Herb,

It occurs to me that not only do activities like the ones you described
perform the function of uniting grammar (broadly construed) with wider
issues of language awareness, they also provide an additional way to get
at a kind of heuristic students can use: 

"If it's a statement that you've punctuated as a sentence, and you can't
possibly contradict it, it's a fragment."

I'm fairly sure this won't yield false negatives, but I'm still trying
to sort out whether it can yield false positives. From informally
polling native English-speaking students, I've noticed some potential
variation -- for some reason, fewer people object to contradicting
material in a because-clause than in a when-clause:

Bjorn was in the kitchen when Brunnhild murdered Bjarki.	*No she
didn't!

Bjorn was rather put out because Brunnhild murdered Bjarki	?No she
didn't

That second one doesn't sound very good to me, but a number of my
students were not bothered by it. However, moving the subordinate clause
to the beginning caused everyone to reject the contradiction. Something
is going on with end-rheme, I think, but I haven't dived into the
research on this at all (yet).

So, I'm not sure the proposed heuristic would enable students to find
*all* fragments (and it does not give students any way of thinking about
intended fragments), but it should work for a large number of cases.

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University.

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