Herb,
   I can think of occassions when a number would take a plural, as in "He
threw two sevens in a row." (Maybe I'm confessing my social class.) But
you have me convinced.
   For verbs, adding endings may be the simplest and purest test. I wonder
why we don't do that in early grades. I wonder if syntax is hard to
teach later precisely because we have avoided it for so long. Even at
the college level, I still have students who haven't been told the
difference between plural and possessive (or it hasn't taken; but it
takes so easily, I can't help suspecting it just isn't always taught.)
Are syntax and morphology hard to teach, or do we just avoid them?
   I have access to students in a K-4 charter school, so I may be trying a
few things out.

Craig


Craig,
>
> I agree that the four open classes are the clearest, easiest to define
> notionally, and probably the best to present at lower levels.  As to
> auxiliaries, "have", "do" and "be" are examples of words that can be in
> two different classes, auxiliary and verb, and their behavior differs
> depending on which class a particular example represents.  Multiple
> class membership and auxiliary are both items for later introduction, I
> would think.
>
> As to the status of "numeral", number words do not inflect.  Adjectives
> do.  Number words can take derivational suffixes like "-th" and "-some",
> which adjectives cannot take.  Notionally, they can't be comparative or
> superlative.  Number words must occur initially in a noun phrase or
> between the determiner and any adjectives, so they are syntactically
> distinct as well.  They are like adjectives in that they are
> post-determiner, pronominal, and are attributive and can, to a degree,
> be predicative, as in the somewhat archaic "Now they were three",
> indicating number, not age.  Unlike nouns, they don't take plurals, and
> when they are used as sole noun phrases, as in "I saw three on the
> table", they are usually elliptical ("three books").  So there are both
> morphological and syntactic criteria for considering numerals a word
> class.  However, it's one I'd present rather late in K12.
>
> Like you, I'm uncomfortable with "adverb".  The distinctions among
> sentence-modifying, verb phrase modifying, and adjective-modifying words
> are too great, from my perspective, to allow them to be properties of
> one word class.  I would prefer at least distinguishing intensifiers,
> like "very" and "sort of".  But it's also a practical pedagogical
> question, and I wouldn't oppose keeping the term as is.  I would, later
> on in K12, want to distinguish carefully among types of adverb, though.
>
> I'm not comfortable speculating on scope and sequence, since I don't
> teach K12 and have no expertise in K12 curriculum.  I would want such
> decisions made by people who know those areas well.
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 8:42 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Greenbaum's word classes
>
> Herb,
>    I think this is a wonderful place to start. A number of people have
> suggested the four "open classes", and so maybe we can start with that
> as a consensus position. (These also carry over from traditional
> grammar.) Notional criteria seem the current way of going about it for
> early grades, so I wonder if people think morphology and syntax are a
> more mature perspective. I notice even with the NATE glossary (I don't
> have it with me) they tend to oversimplify in the early grades. They
> define "subject", for example, as "what carries out the action," which
> seems a terrible mistake to me.
>    It's hard to imagine getting far without prepositions and
> conjunctions.
> For auxiliaries, you need to determine whether "have", "do", and "be"
> verbs are verbs used as auxiliaries, which would mean it's a function
> label and not just a category label (as it would be for the modals, I
> presume.) What are the arguments for numeral as its own catgory and not
> just noun or adjective?
>    I know we have talked a number of times on list about the category
> "adverb" being too large. Do we want to add "qualifier"? It shows up
> very early, I think, with "so" and "very". Unlike other "adverbs", they
> can't head a phrase.     >
>    I like the idea of "typical" or "prototypical", especially for
> notional
> definitions. Even in early stages, I would opt for presenting language
> as very flexible.
>    These categories would have sub-categories, I assume. At what age
> would
> we assume that a typical child is ready for a full description?
>
> Craig
> In a previous posting, I mentioned Greenbaum's treatment of word classes
>> in The Oxford English Grammar (OUP 1996).  I thought I'd summarize
> what
>> he lays out (pp. 90-95).
>>
>>
>>
>> He proposes four open classes (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) and
> seven
>> closed classes (auxiliary, conjunction, preposition, determiner,
>> pronoun, numeral, and interjection) and notes that many words belong
> to
>> more than one class.  In his treatment of the classes, he combines
>> determiner and pronoun into one section because there is a great deal
> of
>> overlap between them, even though there are words, like "the" and
> "she",
>> that are clearly one or the other.  (It's a good example of the fact
>> that category boundaries are fuzzy.)  In his two-page discussion of
> the
>> criteria that are used to determine word classes and their membership
> he
>> presents three types of criterion, notional, morphological, and
>> grammatical (syntactic), with the combination of morphological and
>> grammatical being the most useful where inflectional variants or
> affixal
>> characteristics are available.  For word classes that don't have
>> morphological variants, like prepositions and conjunctions, notional
> and
>> grammatical criteria work better.  He "notes that notional criteria
> are
>> often a useful entry to a recognition of a class."  He also touches on
>> the notion "prototype", commenting that "some members of a class are
>> central (or prototypical), whereas others are more peripheral",
> pointing
>> out that "tall" is a central member of the adjective class because it
>> exhibits all the criteria of adjectives while "afraid" is peripheral
>> since it can only be predicative.  He points out also that members of
> a
>> class may contain more than one word, like "book review", "no one", or
>> "in spite of", which are a compound noun, pronoun, and preposition,
>> respectively.
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm not suggesting that we simply adopt Greenbaum's description but
>> rather that it is a useful starting point for part of speech
> terminology
>> and concepts.  Clearly any such system must be analyzed in terms of
>> scope and sequence, deciding which criteria and which categories to
>> present when and in which order.  I'm also not suggesting that
>> terminology be limited to parts of speech.  Johanna's proposal is, I
>> think, an excellent place to start for more comprehensive terminology.
>>
>>
>>
>> Herb
>>
>>
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