Everything that has been posted about this topic over the past few days
underscores the importance of talking about language in terms of function and
not form.
This point was driven home to me this week as I talked with my students
about adjective clauses that begin with words normally thought of as adverbs: “where,”
“when,” and “why.” I think a good case can be made for regarding
them as functioning pronominally (is that a word?) in these particular
constructions.
With most adjective/relative clauses, the relative pronoun refers to a
specific noun in another clause. Thus, in the sentence “She is the woman
whom I met at a party,” a traditional diagram would show a dotted line connecting
“whom” in the relative clause to “woman” in the main
clause. The reader, upon seeing the clause “whom I met at a party,”
thinks “woman I met at a party.”
It stands to reason, then, that “where,” “when,”
and “why” function more like pronominals than like adverbs in cases
where the adjective clause starts with one of those words.
I am a huge fan of Martha Kolln’s Understanding English Grammar. Martha, in your diagrams of
such clauses (adjective clauses launched by an adverb), you show the adverb on
a straight line under the verb of the adjective clause. But could we not treat
the “where,” “when,” or “why” as if it were
the object of a prepositional phrase with an elliptical preposition? The
prepositional phrase as a unit functions adverbially in its own clause, but the
word itself functions nominally in its relation to the other clause—as a
replacement for the word to which we say it is connected.
Take this sentence, for example:
This is the house where I was born.
The dotted line connecting the adjective clause “where I was born”
to the main clause would connect “where” to “house.” “Where”
acts just like a pronoun;
that is, when we read that adjective clause, the meaning conveyed is “I
was born [in] house” or “I was born [in] where.”
My students were inclined to treat these words as objects of
prepositional phrases with elliptical prepositions because earlier in the text,
they were taught that words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow”
and “Friday” are diagrammed as objects of prepositional phrases
with elliptical prepositions. And I have implored them so often to think in
terms of a word’s function and not its form that they were comfortable
seeing “when,” “where,” and “why”
functioning pronominally in these particular cases.
When they are trying to figure out how a phrase or clause is related to
the rest of a sentence, my students get the best results when they ask
themselves “What question does this word/phrase/clause answer?” If
we ask ourselves what question “where” answers in its own clause
(not what question does the entire clause answer—that would be “which
house?”), we would answer “where I was born.” But the answer to
the question “where was I born?” is “in house,” not
simply “house.”
I’m not sure I’m being clear here. I should have learned by
now not to post to this very intelligent group late at night! But the bottom
line is this: I am much more concerned that my students are thinking about and
recognizing the relationships among words, phrases, and clauses than I am that
they be able to put words in form classes—a frustrating if not completely
futile exercise. I am convinced that as they get better at recognizing the functions
of words in a construction, they become clearer thinkers and more precise writers.
Nancy L. Tuten, PhD
Professor of English
Director of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Program
803-786-3706
From:
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007
9:30 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [BULK] A new question
was The necessity for classification was: Those old transitivity blues was Help
for a puzzled teacher
One of my former students
sent me an email asking this question: I
have a grammar question I have yet to find an answer to, and I thought,
"Who better to ask than Janet?" So, regarding the use of the word
'wondering', I would like to know if I should use a question mark at the end of
a sentence such as: "I was wondering if you are going to the store?"
or "I wonder why it rains?" My first inclination is that these are
statements, not questions. However, I have run into question marks at the end
of such sentences frequently of late. I must know the truth!
I believe I would treat this
as reported speech not requiring a question mark. What do others think?
Janet Castilleja
-----Original Message-----
From:
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007
6:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [BULK] The necessity for
classification was: Those old transitivity blues was Help for a puzzled teacher
Importance: Low
Craig writes:
When
classification becomes an end in itself, the living,
dynamic language gets left behind.
This may be so in the case of purely linguistic analysis. However,
I do not agree that this reflects the recent comments related to the ESL
context. Therein, assuming that one is adopting an explicit approach to
explaining the difference between phrasal and prepositional verbs, first,
one has to have a means of classifying the two, and second, one has to provide
the students with a clear way of distinguishing them.
Ron Sheen