It is amazing how long you
may have been teaching and yet not fully identified the difficulties your
students may come up against. There was a time when linguists invested far more
time in comparing English to other languages and looking into systematic
differences that inhibited understanding.
It is my feeling that
there are quite a few aspects of the English language posing problems for
speakers not just of one first language but of several which remain largely
unexplored. At least I gather this much from discussions with other teachers,
many of whom overlook these areas of difficulty in their teaching, and the same
goes for the majority of course books whether they are meant for an
international market or for speakers of a specific language.
I will focus on one such aspect in this post without
any pretensions to thoroughness; this would entail large-scale research with
the participation of keen teachers and collection of corpora. However, I will
attempt a certain methodology for this suggested research.
My topic is noun adjuncts,
which means nouns qualifying nouns. Some simple examples would be:
orange juice, coffee pot, wine glass, health
authorities, drug addiction, guard rail
and many others. The above-mentioned examples
are simple in the sense that there is only one noun qualifying another.
However, there could be more:
landmark compensation case, snail shell spiral
or the attributive noun
could be qualified by an adjective:
social media star, post-traumatic stress disorder
Being a native speaker of
Greek, I will put forward my theory of rendition of phrases made up of two
nouns to begin with. To my mind there are three different ways in which these
phrases can be rendered in Greek:
·
second
noun – first noun in genitive case (Most may in fact fall under this category.)
orange juice, wine
glass
·
first
noun translated as adjective – second as noun
health authorities,
giant meteorite
·
second
noun preposition (mostly “for”) second noun
drug addiction, air supremacy, kitchen towel, safety
net
