towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

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'moderately', 'really', 'quite', 'awfully', etc. are said to
convey a "tempering meaning". 25 Operating at e a class of
adjectives whose distinctive word-structure usually lies in the
addition of suffixes such as:
-al, -en, -ic, etc. is also
introduced together with the adjectives which refer to colour,
n - nouns can modify nouns. Sinclair claims
that
"Much atechnical jargon is of this kind, and
it is difficult to understand because the
precise meaning relationship between each noun
- and the next is not clear from the syntax; also
each pair of nouns can make up a special
compound which then operates as a single word,
and eventually gets written with a hyphen
between the two words, or a single compound
word." 25
He still says
that there is no limit to the power of
compounding nouns in modern English. As an example, he presents
the nominal group 'The vent control! knob key lubricant can'
"Stress and intonation patterns can usually be
relied upon to supply the correct meaning in
.such compounds as the tendency is for the
headword to receive nuclear stress: e. g. 'an
^English teacher' and 'an English teacher ' .
Unfortunately this information does not apper
in the written form." 2 ? 7
The use or the omission of a hyphen in the nominal
groups whose elements
in the delicacy scale at (m) appear in a
great number - namely the exponents of n - seems to mean very
little to our students; moreover, the texts used for our students
show that there is little consistency among writers in this
respect.
Considering noun modification, we can say that there