Bill,
My comment was directed more at the historical pattern than your own
practices, which I suspect are much more ambitious. (You said we
probably got transitivity as a staple in the curriculum because of
these usage issues.)
I teach traditional transitiviy for a number of reasons, not least
because it is part of what a person educated in grammar is expected to
know. What I tried to do in my book is then discuss how limited those
concepts are and broaden out from there.
I have had good luck with "grow", since it shows up so readily in three
patterns. "The tomatoes grew fat." "The tomatoes grew quickly." "I grew
fat tomatoes." But that raises, or should raise, the question of why
both the grower and the fruit are credited with the growing. What is it
avbout how we conceive "growing" that lends itself to that? Why doesn;t
that work with kicking? That seems to me the interesting side of it.
I stick to my now rather lonely point. Categorizing can be an awfully
empty practice. Learning the tricks for identifying a noun may be
useful for a test asking you to use the tricks to identify a noun, but
it takes the very lively and rich subject of language and turns it into
a tedious formal game.
Person, place, and thing may not be a full definition, but it is not
trivial.
Nominalization may be limited by what we are capable of conceiving.
Maybe the problem with identifying "parts of speech" is that sentences
are not just a collection of words.
Is a cow a thing or does it only become a thing when we bring a
particular cow into focus?
The teaching of grammar is in terrible crisis, and I think we should
admit that the old solutions won't solve that crisis.
Craig
Craig,
>
> My focus on pairs like "sit/set" does result, in part, from their status
> as shibboleths, but it's not exactly driven by it. Because of their
> history (old causative suffix --jan triggering vowel changes, then
> disappearing) they made it into Early Modern English with a clear
> transitivity diffference, and because of their status as shibboleths, that
> difference may have been maintained when otherwise it would not have (no
> way to test that one way or another).
>
> At any rate, they make good paradigm examples -- if students have an
> "instinctive feel" for a difference between "sit" and "set" (for each
> pair, that's going to depend on the students' dialect, including social
> dialect) they already have a transitive vs. intransitive example that
> they're comfortable with. "Sit/set" does not, in fact, act as a shibboleth
> for most of my students, simply because they never had to be "taught" the
> distinction, and I suspect they'd regard statements like "I set down for a
> while" as involving an odd pronunciation rather than as examples of misuse
> of a verb. In my experience, dialect areas in which people use "set" for
> both transitive and intransitive do not necessarily do the same thing with
> rise/raise, so the latter would work as the base example. And again, I
> think the existence of pairs like that "partitions" the transitivity
> possibilities in a way that wouldn't otherwise happen so rigidly. It's
> classic structuralism: for people with a sit/set distinction, part of the
> meaning of "sit" is that it's not "set." "Set" thus creates a territory
> that individual uses of "sit" don't wander into.
>
> That we can take the students' knowledge of one pair and use it to
> familiarize them with the formal usage of another pair is simply icing on
> the cake.
>
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Craig
> Hancock
> Sent: Fri 7/11/2008 8:41 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Transitivity vs Intransitivity - The Linguists' Version of
> Hazing?
>
>
> Bill,
> I think John's post is very thoughtful, but I want to go ahead anyway
> with a sort of contrary, maybe too theoretical position. I have been
> working on two writing projects that have forced me to think about
> these issues more than is probably healthy. Now I'm stuck with all
> these thoughts that need purging.
> I suspect you're right, that much of what animated our teaching
> historically is giving students what they need in order to handle the
> "shibboleths" of usage. So we decide that students need to master the
> tricky concept of transitivity so that they, too, can handle sit and
> set "properly" and look down on those who don't. In the language of the
> blue collar friends I grew up with, this is stupid. We also have
> studies that show that grammar doesn't improve reading and writing,
> and is in fact harmful precisely because it pulls us away from more
> productive activities, like reading real books and doing real writing,
> and if this is what grammar is all about, then the studies are
> absolutely right. It's all trivial.
