Mastering Morphosyntax: Enhancing Language Skills

Understanding Morphosyntax: Strategies for Effective Learning

Morphology and syntax are the heart of the lexicon. If pronunciation and spelling provide the visual and sound images of communication, then morphosyntax offers the structural rules of the game, telling us how to use language effectively. Therefore, what is often meant by 'grammar' is, in essence, morphosyntax.

Mastering morphosyntax means being much more aware of the forms of words and how they combine, and using this knowledge to understand and express oneself better. It does little good to memorize verb conjugations or diagram a sentence if, afterward, we cannot exploit these mechanisms to speak and write with greater accuracy and clarity. A single idea can be expressed in infinite expressive ways. The immense wealth of language offers extremely varied mechanisms to shape every detail of what we intend to convey.

A competent language user, one who masters morphosyntactic resources, will know how to choose the most suitable expressions for their interests. In contrast, many of our students, who may have received more or less grammatical instruction, show a more limited command of morphosyntactic resources. They are often unable to produce sentences expressed in different ways with unique meaning, especially spontaneously. Furthermore, the written prose and oral discourse of our students often exhibit a varied set of features that demonstrate the deficiencies they suffer from.

Common Morphosyntactic Deficiencies

Some symptoms of this deficiency are reflected in the following list:

1. Anacoluthon: An incomplete or inconsistent sentence for various reasons, such as the lack of an essential element in the sentence structure, or a lack of subject-verb agreement, or agreement between verb and object.
2. Unfinished Phrases: Starting a sentence but leaving it unfinished to begin another (a false start).
3. Simple or Impoverished Phrases: Inability to construct complex sentences. The author consistently uses short, simple sentences in the indicative mood.
4. Semantic Repetition of Connectors: Little variation in the use of conjunctions and connectors.
5. Colloquial or Vulgar Expressions.
6. Overly Complicated Sentences: Sentences that are too complex with excessive subordinate and parenthetical clauses, leading to problems with cohesion, punctuation, etc.
7. Improper Punctuation: Various punctuation problems in the text related to syntactic issues, such as commas between subject and verb or between verb and complements, a general lack of punctuation, paragraphs without commas, dashes, or parentheses, and commas used instead of periods.

These features are common in spontaneous spoken language and, for that matter, are often tolerable. Morphosyntactic constraints are alleviated by the constant negotiation of meaning, interaction, and the nonverbal codes inherent in multi-party conversations. However, in decontextualized, monologic texts, language – specifically morphosyntax – is the only possible tool to convey meaning clearly and precisely. Therefore, students with grammatical constraints often have problems with this latter type of text, although they can converse fairly fluently.