Ed,

I'm missing something here.  You claim that "on" in "Put on your  hat" can be analyzed as a particle in a phrasal verb or as a preposition.  But particles and prepositions behave differently.  Syntactically, particles can occur in only two positions, immediately after the verb or immediately after the first object (IO or DO).  Prepositional phrases, depending on whether they are complements or modifiers, have considerably more freedom of movement.  

1. On your head, put your hat.  On your hand, your gloves.

vs.

2. *On, put your hat.

There is also semantic variation in phrasal verbs that is not found with PPs.   

3. He told me you were in London, but he was just putting me on.

It's pretty hard to interpret "on" in (3) as a preposition.  Granted, the construction is idiomatic, but what characterizes idioms is not that they are grammatically anomalous but that they are not semantically analytic.  How would KISS distinguish such constructions?  And a bright student will ask this sort of question.  I suspect KISS is a bit too blunt an instrument for this purpose, a price it pays for being easier to teach to elementary and secondary students.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  We don't teach kids algebra before can perform basic arithmetic functions, so I have no problem with simplifying grammar for them and letting the brighter ones stretch the descriptions a bit.  But I'd have to agree with the NCTE reviewers on this one.

Herb

Ed writes:
Our point of disagreement here may be in "every sentence into all of its components," and we may not even disagree there. KISS makes the claim to enable students to explain "every word," and a complete study of KISS does do that, but not to the satisfaction of many of the people on this list. Consider, for example, the often discussed question (on this list) of phrasal verbs. This may be an important question for grammarians, but the pedagogical focus on it is silly. Consider, for example:

Put on your hat.

In KISS, you can consider "on" as part of the verb phrase (the linguists phrasal verb), or you can consider it as a preposition ― as long as you do not consider "on your hat" as the prepositional phrase, for the sentence means "Put on *your head* your hat. When I tried to explain this in the KISS manuscript, the NCTE reviewers immediately jumped to the grammarians' / linguists' position and claimed that "put on" is a phrasal verb. Their response suggests that they have probably never even tried to teach students to identify prepositional phrases in real texts. If they had, they would have noticed that many students would label "on your hat" as a prepositional phrase. The KISS explanations (two possibilities here) enables students to deal with the meaningful structure in a meaningful way. 

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