> What's more difficult, I think, is that we are also heirs to a
> structural grammar tradition that attempted to put grammar study on a
> more formal, more scientific basis.This meant making observations on
> the basis of what we could observe about forms and the "rules" that
> seem to govern them. This leads naturally to classification: on the
> basis of form, how can we classify a sentence as transitive? Because
> this is a difficult enterprise, we try to make it easy by focusing on
> the prototypes. But there is nothing to stop someone from asking the
> "so what" question and no easy answer to it. If the only thing we are
> worried about in relation to grammar is error, then it seems natural to
> dismiss this as a distraction and to reduce grammar down to "error in
> context" with as little metalanguage as possible.
> We can say that grammar has a huge role in the making of meaning, but
> our central traditions, in both traditional grammar and in linguistics,
> at least in this country, don't acknowledge that.
> To make grammar useful, we need to reconceive it in a very fundamental
> way.
> I don't like to make such a contrary blanket statement, and I hope my
> many friends in the group understand that this is said in deep respect,
> but at this point in time we (ATEG) are part of the problem.
>
> Craig
>
>
> Spruiell, William C wrote:
>
> Craig, Diane, et al.:
>
>
>
> I suspect one of the main reasons that both the classification and the
> amount of flexibility with it are big deals in grammar textbooks is
> simply the existence of verb sets like "sit vs. set," "lie vs. lay" and
> the like. Those seem to have turned into shibboleths fairly early, and
> stayed that way. One of my clearest memories of third grade Englsih was
> filling out pages of exercises in which I had to figure out whether to
> put "lie" or "lay" in blanks. We have to talk about transitivity to deal
> with those sets (and to talk in an organized way about why proto-geezers
> like me balk at statements like "I graduated high school"). What I think
> gets left out of the discussion, frequently, is the possibility that it's
> the existence of "set" that keeps us from using "sit" transitively, and
> vice versa - in other words, verbs can "block" the flexibility options of
> other verbs. Where there is no opposing verb, we're much freer to play
> with the transitivity of the one we have.
>
>
>
> I usually start class discussions of transitivity with that "sit vs. set"
> pair (and "rise/raise"), since students here in Michigan typically use
> those the same way formal usage demands (unlike the case, of course, with
> "lie vs. lay"). Those work well as prototypes for comparison, and I do
> something similar with the transitive and linking interpretations of
> verbs like "taste" ("The chef tasted the soup" / "The soup tasted too
> salty"). Having concrete models like that, and then discussing how
> particular examples fade off into grey areas, seems to work fairly well.
> What would be a problem is giving them a set of verbs, out of context,
> and asking them to label the transitivity of each; it's only with the
> relatively rare "sit/set" type that that's easily possible, I think.
>
>
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
>
> Central Michigan University.
>
>
>
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 12:43 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Transitivity vs Intransitivity - The Linguists' Version of
> Hazing?
>
>
>
> Dinae,
>
> Thanks for the response. I'm not at all surprised; that's a pretty
> good description of what we can expect to find in most grammar texts.
> Students certainly have difficulty in applying these classifications,
> so it makes absolute sense to present clear examples of the central
> prototypes. I just worry that classification becomes an end in itself,
> and it's hard to fault those who say that studying grammar (learning
> how to classify sentences this way) doesn't carry over into reading or
> writing. In fact, when we being to look at the kinds of nuanced
> choices available to us as language users, the patterns, as defined,
> aren't practical. The fact that so many sentences aren't easy to
> classify is a plus for a language user, but not for someone trying to
> use these patterns as some sort of guiding light. In the attempt to
> make it simple, we rob it of nuance and of life.
