Martha, I know. I know. I know. That drives me crazy--singular present etc.
I teach that a sentence is a series of phrase. And those phrase types are
based on the four form-class words: noun, verb, adjective, and adverb.
Does anyone else discuss sentences in this way?
Christine
_____
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martha Kolln
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 3:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What is Linguistic Grammar?
Christine,
There are many ways in which the new descriptions of grammar--some gleaned
from transformational and some from structural--make so much more sense than
traditional. Take the description of verbs. I have on my shelf grammar
books that list pages of so-called verb tenses--of this variety:
Singular present
I eat
you eat
he eats
Plural present
we eat
you eat
they eat
Singular past
I ate
you ate
we ate
Plural past
we ate
you ate
they ate
And on and on, filling pages with Future (I shall eat, you will eat,
etc.)Present Perfect (I have eaten); Past Perfect (I had eaten); Future
perfect (I shall have eaten); Future perfect progressive (I shall have been
eating)--and all labeled as if verbs had the feature of number, as nouns and
pronouns do.
You get the picture. When you add all the possibilities, including the
passive, and take each through all the subject pronouns, the array looks
formidable for kids. And, of course, all of these are called "tenses,"
when, in fact and in form, English verbs have only two forms that designate
tense: present and past.
No one told us that verbs in English are amazingly simple: a mere five
forms (except for be, which has eight). Check out that past array: ate in
every case! And except for the -s form (the one used with singular 3rd
person pronouns), the present in every case is the base form, identical to
the infinitive.
It's true, of course, that there are nuances of meaning that occur with the
auxiliaries--including such modals as should and could and might and may.
But for native speakers, with a few exceptions, the system is close to
automatic. Even nonstandard dialects (He don't; they wasn't, etc.) involve
very few verbs--and in every case I can think of, the verbs are simply
irregular ones being regularized.
In Understanding English Grammar, I have a chapter on verbs that includes
the "verb-expansion rule" that underlies all of those pages of so-called
verb conjugations. It looks like this:
Main Verb = T (M) (have + -en) (be + -ing) V
That's it! It takes a bit of explanation, of course--but it makes very
clear, for example, that when the main verb is the -ing form, it ALWAYS has
a form of be as an auxiliary. And it's easy to relate to the traditional
labels: If you choose have + -en as auxiliary, you're in the "perfect
tenses"; if you choose be + -ing, you're in the progressives; pick both and
you've created "perfect progressive."
The passive voice becomes a very simple concept: That's when the auxiliary
be is NOT followed by -ing, but rather by the -en form (the past
participle).
There are just so many neat things to know about verbs--and they're all
right there! This explanation probably doesn't belong in junior high. It's
not necessarily one of my "wishes"--but I'm glad I know about it now.
And lots of other stuff too.
Lessons of this kind are the reason that grammar should be included the high
school curriculum.
Martha
Martha, please post more of what you wish you had learned!!
Christine in Baltimore
_____
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martha Kolln
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2006 5:08 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: What is Linguistic Grammar?
Dear Colleagues,
This post is in response to recent questions not only about what to teach
but also about what we mean by linguistic grammar. These, of course, are
big questions: This is only the beginning of an answer.
First, let me explain that my own experience as a student of traditional
school grammar back in the 1940s was a positive one, as far as I can recall
these decades later. (Maybe I'm just remembering the pleasure of
diagramming, which I assumed all of my classmates shared--which of course
they didn't.!) I'm quite sure our instruction was not based on error
correction and error avoidance, as current practice appears to be. And I
don't remember being warned about splitting infinitives or avoiding
end-of-sentence prepositions and all those other "don't's" and "nevers" that
seem to dominate our students' memories of grammar classes. I do recall
lots of memorizing--a method by no means limited to language arts. (I can
still recite the formula for photosynthesis I had to memorize for biology
class; the states and their capitals for geography, etc.) And, in fact, I'm
quite sure the purpose of our grammar lessons was not tied to writing; it
was, of course, tied to understanding how language works. (I'm also quite
sure that "writing" class in those days meant "penmanship," something we
spent a great deal of time on.)
But I wish that one of my English teachers had taught me some of the
language lessons I teach my grammar students. Here are two of my wishes:
l. I wish my teachers had told me, back in junior high, that I was a
language expert. In fact, I was an expert when I started kindergarten--let
alone by sixth grade.
Our job as grammar techers is to help students bring to a conscious level
the grammar they know subconsciously, innately, as native speakers, as
humans. (Nonnative speakers must recognize that they too are experts in
the grammar of their home languages. Their learning of English will be
somewhat different from that of native speakers.) A good demonstration of
innate grammar expertise is our automatic use of pronouns; another is the
production of tag-questions, which students will come up with in an instant.
(Mary isn't here today--is she? Pete will wash dishes tonight, won't he?
Jack and Jill aren't coming, are they?) Note that the tag-questions not
only include automatic pronoun usage (she, he, they), but the recognition of
auxiliaries. And if students are having trouble finding the main verb in
their sentences, as teachers sometimes mention, simply have them substitute
a pronoun for the subject noun phrase: It works every time!
2. I wish my teachers had told me that those "eight parts of speech" were
not created equal! That's something I never knew. Nor did they tell me
that those so-called definitions of Nouns and Verbs and Adjectives and
Adverbs were not very accurate. For example, they didn't tell me that lots
of words other than adjectives modify nouns. (And "interjection" as one of
the eight!?!)
They never told me that those four parts of speech were in a class by
themselves--a "form class," as we call it. You can often recognize the
categories by their forms (you can even define them on that basis). And my
teachers certainly didn't mention that those eight categories were based on
Latin rather than English, that perhaps some of them have been classified in
error. (For instance, they didn't tell me that articles aren't really
adjectives--i.e., words that can be made comparative and superlative, that
can be qualified by "very," etc.) When I peruse the books at an NCTE or
4Cs convention that purport to include the latest good stuff on grammar, I
always check the index for "determiner." If it's not there, that grammar
description is not linguistic grammar. It is not based on the premise that
students are already experts, that they automatically include a determiner
with a singular countable noun--every time!
Those then are two lessons we didn't know about back in "pre-structural
grammar" times. So I can't, and don't, blame my teachers for not passing
them, and many other important lessons, on. I might add that in the section
of Grammar Alive called "An Overview of Linguistic Grammar," which I wrote,
I described the "parts of speech" in this "new" way (not really new
anymore--50+ years old!). I also included a section on sentence patterns.
In my classes and my books I use sentence patterns as the framework to help
students organize and build their knowledge of sentence structure. As a
visual tool, the patterns--and their traditional diagrams--provide a place
for students to store all of the details of sentence expansion as they
encounter them.
This, then, is the beginning of my answer.
Martha
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