Herb,
   I was thinking of something very similar to your point about holding
off on some groups. We have the four "open classes", which constitute
most of the vocabulary of the language. Then the "somewhat closed"
classes (if we want to use this terminology) THE MOST IMPORTANT OF
WHICH ARE, which could be followed by whatever we choose as a start,
certainly prepositions and pronouns and conjunctions.
   The "to" in infinitives, "that" in content clauses (and relative
clauses if I follow your sense of it), "there" and "it" in extraposed
and cleft sentences can show up when we introduce those constructs.
Trying to memorize the categories years before they are put to use
would be silly. Like you, I'm not at all sure when that would be.
   We could introduce major categories and not imply that this is all nor
that all words have to fit.
   I would also, very quickly, deal with words that find membership in
more than one group, nouns and verbs being the most obvious. It's hard
to look at even a single page of the dictionary without finding them.
   Welcome back, by the way. We very much need your calm wisdom.

Craig >


 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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