Running Head: FINAL PROJECT 1

FINAL PROJECT 9

Jeremiah Pons

Final Project

December 7, 2014

English-Linguistics-1200

Abstract

In this interview I began by doing an interview and recording Nicholas Gibas. I then asked him some simple question and then went on into a reading and him telling me stories. From there I went on to analyze the five utterances and what syntax is, giving a full description. I wanted to make sure that my hypothesis was true or not and it happened to be so. It just so happened that mu hypothesis was also a grammatical utterance. I included in this syntactic analysis research paper how it relates to life, professionally and personally.

It is my hope that this analysis study will show and teach students and more importantly all individuals how to structure a sentence.

Syntactic Analysis:

Structure of a sentence or phrase

For my final project in this linguistics class I decided to do a syntactic analysis where I will describe the rules of natural speech. For this project I knew that I needed to interview somebody and I didn’t necessarily want to interview someone that I really knew that well because then o felt like I couldn’t really analyze him or her to the best extent. So I decide to interview somebody in my dance company and I chose someone who I previously hadn’t talked to very much and he seem to be a cool guy. My hypothesis for this project was that he would say at least one utterance that had a slang term in it, while still having the sentence make complete sense. There are many people nowadays that like to make up words and have them mean things you thought already had words. Such as a phrase he spoke in this interview was “hot mess” this means that the somebody in question is clearly in disarray, looking a complete mess but is yet somehow still maintaining their level of attractiveness. In the textbook it discusses how the order of the words are important otherwise it just doesn’t make sense and for the most part adult english speakers know exactly how to form these sentences or utterances.

I started by asking him if it was okay to interview him and then the interview consisted of me asking a few simple questions his name; Nicholas Gibas, his age; 19, his sex; male obviously and where he grew up and where he had lived; this was mostly Utah but also Arizona for a few years of his puberty years. Which has a great deal to do with syntax, through a possible difference in how the utterance is arranged. I then went on and had him read to excerpts from two different children’s books; one from The Giving Tree, a story about giving and selfishness and the other from a Dr. Seuss story The Sneetches, a story about being yourself and coming to love that aspect about yourself.

Which then went into him telling stories about him becoming who he is as a person and loving it and his giving back through emotions and dance. I decided to interview and record him because I felt like I wanted to know more about him plus we have a class together and that made for easy meeting times if needed. This recording had mostly natural language as well as languages that are more forced because he was reading and nervous. I as the researcher had tried to design this to make it easy for him to tell me stories about his life and make that more natural by getting his nerves out of the way and by having him think about what the stories were really meaning so that I could get him to open up to me about his giving back and becoming himself.

In the interview is noticed five utterances that Nicholas had said and they were, I’m interested in dance; she had always danced; I look like a big ol’ hot mess; I made the dance company; and lastly I was always crying. Only one of the utterances had anything to do with my hypothesis of assuming that there was going to be t least one utterance with a slang phrase or word. That sentence was the only one where my data stuck to my hypothesis and that utterance is also a grammatical feature do to the fact that only those who speak English in America would understand what this means. Syntax is the arrangement of words as elements in a sentence to show their relationships (Ribera ,2011).

The relevance of this project and all of the utterances to a professional would be to understand how to structure a sentence and have it make sense versus have it a complete jumbled mess. Also as a professional you will want to be aware of how to form proper sentences so that you can actually communicate in a professional manner instead of a casual one. To me personally the relevance is about how to understand those that aren’t aware of sentence structure, where I will be able to change their structure to one that makes sense to me through a syntactic analysis. However because I had known the person that I interviewed for awhile I already knew what to expect from his sentence structure and how to have it make sense to me. That is a form of researchers bias, because it wasn’t a blind test, I already knew at some level what to expect from him.

In my future interactions with language I might actually be forced to try and understand how someone is trying to talk and I will actually need to analyze the sentence structure. Nevertheless because I plan to go into teaching as my profession I am sure I will come into contact with many students who don’t know how to structure their phrases and it will come out in a jumble of words that don’t make sense and it will be my goal to help them into understanding how they should form their phrases to make sense. To form a proper sentence you will build a tree structure that starts at the top of a noun phrase that attaches under a verb bar, the top of the verb bar then attaches under a inflectional bar and the words in front of the inflectional phrase will typically be the top of a noun phrase that attaches under the inflectional phrase.

To conclude because of syntax I now understand what order words need to be in to absolutely make the most sense. Otherwise I will get blank stares as someone tries to analyze my utterances. I now know what the proper formations of sentences need to be to have them understandable to the common peoples ear.

Reference

O’Grady, W., Archibald, J., Aronoff, M., Rees-Miller, J., (2010) Contemporary linguistics, 6th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s

Ribera, Binsent (2011) Syntax analysis. Slide share. http://www.slideshare.net/riveravs/syntax-analysis-8754671