1.1 What’s a longsentence? P1-10

P1 Hi everyone! Welcome to the course ofIntermediate English Reading. Today we are going to learn Module 1, CourseOverview.

P2 This module, including the following modules,will be expounded at two parts, one is language acquisition(语言习得),the other is reading strategies(阅读策略) . The first part inModule 1 includes such three sections as the definition of a long sentence, thestrategies to identify the trunk in a long sentence, the definition oflinearity as well as its application to translating a long sentence in order toenhance reading speed and accuracy.

Thesecond part in this module includes such two sections as the introduction tothe four general IELTS reading questions as well as their corresponding readingstrategies.

P3 Now let’s embark on Part 1, languageacquisition.

P4 Section1.1 What’s a long sentence? Do you know the word of “troika”? Yes, this is troika. “三驾马车”in Chinese. Is there atroika in IELTS reading? The answer is definite. You will encounter a largenumber of long sentences, split structure (in particular a parenthesis) and thepassive voice in IELTS reading, which make IELTS reading highly challenging toChinese readers in terms of achieving reading speed and accuracy. Since manyreading tests, including CET, TEM, postgraduate examination, TOFEL and so on,incorporate enormous long sentences, it seems to be a must to deal with longsentences efficiently and effectively.

P5 Before we really get down to business, we’llhave to define a long sentence first.

A long sentence has very complicated grammaticalstructure, includes many modifying components,complex sentences withmore than two content hierarchies as well as simple sentences with many meanings.

P6Let’s take a look at this example：

Temporal hours（日光时）,  which were first adopted by the Greeksand then the Romans,  whodisseminated them through Europe, remained in use for more than 2500 years.

It’s a fairly long sentence. Many Chinesereaders find it difficult to capture the main idea of the sentence, especiallyhard to discern such specific information as whofirst used temporal hours and who spread temporal hours through Europe?The Greeks? The Romans? Or both?

P7 As a matter of fact, we can handle this problemby chopping this long sentence into three “sense groups”(here marked by twoslashes)--- the first sense group is the trunk of the long sentence ,the secondand third are two attributive clauses.

The trunk of thissentence is “SVP”-structured(“主系表”结构) :“Temporal hours remainedin use for more than 2500 years”(Here the mainsentence elements are marked in the color of red, blue and purple respectively.And this mark system will remain in use in the following modules too). In thisway, we can acquire the main idea of the long sentence.

Similarly, we can identify the two modifiers that providespecific information for the sentence. The first modifier is a non-restrictiveattributive clause introduced by “which” to modify the antecedent of “temporalhours”. Hence, we can clarify the logical connection between the antecedent andits behavior, i.e. the Greeks were the first to use temporal hours.

The second modifier is a non-restrictiveattributive clause introduced by “who” to modify the antecedent of “theRomans”. Therefore, the Romans instead of the Greeks spread temporalhours through Europe.

P8 After identifying the trunk and two modifiers,we can translate them into Chinese in order to improve our understanding. Themeaning of the trunk is“日光时一直使用了2500多年”。The meanings of two modifiers are“日光时最初由希腊人采用”and“罗马人把日光时传遍欧洲”。

P9 In this sense, it is highly important tounderstand the formula of an English sentence in order toimprove reading efficiency. Simply speaking, a simple sentence is composed of atrunk and a number of modifying components.A compound sentence is made up of two simple sentences joined by twocoordinating conjunctions, or above; a complex sentence is made up of onemain/principal clause and one or more dependent/subordinate clauses joined bysubordinating conjunctions; a compound and complex sentence is frequentlycombined by compound and complex sentences. While identifying the trunk, we might simplify those five sentencepatterns into only two: SVO（主谓宾）谁干什么？SVP（主系表）谁是什么？谁怎么样？  

SinceChinese is mainly a language of parataxis（意合）, and English a language of hypotaxis（形合）, there is a great variety of differentiations between English andChinese in terms of syntactic devices （句法手段） andlexical equivalence （词汇手段） and the like. Therefore, itis highly challenging for Chinese readers to handle such modifiers as attributes(attributive clauses in particular) and adverbials (adverbial clauses inparticular) and so on. Hence, Identifying the sentence trunk and its modifyingcomponents as well as translating them into Chinese is of great help to improvereading efficiency.

P10. So much for this section. Thank you. See youthen.