Scott,

 

As the sentences get longer, repeating the same word more and more times, they become curiosities that I, at least, find too cumbersome for use in class, although I’ve used such sentences just to demonstrate the curiosity of them.  In that way, they became a part of language play, the idea that it can be both creative and fun to play around with linguistic structures and see what the language can be made to do.  It takes a bright, creative student to pursue such a challenge, but doing so exercises a lot of grammatical knowledge.

 

A sentence like

 

The policeman the boy the dog bit called came.

 

is useful for teaching the role of function words in making meaning clear.  Inserting “that” in one or two places makes a huge difference in the interpretability of the sentence.

 

Sentences like

 

The horse raced past the barn fell.

Red pencil marks easily erased covered the page.

 

help students work carefully through grammatical roles and options.

 

And sentences like

 

The chicken is ready to eat.

Sylvia rolled up the carpet.

 

focus their attention on ambiguity and how to explain it.

 

Granted, these sentences are not as dramatic as a whole herd of buffalo or eleven hads, but there is a useful pedagogical role for sentences that we might otherwise prefer that students not write.

 

Herb

 

 

 

 

Dear Listmates,   Beyond being fun for grammarians and linguists, are sentences like "Buffalo buffalo..." useful in teaching English grammar?  How do teachers use such sentences instructionally?  What is the purpose of such instruction? What do students gain?   Scott Woods

 

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