Ed, I haven't read the research you refer to and am curious about what kind
of subordinate clauses the research is talking about---and in writing or
speaking? I know that my children used subordinate clauses before they were
5 and relative clauses around 6. That was in speaking. (I'll give you my old
research sources on sentence combining later; the paper I wrote is at home.)
Edith
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Vavra [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 10:48 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Fr. Laurence and noun absolutes
Fr. Laurence,
I'm curious about your comments about noun absolutes. Were those
examples actually taken from students' writing? If so, over what period
of time, and, since you state that the students were not directly taught
the construction, what had they been reading? Hunt, in "Early Blooming
and Late Blooming Syntactic Structures" rathetr convincingly argues that
participles are late blooming -- after subordinate clauses, which bloom
between seventh and ninth grades. (See the bib entry in
http://www2.pct.edu/courses/evavra/Bib/DevLang.htm.) The noun absolute
depends on the participle, including the ellipsed "being" (his face
*being* pale), and thus theoretically, the noun absolute should develop
after the participle. This type of research is incredibly
time-consuming, so I haven't had the time to analyzed (or I should say
reanalyze a set of papers by seventh graders, but in the writing of my
college students, the construction is very rare. I should note, however,
that we need to take the mode of writing into consideration. All of your
examples appear to come from narratives.
Thanks,
Ed V.
P.S., And this is not to Fr. Laurence, but rather to those on the list
who applaud teaching noun absolutes to sixth and seventh graders -- have
you read the research by Hunt, O'Donnell, and Loban? If not, why are you
applauding? Would you also suggest that we teach sixth graders calculus?
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