Екзаменаційний білет № 4

1. Language as a system and structure. Language levels.

2. Text as a syntactic unit. Coherence, cohesion and deixis as the main features of the text.

3. Do the task from the card.

1 Language is a system of symbols and rules that is used for meaningful communication. A system of communication has to meet certain criteria in order to be considered a language:

· A language uses symbols, which are sounds, gestures, or written characters that represent objects, actions, events, and ideas. Symbols enable people to refer to objects that are in another place or events that occurred at a different time.

· A language is meaningful and therefore can be understood by other users of that language.

· A language is generative, which means that the symbols of a language can be combined to produce an infinite number of messages.

· A language has rules that govern how symbols can be arranged. These rules allow people to understand messages in that language even if they have never encountered those messages before.

The Building Blocks of Language

Language is organized hierarchically, from phonemes to morphemes to phrases and sentences that communicate meaning.

Phonemes

Phonemes are the smallest distinguishable units in a language. In the English language, many consonants, such as t, p, and m, correspond to single phonemes, while other consonants, such as c and g, can correspond to more than one phoneme. Vowels typically correspond to more than one phoneme. For example, o corresponds to different phonemes depending on whether it is pronounced as in bone or woman. Some phonemes correspond to combinations of consonants, such as ch, sh, and th.

Morphemes

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language. In the English language, only a few single letters, such as I and a, are morphemes. Morphemes are usually whole words or meaningful parts of words, such as prefixes, suffixes, and word stems.

Example: The word “disliked” has three morphemes: “dis,” “lik,” and “ed.”

Syntax

Syntax is a system of rules that governs how words can be meaningfully arranged to form phrases and sentences.

Example: One rule of syntax is that an article such as “the” must come before a noun, not after: “Read the book,” not “Read book the.”

2 A text grammar is the study of texts above the level of the sentence.^[1][2] It shows how texts are put together so as to convey ideas, facts, messages, and fiction.

A similar term is discourse analysis.^[3] Both are mostly concerned with natural language use; discourse analysis would include spoken language. Speech is also the parent of rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasive speaking. In a similar way, literary criticism parallels text grammar, because both concentrate on the printedword. A text grammar approach puts emphasis on the linguistic structure of a text, rather than its cultural or symbolic meaning.^[4]

A text is a coherent body of sentences.^[5] Coherent means they are linked by a consistent theme. The text ends when completion is signalled. For example, when aproblem introduced at the start is solved, or when a promised discussion has reached a conclusion.