Ron,
Let's start with easiest of your questions, how to use information like
this in teaching. The fact is that I wouldn't present a seven-fold
classification of anything grammatical in an ESL context. I might be
forced to do something like that if I were teaching Chinese nominal
classifiers, of which there are dozens, or Bantu noun classes, which can
exceed a couple dozen, but fortunately English doesn't do such things.
What's important in developing both fluency and register control in
non-native speakers is that they learn to shift particles when doing so
is pragmatically motivated, that they learn to use a passive when that
structure is pragmatically motivated. And this they will learn much
better from usage and practice than from grammar drill.
I think perhaps you confused Bill and me in the latter part of your
post. Actually, the classification I posted is from Sidney Greenbaum's
Oxford English Grammar (OUP, 1996), so I can't take credit for it.
Transitivity does have degrees. Intransitives take only a subject,
(mono)transitives take a subject and a direct object, and ditransitives
(SG's "doubly transitives") take a direct object and an indirect object,
which may or may not require a preposition. Indirect object, bear in
mind, is a function, not a structure, and it can show up as either a
bare NP or as the object of a preposition. I suspect SG uses
"monotransitivity" in a excess of clarity, the result of which isn't
necessarily what the writer hopes for.
Actually, SG doesn't distinguish between "look at" and "look after". In
his discussion of prepositional verbs (p. 282), he uses "look at" as an
example of a monotransitive prepositional verb.
Back to the question of goals for a moment. SG was writing a reference
grammar, and so his goal was to provide as complete and thorough a
classification of English structures as he could. Hence his seven
classes of phrasal/prepositional verbs. What the ESL teacher does with
this classification is subject to different, pedagogical goals, and I
hope that teacher would keep SG's treatment well away from his students,
while being informed by it as he or she prepares lesson plans.
Herb
One of the great advantages of this List (and particularly if one has
the
intellectual courage to state what one knows about grammar with the
attendant possibility of being proven to be wrong and the even worse
possibility of realising that one has been teaching something to
students
which is possibly incorrect) is the potential it has to make one
re-examine
one's own assumptions about some point of grammar.
Herb's comments on the complexities of phrasal verbs and Bill's list of
three examples are cases in point. This query, then, is just to clarify
things in their posts and particularly in the context of ESL.
Bill's list of three is as follows:
I looked [up the chimney] prepositional phrase
I [looked up] the word phrasal verb
I looked [up] adverbial particle.
Just to avoid ambiguity, I would modify the second two as follows:
I [looked up] the word. As 'up' is an adverbial particle and as 'the
word' is the direct object of the resultant phrasal verb, 'look up' is a
transitive phrasal
verb.
I looked [up]. As 'up' is an adverbial particle and as there is no
direct
object, 'look up' is an intransitive phrasal verb.
Would Bill agree with this modification?
Herb's list of seven really puts the cat amonst the pigeons of my
assumptions about transitivity. Here's Bill's list:
1. intransitive phrasal verbs, e.g. "give in" (surrender)
2. transitive phrasal verbs, e.g. "find" something "out" (discover)
3. monotransitive prepositional verbs, e.g. "look after" (take care of)
4. doubly transitive prepositional verbs, e.g. "blame" something "on"
someone
5. copular prepositional verbs, e.g. "serve as"
6. monotransitive phrasal-prepositional verbs, e.g. "look up to"
(respect)
7. doubly transitive phrasal-prepositional verbs, e.g. "put" something
"down to" (attribute to)
My problem is with 3 This is the first time that I have encountered the
term 'monotransitive' so perhaps Bill can explain the significance of
the addition of 'mono-'.
In the case of 3, why is Bill implicitly differentiating 'look at' and
'look
after'? I ask this because I am assuming that he is not claiming that
'look at' is a monotransitive prepositional verb. In the case of ESL, I
think it preferable to consider them both intransitive in order not to
muddy the transitive waters too much.
6 & 7 are also problematic in ESL terms for the same reason but perhaps
we can come to those later.
Ron Sheen
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