27.910, Review: Applied Ling; General Ling: Berry (2015)

Fri Feb 19 16:54:31 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-910. Fri Feb 19 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.910, Review: Applied Ling; General Ling: Berry (2015)

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Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2016 11:54:01
From: Boris Yelin [byelin at purdue.edu]
Subject: From Words to Grammar

Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36097897

Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-3026.html

AUTHOR: Roger  Berry
TITLE: From Words to Grammar
SUBTITLE: Discovering English Usage
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Boris Yelin, Purdue University

Reviews Editor: Helen-Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The proposed audience of “From Words to Grammar,” by Roger Berry, is
undergraduate students of English and trainee teachers on postgraduate
courses. It aims to teach syntax in a bottom-up fashion, where lexical items
are the topic of discussion, and English syntax is discovered by analyzing
word usage. It is an exercise book that contains many examples of authentic
corpus text with short explanations of the grammar. Essentially, the student
internalizes the concepts through practice. The book begins with an
introduction explaining the conventions of the book, including information
about concordance lines (taken from the British National Corpus), which
highlight the word in question. Otherwise, the main text consists of twelve
chapters: Nouns, Personal pronouns; Pronouns and determiners; Adjectives;
Prepositions; Adverbs; Verb patterns; Modal auxiliaries; Multi-word verbs;
Question words, relative words, and subordinators; Multi-functional words (I),
and Multi-functional words (2). Most of the chapter titles speak for
themselves, but a few are worth clarifying. The Verb patterns chapter focuses
on transitivity and complements and adjuncts of verbs. The Multi-word verbs
chapter covers phrasal and prepositional verbs. Lastly, both Multi-functional
words chapters examine words that belong to several word classes. The book
concludes with a combined glossary/index that either defines words not defined
in the main text or refers readers back to the appropriate section to review a
certain definition. 

In order to more easily envision how the book is structured, I offer here an
exercise from the text (pgs. 66-67), which, in the text, immediately follows
an explanation of the uses of ‘still.’

Activity 6.1

Decide whether ‘still’ on these lines is:
a. an aspect verb
b. a linking adverb
c. a degree adverb
d. an adjective

Hint: look at the position of ‘still’

1. The thirty year old is STILL at home.
2. STILL, he does realize that service companies will feel the pinch too…

EVALUATION

As stated above, “From Words to Grammar”, is really a beginner’s roadmap to
syntax. However, no mention of the word syntax is ever made in the text, a
smart move on the part of Berry, since students are more familiar with grammar
and what they learned in school. Essentially, this book teaches what I would
call syntax-lite with good tests to determine word class and without syntax
trees; this makes it an effective link between what students think they know
about the words they use and the reality. With respect to its intended
audience, I think it would only be appropriate as an undergraduate
(pre)introductory text to syntax, and in the hands of a skilled instructor,
this book is very helpful to illuminate much of the polysemy and homonymy in
English. However, since graduate students often dive into more complex
syntactic notions and operations, it would most likely be an insufficient
graduate text. Also, the book can sometimes be unclear or difficult for
someone who has little to no experience with grammar, and the directions may
seem unclear. Thus, this book would not be ideal for self-study since it could
greatly benefit from students’ working through at least a few problems with an
instructor.

Though this book is targeted at learners of English syntax, the application of
the knowledge in this book would be infinitely useful to second language
learners that have English as their first language. Often beginning (and even
higher-level) learners will adopt a strategy of one-to-one translation
correspondences, but this book would show them, for example, that the word
‘that’ assumes so many roles, which makes it highly likely to be rendered in a
variety of ways in other languages, e.g. Spanish or French. Moreover, learning
the specific roles of words and how they relate to each other would boost the
metalinguistic knowledge of students so that they may learn additional
languages more systematically, struggling less with the grammar. This book
could also be useful for high-level English as a Second Language (ESL)
learners. Often, they get confused by multiple meanings and uses for words, or
they cannot use certain prepositions in a native-like manner due to their
first language; this confusion can last for a long time. However, the
motivated ESL instructor and learner could use this text to tease apart the
similarities and differences in word usage as well as pinpoint specific
difficulties.

With respect to the content, probably the most difficult chapter of the book
is Modal auxiliaries, given that people often have trouble discriminating the
uses of modals. Beyond the grammatical explanations, by pointing out pragmatic
differences, such as ‘could’ and ‘might’ potentially being more tentative than
their counterparts ‘can’ and ‘may,’ Berry exposes the reader to word functions
that are often hard for speakers to articulate. 

Two of the most positive aspects of this book are the acknowledgement of
dialectal differences and a firm stance against prescriptivism. As an example
of the former, Berry points out the differences in grammatical usage, e.g. the
use of ‘yet’ and ‘already’ with the present perfect In British English and the
past in American English. Nevertheless, if used in an American classroom, some
of these differences would have to be explicitly stated (as dialectal
differences) to the students, since occasionally, some phrasing sounds quite
unnatural to at least some American English speakers, e.g. ‘the committee are’
and ‘government are’, where the verb agreement implies a plural nature to the
singular nouns.  As to battling prescriptivism, there are numerous examples of
uses the author accepts as legitimate (that are often criticized) peppered
throughout the text: ‘they’ as a singular neuter pronoun, ‘hopefully’ as a
sentence adverbial, ‘less’ used with countable nouns, ‘like’ as a quotative,
etc… 

One aspect I found missing is the occasional lack of alternate nomenclature,
such as ‘subject pronoun’ for ‘subjective pronoun’ and ‘object pronoun’ for
‘objective pronoun’--designations which are more well-known to those with at
least basic grammatical knowledge.  Another example is the use of the terms
‘intrinsic modality’, encompassing permission, obligation, intention, and
promise, and ‘extrinsic modality’ encompassing possibility. Though the author
mentions that there are other terms, it would be helpful for the readers to
know the more commonly used terms ‘deontic modality’ and ‘epistemic modality’
if they wanted explore the topic further.

Since language is complex, and individual differences exist, there were a few
times where after looking at the solution guide I was not convinced of some of
the classifications. For instance, in Activity 3.11, the reader is asked where
‘a’ can be inserted before ‘few’ to create a positive impression, and the
following sentence is on that list: “Very few people at all would ever … say
that…” (p. 40). Unless the author meant that ‘very’ could be replaced by ‘a’,
“Very a few people…” at best sounds unnatural, and in either case the reader
is left slightly confused. In another instance, Activity 12.1 C asks the
reader to identify concordance lines in which ‘that’ can be omitted. I
happened to include one instance in my list that was not in the author’s, but
I was at a loss as to why ‘that’ would be necessary in this sentence.

Essentially, the examples above of discrepancies point to the need of an
instructor to help the reader through the text and to foster discussion. This
would create an environment allowing the student to imagine more examples and
to examine other words beyond the book. Overall, this book is successful in
teaching grammar contextually through word classes and would be helpful to any
language learner exploring word meanings and syntax.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Boris Yelin is currently a doctoral student in Applied Spanish Lingustics at
Purdue University. His main interests are SLA and Pedagogy with a focus on L3
acquisition. Past research has included looking at the intersection of
language variation and semantics with respect to mood. His current career
trajectory is teaching language for the government.

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