Topic: Grammar and meaning

Adverbials typically modify verbs or clauses, but they can also be useful as linking devices to connect clauses to the content of the preceding text. Here are some examples of Adverbials that have this function. Remember that Adverbials can appear in different shapes: as adverbs (or adverb phrases), as prepositional phrases, as (shortened) clauses, or as set phrases.

Listing

In some genres of writing – science reports, for example – the passive voice is encouraged. However, many advocates of ‘plain English’ argue that the passive voice can be confusing to readers, and obscures meaning.

The examples below are from articles on the natural sciences, taken from the ICE-GB corpus. They illustrate the use of the passive voice (verb phrases in the passive are highlighted):

Goals

• Review a list of useful vocabulary and phrases for establishing continuity, cohesion, and structure in discourse.
• Apply knowledge of discourse structure to arranging sentences into an appropriate, meaningful order as an article.
• Analyse existing texts to identify elements that support the discourse structure of the texts.

Lesson Plan

Activity 1

Cohesion refers to the grammatical relationships that exist within a text between words, phrases, etc. When we talk only of the semantic links, i.e. the meaning links, we speak of coherence.

Here we focus on cohesion. However, before we do so, consider the following passage:

The sun is shining. Who is your neighbour? I left the washing in the machine. Without doubt she will succeed.

Grammar is important for expressing information about time. It helps us to locate situations in the past, present or future, and to describe how situations unfold over time.

This is typically done by using different forms of the verb. For example:

When we talk about grammar, we mostly discuss language from the point of view of its internal characteristics.

We can say that steered in the following example has a grammatical form, namely verb. More specificallty, we say that it is a verb in the past tense.

Exercise

You will be given some sentences where two or three noun phrases are marked off with square brackets. For each sentence:

• Identify the semantic roles of the noun phrases (agent, patient or recipient).
• Write a different sentence to describe the same situation, where the same roles are expressed in different ways.

Example:

• [The people we were staying with] cooked [us] [a traditional Normandy dinner]. _{[S1A-009 #125, adapted]}

Roles: