Dear all,

I’d like to hear people’s opinions on two topics, one regarding adjectives
and the other, student readiness. 

How comfortable are people with having adjectives broken down into two
subgroups, Limiting and Descriptive? Limiting adjectives are most easily
recognized by the fact that they do not go through the
positive-comparative-superlative changes. They include articles,
demonstratives, quantifiers, ordinals, and possessive pronouns. Descriptive
adjectives, on the other hand, do just that—describe—and except for words
like “perfect” and “unique” can be made comparative and superlative. Yes,
there might be a debate about whether to include those pronouns, but I think
they fit nicely here. One reason I ask is that I saw that list of TEN parts
of speech, which added articles and numerals as separate ones, and I
wondered how far that subdividing can/should go.
 
Also, I understand Martha’s use of the term “adjectival,” which includes
anything that can modify a noun—from the above limiting and descriptive
adjectives, to prepositional phrases, participial phrases, and adjective
clauses. In fact, Book Two in my series of grammar books arranges things
just that way, by function rather than form, for adjectives, adverbs, and
nouns. That book is intended for grades eight and nine, where I feel the
students are ready to step back and contemplate the relationships,
similarities, and possibilities of these grammatical elements.

But in order to reach that level, of course, I guess they have to have
studied the forms, especially the phrases and clauses parts, which I do in
Book One. Is that a logical sequence? Could they learn functions first?
Could they play around with ten ways to describe a canoe in grade six, and
deduce the forms rather than having direct instruction in them? Which leads
to my big question: When are kids really ready to make the leap from an
adjective simply being the word “big” to the clause “which was hand crafted
by a Penobscot Indian”?

Don Stewart
___________________
Keeper of the memory and method of Dr. Francis Christensen
writeforcollege.com
epsbooks.com

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