HANOI UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

UNIVERSITY OF ST MARK AND ST JOHN

BA Honours International Professional English (IPE)

ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET

YEAR OF STUDY: 2020 MODULE: IPRD03-HUST 20/21A

By
20202020/21
submitting this assignment for evaluation,
I acknowledge that the assignment is my own work, and where the work of others has been
used, it has been appropriately cited and referenced.

NAME: Nguyen Thi Trang STUDENT No:20096340-20183233

NAME OF MODULE: LANGUAGE AWARENESS

ASSIGNMENT: COURSEWORK
DUE DATE: 16 December 2020 DATE RECEIVED: (For teachers only)

MARKS Examiner 1: Examiner 2: Final:

SIGNATURE Examiner 1: Examiner 2:
 I. INTRODUCTION

Linguistics is a science that study about the most important issue in communication, language.

One of the aspects of linguistics is syntax, which is stated to research about the organiation and

construction of words, phrases, clauses and sentences (Putra, 2013). In this paper, I am going to

analysis grammatical features in a specific text of a short story “The Paper Menagerie” written

by Ken Liu.

II. BODY

1. Clauses

First of all, I am about to take a deep look at clausal feature in this text. Clause is a group of

words, considered as a basic unit of grammar which contains a subject and a finite form of a

verb.

(1)
a. This is called origami.
b. None of these facts turned out to be true.

(1) is given as an example of clause. I would like to discuss about the major properties of

clauses. Each clause consists of one verb marked for tense, person and number, which is called

finite verb. Tense has to do with whether the author adds a past event by using past-tense verb,

for instance “turned” in “turned out” or put a present-tense verb to describe an action in present

like “is” in (1a). Person has to do with whether is assigned to the speaker (the first person), the

listener (the second person), or someone else as in (1a) example. Number has to do with whether

writter or speaker refers to singular (one person) or plural (more than one).

1
It is classified into two primary types of clauses: main clause and subordinate clause. Both of

two above examples are main clauses. Some sentences in this text consists only a single clause,

but it is also common when clauses are put together into sentences, in this case, main clauses and

subordinate clauses with the different kinds are essential. Subordinate clauses mainly include

complement clause, relative clause and adverbial clauses.

Firstly, complement clauses, were traditionally called ‘noun clauses’ due to their position in the

main clause that can be occupied by ordinary noun phrases.

A below example:

(2)
The catalogue said she was eighteen

As in (2), complement clause “she was eighteen” occurs to the right of the verb which modifies

the verb “said” requiredly in syntax. In this clause, “she was eighteen” is considered as an object

supplementing structure as well as meaning for the main verb.

The second one is adverbial clauses which are deemed as the most complicated type of

adverbials in comparison to adverbs and adverb phrases (Lin, 2015). They modify not only verbs

but also whole clauses. Moreover, they also play an additional role beyond the sentence level,

making contribution to cohesion “by linking sentences, paragraphs, or even the whole discourse”

(Lin, 2015. In older descriptions, they are categoried corresponding to the meaning such as

result, time, and reason, … with following inllustration.

(3)
a. She breathed into her paper animals so that they shared her breath. (result)
b. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her
cupped hands. (time)

2
c. The catalogue said she was eighteen, loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was
from Hong Kong. (reason)

Besides the examples in the text, there are also other types like adverbial clauses of manner,

concession or condition.

Despites not appearing in this text, relative clauses are still one of three main adverbial clauses.

They are traditionally described as adjective clauses. Because both relative clauses and adjective

clauses modify nouns. It is easily confusing between relative clauses with complement clauses.

However, we probaly distinguish them by removal of WH complementiser: relative clauses will

be incomplete without WH words or that, which is further different from complement ones.

2. Noun phrases

The next grammatical feature that appears in this text is noun phrase. Frank (1972) says that

noun phrase is the structure of the head and its modifiers. It does function as a noun which is

desciption of person, place or thing. Noun phrase can be found in any literary reading from story

book, textbook, novel, newspaper, magazine, article, … (Diana, 2012). This text is not an

exception.