>
> Craig
>
>
> diane skinner wrote:
>
> Craig,
>
> Without question, the discourse context must be considered,
> nonetheless, classifications remain. Klammer et.al. do not state a
> "rule" for any conditionals concerning implied direct objects. So, to
> this regard, your conclusion would be accurate; however, they define
> sentence types "on the basis of prototype sentences, those that
> clearly fit a pattern without complication or ambiguity" (209). They
> also do not include other considerations, such as the derived
> intransitive, an intransitive member of an ergative pair:
> The sun melted the ice sculpture.
> The ice sculpture melted.
>
> Diane
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:32 AM, Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]>
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
> Diane,
> Just to bring this back to the previous discussion, it seems clear
> that
> Klammer et. al.'s approach is to look at the sentence (or clause, since
> transitivity happens in all clauses, even downranked ones) rather than
> the
> meaning of the verb apart from that context.
> In other words, they don't have a rule that says "If a direct object
> is
> implied, the sentence is transitive."
> Would that be accurate?
>
> Craig
>
>
> diane skinner wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Klammer, Schulz, and Volpe, in Analyzing English Grammar, 4th ed. use
> the following definitions for intransitive verbs:
> "You can test whether a verb is intransitive by dividing the predicate
> into phrases. If all the phrases except the main verb phase are
> optional adverbial modifiers, then the verb is intransitive. If you
> can substitute a prototypical adverb (like here, then, or slowly) for
> the phrase, it is an adverbial phrase.
> Ex: The bus stops here each Monday" (p.203).
>
> To explain transitive verbs, they write: (1) "Are the subject noun
> phrase (NP) the actor, the verb and action, and the object NP the
> 'receiver' of the action? if the answer is yes (as in John hit Bill,
> where hitting is an action, John performs the action, and Bill
> receives the action), then the sentence is probably Type V [i.e.,
> contains a transitive verb].
> (2) "To find the direct object, ask who? or what? after the subject
> noun phrase and verb: John saw who/what? If the answer does not rename
> the subject, it should be the direct object" (p. 221).
> (3) "Is the verb followed by a direct object, a noun phrase that has a
> referent different from that of the subject noun phrase? if so, the
> sentence [contains a transitive verb]" (227).
>
> Additionally, they include examples of transitive verbs with reflexive
> and reciprocal direct objects: "Elmer cut himself with a Swiss Army
> knife" (222),
> and transitive verbs with object complements: "Cheryl considered
> Carl's bean soup salty" (223).
>
> Grammar is so much fun!!
> Diane
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 7:17 PM, Veit, Richard <[log in to unmask]>
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
> Dee, Craig, Tabetha,
>
>
>
> Whether we regard a sentence as transitive depends on how we choose to
> define the term, and we are choosing different definitions. Our diverse
> definitions cover a lot of territory. The options seen in the four
> postings
> (copied below) range from the narrowest to the broadest:
>
>
>
> 1. To be transitive, the verb must be immediately followed by a
> direct
> object. [Tabetha's definition?]
>
> 2. To be transitive, the verb must have an overt direct object (in
> any
> position). [Craig's definition?]
>
> 3. To be transitive, the verb must have a deep-structure direct
> object, whether or not it is overt in the spoken sentence. [My
> definition]
>
> 4. To be transitive, one must be able to imagine a direct object
> for
> the verb. [Dee's definition?]
>
>
>
> These definitions yield different results:
>
>
>
> · "He remembered my birthday." Transitive for all four
> definitions.
>
> · "He remembered fondly the old days." Transitive for
> definitions
> 2, 3, and 4; intransitive for definition 1.
>
> · "Did he remember your birthday?" "He remembered." Transitive
> for
> definitions 3 and 4; intransitive for definitions 1 and 2.
>
> · "He sings in the shower." Transitive for definition 4;
> intransitive for definitions 1, 2, and 3.
>
> · "He coughed loudly." Intransitive for all four definitions.
>
>
>
> My apologies if I mischaracterized your definition, but we certainly are
> not
> all in accord, and the differences are interesting.
>
>
>
> Dick Veit
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
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