Dick,
I'm just back from three weeks out of touch. Looking over the "pars
orationis" discussion, your posting seems like a good place to start.
With characteristic clarity, you point to the problems we face in
choosing terminology. One of these problems is the tension between
scientific adequacy and pedagogical practicability. Linguistically,
categories are fuzzy. They have prototypical members, like count nouns
as examples of nouniness, and then there are words that match prototype
to varying degrees. It doesn't take a lot of work with modal
auxiliaries to demonstrate this. But prototype and fuzzy category
aren't pedagogically useful notions until you reach a pretty high
educational level. A second problem is the matter of criteria we use to
determine that a set of words does or does not comprise a category.
Most modern grammars use morphological, syntactic, and notional traits
to establish categories. Number words, for example, are characterized
by taking suffixes like -th and -some, by having cardinal and ordinal
forms, by occurring after the definite article, if there is one, and
before adjectives, and are used to indicate specific quantity. Of
course, quantifiers like "many" and "both" share some but not all of
these traits. A third problem is whether we even need to specify the
number of parts of speech rather than just identify them and teach them
as students are ready to learn them.
Where the problem of parts of speech intersects with scope and sequence
is in considering what categories and what heuristics to introduce at
what level. And at some point, fairly late I assume, it is probably
necessary to teach students that some words, like "to" and "there" can,
in some of their uses, be unique, not members of any category.
Actually, Greenbaum (1996) provides a list of such words.
I suspect that Ed Vavra, with the research he's done on developmental
grammar and pedagogy, knows of relevant studies.
Herb
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Veit, Richard
Sent: Saturday, July 22, 2006 2:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: parts of speech
In grade school I was taught the "eight parts of speech," and that
seemed a good, pragmatic way of teaching word categories to third and
fourth graders. But for those who say to adults that there actually are
only eight (or ten) parts of speech, I'm curious what they do with the
parts that don't fit. Just a few examples:
* The word to can serve at least three different grammatical
functions in the following sentences:
* She came to the meeting. [preposition, introducing a
prepositional phrase]
* She came to hear the speaker. [infinitive marker,
introducing an infinitive phrase]
* She passed out but came to. [particle, completing the
phrasal verb "come to"]
Only the first is a preposition. Where do they slot the other two?
* A list of ten parts of speech that was posted earlier included
"article." What about the other determiners that fill the same slot as
articles, such as demonstratives (this, that, these, those) and
quantifiers (many, every, few, and so on)? They certainly aren't
adjectives.
* What about there in "There are eight parts of speech"?
Of course we could shoehorn several very different functions into one
category if we choose-for that matter, we could arbitrarily say there
are seven or nine or even two parts of speech (verbs and nonverbs, say).
But that wouldn't be very helpful if the purpose is to understand the
different grammatical functions that words actually perform in
sentences.
Dick Veit
________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English, UNCW
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