(4)
a. The paper tiger
b. a tight green silk cheongsam
c. a sheet of wrapping paper
d. her long black hair
e. white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees
f. the introduction service back in the spring of 1973.

(5) The rigid order of modifiers in English:

3
Noun Phrase (NP) = (Quant) (Det) (AP*) (N*) N (Pl) {Rel/PP/N-Comp}

In rule (5), modifiers which go before the head noun are quantifiers (Quant), determiners (Det),

adjectival phrases (AP), and modifying nouns (N) respectively. And the head noun is followed

by modifiers such as the plural morpheme (Pl), relative clauses (Rel), prepositional phrases (PP)

or noun complements (N-Comp).

The components in the parentheses are optional choices in the fixed arrangement, while we can

choose only one items in the curly brackets. And the asterisk indicates elective recursion.

It is uncommon to see full of the modifiers and the rule (5). Therefore, noun phrases are created

with a lot of different forms, some of which will be analysed below:

(a) is almost simple structure of a noun phrase with the head is tiger, the functions as a

determiner and paper is a modifying noun.

(b) is a noun clause with the following elements: cheongsam as the head, a as determiner,

tight and green as adjectival phrase, silk as modifying phrase.

(c) is quite different from the above instance because in this clause a sheet of works as a

quantifier, wrapping is modifying noun which modifies the head paper.

(e) and (f) are examples for noun clauses with post-modifiers. (e) is followed by a

prepositional phrase meanwhile (f) goes along with a reduced relative clause.

3. Verb phrases

Last but not least, verb phrases are also the main feature in grammar. Crystal (cited by Asido in

2017) states that verb phrase with syntactic function of simple verb is combined of a main verb

or verbal participles that refer to the verbs. While verb is the most complicated parts of speech

4
because its changeable order with nouns verify “the different kinds of sentences-statements,

questions, commands, exclamations” (Frank, 1942). As a certain result, verb phrases play an

essential part in clauses or sentences. This phrase is made up of a verb and its modifiers

consisting of auxiliaries, object, complementary objects, etc…, which acts as the predicate.

A verb phrase has two main parts: main verbs and auxiliary verbs. Main verbs or called head or

lexical verbs carry refer to reference about an action, event or process. It can be divided into

three primary categories: copula, transitive and intransitive verbs.

Firstly, copula is a type whose verbs are: be, get, seem, turn, go, get... This type needs a

complement to go after. For example, in the clause “but Mom’s breath was special”, the main

verb is “be” in the past-tense form “was”.

Then, transitive verb is one which goes along with an object (a complement and a subject). The

subject could be the object patient and agent, or the object theme and experiencer. It is also

devided into mono transitive with only one direct object and ditransitive with two objects

following.

(6)
a. the company passed their messages back and forth.
b. I asked Dad about the details.
c. He was trying to get me to speak to Mom again.

(6a) is given to illustrate mono transitive verb besides (6b) or (6c) are for ditransitive one.

Intransitive verbs are kind of verbs with one argument which is either an agent or an experiencer.

“and thus moved with her life” is a typical example for this type.

5
About auxiliary verbs, it is claimed that auxiliary verbs or auxiliaries associating with the verb

phrase to recognize the grammatical categories like tense, aspect and mood. It is classifed into

primary auxiliaries (be, have, do) and modal auxiliaries (can, may, will, must, etc) The below

clauses possibly exemplify for primary and modal auxiliaries, in order:

(7)
a. “The people at the company had been writing her responses.”: had and been are primary
auxiliaries
b. “She would look at me”: would is modal auxiliaries

In addition, I desire to focus on phrasal verbs which appear several times in this text. It is a set of

verbs that display several unique particularities, go with a preposition, normally refered to as a

particle. It is an obvious fact that their meaning is regularly idomatic in whose meaning it is not

frankly computed from the the verb and the preposition combined.

