Ed,

You write that

>The "John is" in your example is not incomplete Ø except for you linguists.

and that

>My student would immediately resort to, as you note, the natural and ready
>"John is happy and well-rested." I have never EVER seen a student simply
write >"John is" out of  a meaningful context. As a result, there is no need
to
>"teach" students that "John is" requires a complement. I think you have given
>me another example of what linguists are interested in and want to teach, but
>what most of us comp teachers simply think is irrelevant.

There are two points (at least) relevant here:

(i) the notion of completeness/incompleteness
and

(ii) the issue of what about language structure is relevant to teach when.

Let me take the second point first.

I think we need to distinguish what is being taught when. In a composition
class, I am not going to spend my time with big, stand alone grammar segments.
Indeed, truth be told, I do not 'teach' grammar in my composition classes.
Though, I will USE insights from grammar to help students get a grip if they
are feeling confused in a sentence. (Ed, did you have a comment about the
example I gave earlier about how knowing some basic sentence patterns can help
students unbind stacked nominalizations, and move to more simple expression?)

You're absolutely right, I am NOT, in a composition class, going to teach
students that "John is" requires anything after it. Because, as you aptly
point out, they already know how to interpret this structure, and do so
readily by being aware of the "happy and well rested this fine afternoon" that
had just occured.

However, IF some of my students are having a hard time interpreting fragments
in some student writing, and if someone says to me, "well, my high school
teacher said that all "incomplete" sentences are bad; are they?", we might
indeed explore issues of what 'incompleteness' means. And when it works and
when it doesn't.

(sorry for the lack of examples here...)

On the first point: with Ed asserting that

"The "John is" in your example is not incomplete Ø except for you linguists".

Perhaps I should either define more clearly or move away from the notion of
'incompleteness' -- which itself has a flavor of something being "wrong" or
"missing", or "not there when it should be there." for in this instance, the
"John is" is flat out perfect, right? Nothing awry. Nothing needs to be added
to the passage.

BUT! As you noted, Ed, when we come to "John is" we don't just stop there...
we quite naturally plunk "happy and well-rested this fine afternoon" in the
back end of "John is" as we interpret that sentence.

Can we agree that in some sense that "John is" is not stand-alone
(syntactically/semantically "complete" in and of itself with nothing else at
all added). I'd suggest that it  has an "understood" slot that we naturally
seek to fill. And fill we do, with the close-by, previously mentioned "happy
and well-rested ..."  The fact that we all take that next step and fill in the
requisite understanding, THAT correlates to what a linguist might loosely call
"an incomplete instantiation of the full sentence pattern."

Again, I fully agree with you that students don't need to be taught to put/or
not put anything after "John is", in such instances. They know it already.

Do you think such points would be relevant in an Advanced Grammar class? Say
at the junior/senior level?


But I very much appreciate your point about "incompleteness". I will think
about how to express this that doesn't have that pejorative/"something's
wrong" connotation to it.


thanks,

rebecca


>
>It had been a hard day. I got home to find that my dog had turned over the
>flowerpot and had drug the dirt and plant all over the dining room. This
>puppy had found the bag of potatoes and had lovingly chewed each one,
>partially, over the course of the apartment. The trash was strewn
>everywhere, and to top it all off, Kiku STOOD atop the dining table.  When
>I hollered, he, in fear, relieved himself.  It was all too much. Not
>trusting myself to handle the situation, I called to my incoming
>housemates, "Who's happy and well-rested this fine afternoon? I got a
>situation here!" And a companion answers, "John is."
>
>I'd say that's not only an instance, but a very common instance in which a
>student could run across the sentence, 'John is."  Indeed, in the discourse
>context, in order to make sense of the utterance, we naturally look back to
>the previous sentence to "complete" the interpretation. So in some sense,
>the 'sentence' "John is" is indeed "incomplete", in that upon encountering
>it, we look for something else to plunk in that next spot the sentence in
>our understanding. And quite naturally, we readily, and easily know that
>"John is happy and well rested this fine afternoon."
>
>Sometimes fragments are pernicious and sometimes they're not. The times
>they're pernicious are when the reader can't figure out what is going on,
>what the intended meaning is.  This example, though I wouldn't actually
>call it a fragment (it is more like "John is ______" and then we naturally
>fill in that blank with the adjectival/descriptive info that came eralier),
>is utterly natural, and in no way pernicious. So, possibly, some of the
>sentence pattern info  might be useful to students, in examples such as
>these, to distinguish (among vastly many other things) between fragments
>that don't work, and ones that do.
>
>Reminds me of an example in the linguistics lore:
>
>In isolation, the following seems 'ungrammatical': "Regan thinks scrambled."
>But as an answer to the question, "How does Kissinger like his eggs?",
>"Regan thinks (that Kissinger likes them) scrambled" makes perfectly good
>sense.
>
>Surrounding discourse context is indeed crucial.
>
>


Rebecca S. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Department of English
Weber State University
Ogden, Utah 84408