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:
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:
Only the first is a preposition.
Where do they slot the other two?
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