Metaphor and the Teaching of Grammar

Abstract

Traditional linguistic analysis divides languages into three components, ‘the grammatical/syntactic’, ‘the semantic’ and the ‘phonological’. A very simple example of how this distinction operates can be observed in the sentence ‘John opened the book’. A syntactic pattern, which can be broadly characterised as SVO (subject, verb, object) sets up slots which are filled by words of different kinds, a specified male person ‘John’, an action ‘opened’ and the goal of his attentions ‘the book’, for example. The pattern combines the meaningful items and is then articulated as sound, entailing a phonological and finally a phonetic component.