35.Ways of forming guestions in the English language

A question tag or tag question is a grammatical structure in which a declarative statement or an imperative is turned into a question by adding an interrogative fragment (the "tag"). For example, in the sentence "You're John, aren't you?", the statement "You're John" is turned into a question by the tag "aren't you". The term "question tag" is generally preferred by British grammarians, while their American counterparts prefer "tag question".

Uses.In most languages, tag questions are more common in colloquial spoken usage than in formal written usage. They can be an indicator of politeness, emphasis or irony. They may suggest confidence or lack of confidence; they may be confrontational, defensive or tentative. Although they have the grammatical form of a question, they may differ from questions in that they do not expect an answer. In other cases, when they do expect a response, they may differ from straightforward questions in that they cue the listener as to what response is desired. In legal settings, tag questions can often be found in a leading question. According to a specialist children's lawyer at the NSPCC, children find it difficult to answer tag questions other than in accordance with the expectation of questioner.^[1]

36.Elementary structures in English and their peculiarities

The Elementary English Language Arts (ELA) program focuses on the broad categories of self-expressive, narrative, literary, popular and information-based text types. The distinction between literary and narrative is made to accommodate students’ own writing and media production, both of which fall into the latter category.The following charts indicate the knowledge about required self-expressive, narrative-literary and information-based text types that students are expected to develop by the last year of elementary school. This knowledge includes required texts in each broad category, such as illustrated picture books in the narrative-literary category, as well as an understanding of the structures and features found in specific text types. Students use this knowledge to construct meaning while listening to, reading, writing, viewing and/or producing texts. The expectation here is that students learn about different texts by examining their specific structures and features, rather than being asked to identify or define terms in an isolated fashion.

37. Otto Jespersen grammatical studies of Phrase structure

Otto Jespersen, in full Jens Otto Harry Jespersen (born July 16, 1860, Randers, Den.—died April 30, 1943, Roskilde), Danish linguist and a foremost authority on English grammar. Jespersen gave particular consideration to the relationship between sound and sense in language. Another major concern, linguistic progress, was influenced by Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories and early reflected in Progress in Language, with Special Reference to English (1894). His principal work on linguistic evolution, and also probably his most brilliant achievement, was Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (1922). His belief in the efficiency of linguistic change was evidenced in The Philosophy of Grammar (1924). Long interested in international auxiliary languages, he helped to elaborate Ido, but his main achievement in this area was devising Novial, which he presented in International Language (1928). A Novial lexicon followed in 1930. phrase-structure grammar (PSG) A grammar that contains rules which are capable of both generating strings of linguistic elements and providing a constituent analysis of the strings. In their original form, phrase-structure grammars took the form of a set of rewrite rules, for example S → NP + VP (which reads rewrite S as NP (noun phrase) + VP (verb phrase)). Various distinctions have been made between different classes of phrase-structure grammar, primarily between context-sensitive and context-free grammars.