Dear all, I’d like to hear people’s opinions on two topics, one regarding adjectives and the other, student readiness. How comfortable are people with having adjectives broken down into two subgroups, Limiting and Descriptive? Limiting adjectives are most easily recognized by the fact that they do not go through the positive-comparative-superlative changes. They include articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, ordinals, and possessive pronouns. Descriptive adjectives, on the other hand, do just that—describe—and except for words like “perfect” and “unique” can be made comparative and superlative. Yes, there might be a debate about whether to include those pronouns, but I think they fit nicely here. One reason I ask is that I saw that list of TEN parts of speech, which added articles and numerals as separate ones, and I wondered how far that subdividing can/should go. Also, I understand Martha’s use of the term “adjectival,” which includes anything that can modify a noun—from the above limiting and descriptive adjectives, to prepositional phrases, participial phrases, and adjective clauses. In fact, Book Two in my series of grammar books arranges things just that way, by function rather than form, for adjectives, adverbs, and nouns. That book is intended for grades eight and nine, where I feel the students are ready to step back and contemplate the relationships, similarities, and possibilities of these grammatical elements. But in order to reach that level, of course, I guess they have to have studied the forms, especially the phrases and clauses parts, which I do in Book One. Is that a logical sequence? Could they learn functions first? Could they play around with ten ways to describe a canoe in grade six, and deduce the forms rather than having direct instruction in them? Which leads to my big question: When are kids really ready to make the leap from an adjective simply being the word “big” to the clause “which was hand crafted by a Penobscot Indian”? Don Stewart ___________________ Keeper of the memory and method of Dr. Francis Christensen writeforcollege.com epsbooks.com 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/