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

23
and abstraction that would be caused." p.8.
The introductory part of his grammar presents his own
concepts of grammar by way of justifying his approach. On pages
5 - 9 he shows all the involvement of the surface structure with
the deep one in which the changes in meaning is conveyed by a
semantic insertion of the roles played by the elements of a
sentence: I (Interested Party) M (Mover) P (Pivot) and E (Entity);
on page 6 the same deep structure is realized by means of four
different sequences of the elements of a sentence. This
complicated type of analysis points out the similarity of passive
voice with another structure of 'copula plus complement', besides
the influence of passive over other choices, mainly the one
involving 'transitivity'; more complicated rules are needed for
examples like:
(6) MY BROTHER LENT BILL A BOOK
(7) THE OLD MAN WAS HAPPY
He says that the subject of the passive cannot be the M
as in (8) THE WORM WAS EATEN BY THE THRUSH
(Entity) (Pivot) (Mover)
Examples (9) and (10) do net describe the same event:
(Mover)
(9) JOHN SOLD THE CAR
M P E
(10) JOHN WAS SOLD THE CAR
I P E
"Their relation is like that between past and present, singular
and plural, because the grammatical change alters the meaning
in a predictable way." p.11. Other examples, such as
(11) THE TOMATOES GREW WELL
(12) THE TOMATOES WERE GROWN WELL
are the ones selected by Sinclair to illustrate the organisation
of his book; he claims that (11) and (12) have no object and
focus attention on the same item (TOMATOES). He says that "the
effect of paring (11) and (12) is that the deep structural
relations are mentioned but not used in the construction of the
grammar. Instead, clauses with similar structure are contrasted
i n mean i ng." p.11 .
These considerations were made to show the
main