A quick response to Ed and to Brenda:
Brenda,
You call for cultivating in students respect for Standard English. I'd
like to emphasize a point I made in my previous posts on this topic:
demanding respect without giving it in return doesn't work. If we want
kids to respect Standard English, we have to respect their language as
well. It is a language, and it functions perfectly well within their
everyday worlds -- if they had needed another language for a strong
reason, and had been exposed to it long enough, they would have learned
it. Comparative approaches are much more successful -- discussing the
structural and vocabulary differences between different styles/dialects
of English as differences, not as right/wrong pairs, values the language
of students' everyday lives, and of them and their friends (we know how
strong peer focus is in the middle grades). Students can then, as I
suggested, work creatively, moving between styles for different
communication situations.
Presenting Standard English as better than other kinds, esp. better than
students' native kind, will only provoke them to rebel (except for the
very academically-oriented student). Openly discussing issues like
language use as a marker of the "in crowd" vs. the "nerds" -- and then
talking about who gets the higher-paying careers -- is important. Many
kids have career aspirations at middle-school age, even though these may
be impossible dreams, or may change later. Relate language instruction
to things that matter to them.
Ed, a reason for not calling phrases like the one in "Playing in the
park, I saw Bill" gerundives is that they are not nominal. So far as I
understand, the conventional use of the term "gerund" in both
traditional grammar and linguistics (though linguists I know seldom use
that term) is to refer to the -ing form of the verb when it functions as
the head of a nominal, as in "Playing in the park is fun". I don't know
what value adding "-ive" has to this; it suggests that participial
phrases like the one in the first sentence above are somehow noun-like.
They aren't. They're modifiers. I can see them as adverbial modifiers
(reduced from "while I was playing in the park") or as noun modifiers,
which can derive from a re-analysis of "I was playing in the park" from
a sentence with past progressive to one with a copular verb and subject
complement. I can really feel my construal of the first sentence switch
between these two inpretations -- either describing "I" or setting the
action scene for the rest of the sentence.
The -ing participle commonly is used as a pre-noun modifier ("the
sleeping child") and in adverbial ways, as "He lost control in the ice
-- slipping and skidding this way and that" (although this second one
has the same two possible structural interpretations for me as your
example sentence). It seems to me that using "gerundive" for
non-nominal uses would be more confusing than sticking with "participle"
as a term for the form of the verb when it functions other than
nominally. Hence, your example sentence does, indeed, contain a
participial phrase. (Whether to call it a phrase or a clause is a
separate argument.)
This explanation was, of course, way more complex than I would use even
for my undergraduate students, let alone lower grades.
***************************************************
Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. 805-756-2184 ~ Dept. phone 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374 ~ E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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