On Case Theory And English Verb Pattern Teaching

Instructed with the theory of linguistics, English teachers teach the theories of phonetics and syntax systematically in class to help students understand language rules in less time. However, few teachers teach the deep semantic structure of the sentence and the semantic elements of the predicate (the verb) which determines the deep semantic structure. The syntactic structure of the sentence comes from the semantic structure of the sentence determined by the verb's valence or propensity. To write out correct sentences, we should understand the sentence's semantic structure and the verb's semantic elements and valence. Case theory is the very theory which studies English verbs' semantic elements. The thesis applies parts of case theory to explaining and analyzing some grammatical phenomena existing in English verb patterns of which traditional grammar cannot offer us a satisfactory explanation. We attempt to develop and improve the students' language sense by means of introducing some knowledge of case theory to verb learning and imparting relevant semantic knowledge on to the students.This thesis discusses the topic from three respects:First, the sentence is the basic unit of language communication. To learn a language is to learn to make sentences. The sentences are infinite and changing, no matter whether they are simple or complicated, they are the transformation and expansion of the basic sentence patterns. A contrast between English basic sentence patterns and Chinese basic sentence patterns shows that the verb is the central element of the sentence and the verb is essential in the sentence. The so-called basic sentence patterns are the verb patterns we adopt in the thesis.Secondly, grammarians put forward different systems of verb patterns. Their way of classifications falls into two approaches, one is comprehensive and the other is simplified. Both the two approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages. Case analysis of case theory, which studies the relation between semantics and the sentence's structure, indicates that the seven verb patterns reflects the feature of the verb and the relations between...