1.1 What’s a long sentence? 什么是长句 P1-10

P1 Hi everyone! Welcome to the course of Intermediate 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 in Module 1 includes such three sections as the definition of a long sentence, the strategies to identify the trunk in a long sentence, the definition of linearity（顺译）as well as its application to translating a long sentence in order to enhance reading speed and accuracy.

The second part in this module includes such two sections as the introduction to the four general IELTS reading questions as well as their corresponding reading strategies.

P3 Now let’s embark on Part 1, language acquisition.

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 a troika in IELTS reading? The answer is definite. You will encounter a large number of long sentences, split structure（分割结构） (in particular a parenthesis 插入语) and the passive voice（被动语态） in IELTS reading, which make IELTS reading highly challenging to Chinese readers in terms of achieving reading speed and accuracy. Since many reading tests, including CET, TEM, postgraduate examination, TOFEL and so on,incorporate enormous long sentences, it seems to be a must to deal with long sentences efficiently and effectively.

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

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

P6 Let’s take a look at this example：

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

It’s a fairly long sentence. Many Chinese readers find it difficult to capture the main idea of the sentence, especially hard to discern such specific information as who first 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 problem by chopping this long sentence into three “sense groups”（意群）(here marked by two slashes 斜杠)--- the first sense group is the trunk of the long sentence ,the second and third are two attributive clauses.

The trunk of this sentence is “SVP”- structured （“主系表”结构）:“Temporal hours remained in use for more than 2500 years”(Here the main sentence 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 this way, we can acquire the main idea of the long sentence.

Similarly, we can identify the two modifiers that provide specific information for the sentence. The first modifier is a non-restrictive attributive clause（非限定性定语从句）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. The meaning 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 to understand the formula of an English sentence in order to improve reading efficiency. Simply speaking, a simple sentence （简单句） is composed of a trunk（主干）and a number of modifying components （修饰成分）. A compound sentence（并列句） is made up of two simple sentences joined by two coordinating conjunctions（并列连词）, or above; a complex sentence （复合句）is made up of one main/principal clause（主句） and one or more dependent/subordinate clauses（从句） joined by subordinating conjunctions（从属连词）; a compound and complex sentence（并列复合句）is frequently combined by compound and complex sentences. While identifying the trunk, we might simplify those five sentence patterns into only two: SVO（主谓宾）谁干什么？SVP（主系表）谁是什么？谁怎么样？  

Since Chinese 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 and Chinese in terms of syntactic devices（句法手段） and lexical equivalence（词汇手段） and the like. Therefore, it is highly challenging for Chinese readers to handle such modifiers as attributes（定语）(attributive clauses 定语从句 in particular) and adverbials（状语） (adverbial clauses 状语从句 in particular) and so on. Hence, Identifying the sentence trunk and its modifying components as well as translating them into Chinese is of great help to improve reading efficiency.

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