterized by A predicate is therefore an expression that can be true ofsomething Thus, the expression "is moving" is true of those things that aremoving This classical understanding of predicates was adopted more or lessdirectly into Latin and Greek grammars and from there it made its way intoEnglish grammars, where it is applied directly to the analysis of sentencestructure The predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence (the otherbeing the subject, which the predicate modifies) The predicate must contain averb, and the verb requires, permits, or precludes other sentence elements tocomplete the predicate
Trang 8An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the
predicate It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's
"performance" of the verb Basically, it is what or whom the verb is actingupon As an example, the following sentence is given: "Bobby scored a goal",
"a goal" is the object
A sentence is a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that
bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it Asentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement,question, exclamation, request, command, or suggestion
In grammar an adverbial is a word (an adverb) or a group of words (an
adverbial phrase or an adverbial clause) that modifies or tells us somethingabout the sentence or the verb The word adverbial is also used as anadjective, meaning 'having the same function as an adverb' Look at theexamples below: Danny speaks fluently (telling us more about the verb)
A clause typically contains at least a subject noun phrase and a finite
verb While the subject is usually a noun phrase, other kinds of phrases (such
as gerund phrases) work as well, and some languages allow subjects to beomitted There are two types of clauses: independent and subordinate(dependent) An independent clause demonstrates a complete thought; it is acomplete sentence: for example, I am sad A subordinate clause is not acomplete sentence: for example, because I have no friends
A noun is a part of speech typically denoting a person, thing, place or
idea In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical categorywhose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, theobject, of a verb, or the object of a preposition The syntactic rules for nounsdiffer from language to language An adjective is a 'describing' word; the mainsyntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more
Trang 9information about the object signified Adjectives are one of the traditionaleight English parts of speech, although linguists today distinguish adjectivesfrom words such as determiners that formerly were considered to beadjectives.
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax
conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen,become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand) In the usual description ofEnglish the basic form, with or without the participle to, is the infinitive Inmany languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense,aspect, mood and voice A verb may also agree with the person, gender and/ornumber of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object In manylanguages, verbs have a present tense, to indicate that an action is beingcarried out; a past tense, to indicate that an action has been done; and a futuretense, to indicate that an action will be done
A conjunction (abbreviated CONJ or CNJ) is a part of speech that
connects two words, sentences, phrases, clauses together A discourseconnective is a conjunction joining sentences The definition may also beextended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit with the same single-wordconjunction (as well as, provided that, etc.)
Despite the fact that traditional grammar is informal, unscientific full ofcontradictions and inconsistencies, inexplicit, inadequate, and prescriptiveuneconomical and unwholesome and it ignores spoken language, languagechange, contemporary usage and all the varieties of language It is still acrucial unit of the English language Thus, there is no need for whole scale to
be changed, it surely needs to be mended rather than ended
2.2 Previous research
Trang 10This work was worth analyzing because there had none study about clause patterns of The Little Match Girl story conducted previously
2.2.1 Types of sentence structures
A simple sentence structures consists of one independent clause (An
independent clause contains a subject and verb and expresses a completethought.)
E.g She likes dogs.
He likes cats.
A compound sentence structure is two (or more) independent clauses
joined by a conjunction or semi-colon Each of these clauses could form asentence alone
E.g She likes dogs and He likes cats.
She came home but her husband went to the bank.
A complex sentence structure consists of an independent clause plus a
dependent clause (A dependent clause starts with a subordinating conjunction
or a relative pronoun, and contains a subject and verb, but does not express acomplete thought)
E.g Tom failed at the entrance exam because he was lazy to learn The baby smiles when she hears her mother’s voice
A compound - complex sentence structure consists of at least two
independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses
E.g I didn't join the year-end party of my company because my daughter was not well, therefore, my boss was not satisfied
Though Mitchell prefers watching romantic films, he rented the latest spy thriller, and he enjoyed it very much
2.2.2 The sentence elements
Trang 11A sentence may alternatively be seen as comprising five units calledELEMENTS of sentence (or, as we shall see below, clause) structure:SUBJECT, VERB, COMPLEMENT, OBJECT, ADVERBIAL, here abbreviated
as S, V, C, O, A:
He (S) suddenly (A) came (V) home (O) [1]
The girl (S) is (V) every day (A) asleep (C) in the hotel (A) [2]
The train (S) left (V) the station (C) on time (A) [3]
She (S) is (V) at work (A) in her garden (A) [4]
He (S) had given (V) the girl (O) a gift (O) [5]
I (S) lost (V) my purse (O) with money (C) in the bus (A) [6]
We shall see that considerable variety is possible in realizing eachelement of structure Indeed S, O, and A can have themselves readily theinternal constituents of sentences:
She (S) saw (V) that [(S) rained (V) all day (A)] (O) [7]
His brother (S) grew (V) happier (C) when [his friend (S) arrived (V)] (A) [8]That [she (S) answered (V) the question (O) correctly (A)] (S) pleased(V) him (O) enormously (A) [9]
The italicizing is intended to emphasize the similarity between nate (or dependent) clauses and independent sentences At the same time thisand the bracketing can interestingly suggest that when in [8]and that in [7]and [9] operate as A, O, and S respectively (though this is only partly true)while more importantly being themselves ‘expanded’ by the dependentclauses (Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik,1982)
Trang 122.2.4 The complex sentence
2.2.4.1 Finite, non-finite and verbless clause
Analyzing by structural type, we arrive at three main classes:
FINITE CLAUSE: a clause whose verb element is a finite verb phrase.
E.g John has visited New York
Because John is working, he
NON-FINITE CLAUSE: a clause whose verb element is a non-finite verb phrase.
E.g Having seen the pictures, he
For John to carry the parcels was a
VERBLESS CLAUSE: a clause containing no verb element (but otherwise
generally analyzable in terms of one or more clause elements)
E.g Although always helpful, he
John, then in New York, was