I agree, Beth. I keep threatening to design a workshop on how not to use
grammar checkers in software programs. They do more harm than good,
especially for students who lack the confidence in their own abilities to
ignore their computer's bad advice.
As someone who was not professionally trained in this area, I am grateful
for these discussions! All the remarks and handy suggestions for teaching
the appositive will come in handy next year when I teach my department's
grammar course again.
Best,
Nancy
Nancy L. Tuten, PhD
Professor of English
Director of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Program
Columbia College
Columbia, South Carolina
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803-786-3706
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Beth Young
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 1:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: appositive vs relative clause
> >2. The fact [that they didn't like chocolate] surprised her.
Reasons this clause appeared to be adjectival:
1. it tells us more about "the" fact (answering the question "which
fact") rather than just renaming "that fact"
2. it can't be set off by commas, at least not without changing the
determiner. While writers often have the choice of putting in commas or
omitting them in order to indicate whether the appositive is restrictive
or nonrestrictive, here there is no choice.
But I'm convinced now that the clause IS an "appositive" because the
"which" test doesn't work and because the "that" doesn't play a role in
its clause.
Just to be controversial, I'll add: The that/which rule (about using
"that" w/o commas for restrictive clauses and "which" w/commas for
nonrestrictive clauses) isn't terribly old (first proposed by Fowler in
1908, I believe) and isn't supported by best practice, so I don't tend
to rely on it much. I believe that rule gets attention largely because
it was easy for software designers to program into grammar checkers.
But hey, that's just the opinion of someone who confused a nominal
appositive clause with a relative clause. :)
Beth
>>> [log in to unmask] 3/9/2005 10:20:34 AM >>>
I really don't understand how the clause in the second sentence can be
anything other than an appositive. Adding commas doesn't change a thing.
In fact, by the "old rules," if we put in the commas, we should change
"which" to "that," and clearly that won't work. As one person said, the
fact that "which" won't work TELLS us that the clause is clearly an
appositive.
Nancy
----- Original Message -----
From: Beth Young <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, March 9, 2005 9:45 am
Subject: Re: appositive vs relative clause
> Thanks, everyone. The "which" test does work on sentence 1, but not
> sentence 2. Maybe we idiomatically prefer "the fact that . . . " or
> maybe I should have agreed that sentence 2 was an appositive? I
> can see
> that it's definitely an appositive in the sentence "That fact,
> that they
> didn't like chocolate, surprised her"--but that's not the same
> sentence.
>
> Ultimately, I guess it doesn't matter that much. These sentences
> won'tappear on any test--the students wrote the sentences for a
> differentactivity. I can just agree that sometimes it's really
> hard to tell what
> a clause is doing, just like it's sometimes really hard to tell
> what a
> prepositional phrase is doing, and leave it at that.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Beth
>
> >Here are a couple of example sentences with the suspected
appositives
> >in brackets:
> >
> >1. The book, [that was titled 'Great Expectations',] was a classic.
> >
> >2. The fact [that they didn't like chocolate] surprised her.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Beth Rapp Young
> http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~byoung
>
> University of Central Florida
> From Promise to Prominence: Celebrating 40 Years.
>
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