Readings for Week 12

As it seems, I was a little confused on the material presented in Chapter 8 of Finegan. This is becoming a recurring blog habit of mine but I would just like to establish the things I was confused about:

Fronting, a little clarification on what the purpose is.

The whole concept of definite vs. given.

I found some interesting aspects about the English language that I did not know had a specific purpose and that is the new-information stress. As a native speaker I have always used that type of stress, but now I realize the importance of teaching it especially in and adult E.L.L. classroom. I think students could both learn the stress and pick it up implicitly.

I liked reading about other languages and how they mark different pragmatics and other aspects of language. One example that I found to be completely fascinating was with Russian and all the ways with which 'The cat is chasing the dog' I think there were 6 examples presented. That is so interesting! The word order of the language marks it's givenness.

The whole concept of the It Clefts and the WH Clefts is again, structures that I have used many times in English, but I was never aware of the purpose they serve.

It seems that all the information is important to identify the pragmatics of a discourse and I think there are some really great advantages for readers to identify the discourse right away. One example, is students could use more context clues to their advantage when guessing the meaning of different vocabulary terms. Overall, the ability to identify the pragmatics of a text is one more tool in the "literacy tool box " of students.