Craig Hancock wrote:
> Herb, Peter, Bill, Ron,
>
> With apologies if this seems too theoretical for most people’s tastes. 
> I have been thinking about these things for several months now and 
> have mostly held back while the thoughts come into focus.
>
> The problem I currently have with trying to find a classification for 
> “think about” is that I am starting to believe we make these 
> categories more important (more governing) than they actually are. We 
> tend to feel as if words have to act certain ways because of the 
> grammar, rather than believing that the grammar itself arises out of 
> our use of words. (Or that it is a dynamic relationship, a 
> lexico-grammar, word-grammar, cline.) When classification becomes an 
> end in itself, the living, dynamic language gets left behind.
>
> Another way to think about it is that the process of thinking is often 
> conceived of (and articulated) as “about” something, and over time 
> “think” and “about” come together often enough to start feeling like a 
> single phrase rather than a verb plus prepositional phrase with a 
> variable object.
>
>
> I often think about blank.
>
> I often think about blank
>
> From this way of thinking, the verb will begin to pull the preposition 
> into its orbit, helped by two forces—one is repetition (the words 
> coming together so often)--and the other is congruency with our 
> experience of the world, our conception of what thinking is like. In 
> other words, we continue to use it because it is practical to use it, 
> highly “functional.” And this becomes patterned.
>
> From a rule based approach, we have to say that “all grammars leak”, 
> but that may be because they try to treat the language as frozen and 
> not dynamic. If we see the creation of phrasal verbs as a dynamic 
> process, then it is easy to treat in-between examples as part of that 
> process of change—of grammatical structures being lexicalized and 
> lexical terms being pulled into the grammar. From a usage based 
> perspective, leaking is likely. Just like words, the grammar is always 
> coming into being.
>
> This gives us an approach to grammar that pulls us into meaning and 
> one that frames meaning itself as contextual and dynamic.
>
> Craig
>
>
>
> STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>> 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
>>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
>> interface at:
>>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
>> interface at:
>>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
>> and select "Join or leave the list"
>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>>
>>   
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web 
> interface at:
>     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/