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Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar <[log in to unmask]>
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Thu, 5 Mar 2009 12:12:34 -0500
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"We will have finished the project tomorrow."
At a time in the future and action will have been completed.
Where's the beef?  My ESOL students had no problem with future
perfects--then again, all were college graduates.  My non-college graduate
ESOL students spoke a fluent but very basic English and I concentrated on
their obvious errors in writing.  I once remarked that they were illiterate
in two languages: Los Angeles schools do not require even a basic command of
written English to graduate and they were not allowed to take Spanish 
because they spoke Spanish in the home--making them illiterate in Spanish.

My pebble in the pond:

I was taught in my advanced grammar class in 1960 that "I was baked a cake"
was perfectly grammatical and all in the class had heard or used similar
phrases.  When we went to diagram the sentence we found "cake" to be the
subject and "I" to be the indirect object.  The professor explained that
"I" was a retained indirect object in the nominative position and I used
that explanation for that sentence and for "He was fried three eggs"--a
contribution from a student.

Does modern English grammar still support that explanation.  All grammar
teachers who rejected the concept had to fall back on the supposition that
the sentences were ungrammaticalbacause they insisted that 'I' and 'He' had
to be subjects and they had never heard of retained indirect objects in the
nominative position; ergo, such things did not exist.

Scott Catledge

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