The following is a series of examples:

a. Dad gave up
b. She set the paper down
c. She put her hands down
d. He had signed up for the introduction service
In these phrases, prepositions may go after verbs or can be moved seperately.

III. CONCLUSION

To conclusion, this text contains many elements in grammaticism including clauses, noun

phrases and verb phrases. These analysed syntactic features are all essential in the study of

language. We can usefully put theory into practise from a sentence to an essay or even a

discourse in order to instruct information or meaning.

6
 References:

Department of Applied Linguistics and British-American studies. (2014). Language Awareness. Hanoi:
School of Foreign Language of HUST.

Frank, M. (1972). Modern English. USA: Prentince Hall.

Lin, J. (2015). Adverbial Clauses.
Putra, Seno H. (2013). Syntax and Semantics. Pekanbaru: UNRI Press.
Sari, D. K. (2012). A Syntactic analysis of noun phrase in text of Developing English
Competiencies book for X grade or senior high school.
Tuahta, A. (2017). An Analysis of Verb Phrases in English and Karonese. The Episteme Journal
of English Literature and Linguistics.

7
 APPENDIX
The Paper Menagerie
One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be soothed no matter what
Mom and Dad tried. Dad gave up and left the bedroom, but Mom took me into the kitchen and
sat me down at the breakfast table.
“Kan, kan.” Look, look, she said, as she pulled a sheet of wrapping paper from on top of the
fridge. For years, Mom carefully sliced open the wrappings around Christmas gifts and saved
them on top of the fridge in a thick stack. She set the paper down, plain side facing up, and began
to fold it. I stopped crying and watched her, curious. She turned the paper over and folded it
again. She pleated, packed, tucked, rolled, and twisted until the paper disappeared between her
cupped hands. Then she lifted the folded-up paper packet to her mouth and blew into it, like a
balloon.
“Kan,” she said. “Laohu.” Look, a tiger. She put her hands down on the table and let go. A little
paper tiger stood on the table, the size of two fists placed together. The skin of the tiger was the
pattern on the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas
trees. I reached out to Mom’s creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger.
“Rawrr-sa,” it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers. I laughed,
startled, and stroked its back with my index finger. The paper tiger vibrated under my finger,
purring.
“Zhe jiao zhezhi,” Mom said. This is called origami. I didn’t know this at the time, but Mom’s
breath was
special. She breathed into her paper animals so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with
her life. This was her magic.
Dad had picked Mom out of a catalogue.
One time, when I was in high school, I asked Dad about the details. He was trying to get me to
speak to Mom again. He had signed up for the introduction service back in the spring of 1973.
Flipping through the pages steadily, he had spent no more than a few seconds on each page until
he saw the picture of Mom.

8
I’ve never seen this picture. Dad described it: Mom was sitting in a chair, her side to the camera,
wearing a tight green silk cheongsam. Her head was turned to the camera so that her long black
hair was draped artfully over her chest and shoulder. She looked out at him with the eyes of a
calm child.
“That was the last page of the catalogue I saw,” he said. The catalogue said she was eighteen,
loved to dance, and spoke good English because she was from Hong Kong.
None of these facts turned out to be true. He wrote to her, and the company passed their
messages back and forth. Finally, he flew to Hong Kong to meet her.
“The people at the company had been writing her responses. She didn’t know any English other
than ‘hello’ and ‘good-bye’.”
What kind of woman puts herself into a catalogue so that she can be bought? The high school me
thought I knew so much about everything. Contempt felt good, like wine.
Instead of storming into the office to demand his money back, he paid a waitress at the hotel
restaurant to translate for them.
“She would look at me, her eyes halfway between scared and hopeful, while I spoke. And when
the girl began translating what I said, she’d start to smile slowly.” He flew back to Connecticut
and began to apply for the papers for her to come to him. I was born a year later, in the Year of
the Tiger….