Parts of Speech – Quick and Dirty

So we linguists spend too much time, I’d say, saying how other people’s definitions for parts of speech are inadequate, how they are using the wrong categories, and how, essentially, everyone’s lives would be better if they would just listen to us linguists.

We also talk about how complicated English grammar really is, suggesting you’ve got to spend a lot of time learning about it and teaching it - but that's it's really interesting and amazing! - and you can't just do it in five minutes at the beginning of class. And while that all might be somewhat true, it’s not very productive. And no one has enough time; they need to get on with the business of reading and writing and analyzing.

I, in collaboration with teachers I've been working with, have been creating materials that will be linguistically accurate, but also relevant to what you need to do in your classrooms. In the meantime, however, the quick and dirty (and erroneous) shortcuts are out here, and I do think there can be some quick and dirty shortcuts that are at least better than those (uh oh, I'm sounding like one of those ranting linguists), and that take advantage of our intuitive knowledge, using morphological and syntactic facts, rather than just meaning-based definitions.

I've been picking on my 8th grader's textbook's "grammar and usage" lessons (and wrote an article about it, so at least that ranting turned into something more productive, I hope). And my 10th grader showed me her parts of speech notes from school just this morning. She was confused because the definitions didn't match up with the examples as she understood them. (It was conflating the forms of words (noun, verb, adjective) with their functions (using a term like "adverbial" to mean "modify").) So I gave her a copy of Navigating English Grammar by Anne and me, but that wasn't what she had in mind. So then I wrote up a quick and dirty two-pager on parts of speech, another two-pager on Movable Modifiers (various parts of speech categories that serve as modifiers), and a one-pager on Relative Clauses (all adapted from our book). These were really just intended for my own kids, but I thought maybe they'd be useful for others.

Back to Nouns: Noun Meaning

When I talk with my college students about noun semantics, I mostly reassure them these distinctions (abstract-concrete, mass-count, and proper-common) are true of all languages, and these are real distinctions that we all have in our heads. So it’s all pretty straightforward. Some words, admittedly, are tricky because these semantic notions of abstractness, for example, are hard to pin down. We need to call in the philosophers. Or call in the fourth graders.

Deidre wrote to me that in the course of discussing various nouns last week, her 4th(ish) graders concluded that “actual people, places, things and ideas aren't nouns themselves, but the words for them are nouns. I [Deidre] demonstrated by picking up Tucker (my dog) and saying I wasn't picking up a noun, but that the word Tucker is a noun. All of this created some interesting discussions and challenged their abstract thinking.”

Concrete nouns are simple labels for things that we can see and touch: toad, belly button, rug, Tucker. Abstract nouns are, well, abstract – you can’t see or touch them: love, truth, friendliness. But some words pose a challenge for our definition of abstract. Can you see or touch weather? Or how about unicorn?

Philosophers and semanticists have thought a lot about these things, most agreeing that abstract nouns can be further divided into different subcategories: events and processes that exist but that you can’t actually see (weather, temperature) and other things that are not observable (happiness, freedom). Where does that leave unicorns, ghosts, fairies, and monsters? Ask your students and see what they come up with!

As for count and mass, that’s a real distinction too, and a fairly straightforward one. Count nouns are countable, mass nouns are not.
mass nouns: rice, mud, mail
count nouns: frog, idea, shoe
And there are some handy tests to distinguish these. Count nouns can be pluralized and they can occur with numbers or other words that express quantities: each, both, many, etc. Mass nouns, can’t be pluralized, can’t be counted, and occur with much or less. (But both mass and count nouns can occur with the, all, and some.)

Take some nouns and try them out. Can the noun be pluralized? (If so, it’s a count noun.) Can it occur with a? (If so, it’s a count noun.) Can it occur with much? (If so, it’s a mass noun.) Did you find any nouns that work both ways, like light? (I turned on two lights. There is not much light in this room.)

Parenthetical on less: In general, less is used with mass nouns, while fewer is used with count nouns. But less has long been used with count nouns too, in fact. Many a grocery store sign says “10 Items or Less,” and although some people get upset about it, less has been used with countable things ever since English was English. Apparently, King Alfred (the Great) who was a staunch defender of English used it that way in his writings, way back in the 800s. And we’ve seen it ever since. But this isn’t LanguageLog (where I’m sure there are lots of discussions of this. I just checked, and there are here).

So knowing these labels and making our unconscious knowledge of the distinctions into conscious knowledge could make our lives a lot better. Or it could at least make MadLibs a lot funnier. This word game is sometimes the only place that my students have ever encountered parts of speech labels. I like MadLibs. And it reinforces what we already know - that word games are fun, and that even parts of speech are fun (and funny). But the restrictive parts of speech labels that MadLibs offers are sometimes problematic, and not having fine enough distinctions for nouns is one of the issues. So you might have something like

She seized (number) ______ (noun) _______.

And then, say, you write in She seized six rice. Or She seized 10,000 homework. It’s not even funny because the syntax is weird. Rice and homework are mass nouns, not count nouns, and numbers only occur with nouns that are countable. That’s a fact about the language, and should be a fact about MadLibs. These are real distinctions with real labels, and if MadLibs used these finer distinctions, then kids would learn the labels.

So I think we should come up with a better version of MadLibs that has more options – mass noun, count noun, abstract noun, concrete noun, not to mention degree word and quantifier. Who’s in?

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 7: Five Forms of a Verb

I've just posted a version of this lesson plan on TeachLing, so you can see it here. I'll provide an overview here too.

Every verb has five forms: infinitive, past tense, present tense, past participle, present participle. Knowing this will turn out to be really useful in
• identifying passive
• making tenses consistent in writing
• distinguishing main verbs from other (modal) verbs
• effecting the “feel” of your writing
• confronting subject-verb agreement
• self-empowerment!

Here is a chart with some examples.

After briefly introducing these forms, you could have your students come up with verbs and put them into the frames below to come up with the five forms for each verb. Have them discuss where there is overlap in the forms.

infinitive: I really want to ___________ today.
present tense: She __________ on most days.
past tense: He __________ yesterday.
present participle: They are/were ___________ at noon.
past participle: We have/had already ___________ before they arrived.

The Infinitive. The infinitival form of the verb expresses no tense. It is the bare form of the verb and is preceded by to: to coerce, to dance, to chow down.

Exercise: What is the connection in meaning between the words infinity and infinitive? After hypothesizing, look them up!

Present Tense: Although we don’t have any problem using present tense, it can be a bit hard to identify because of the lack of present tense suffixes in English. You can conjugate a verb with all of the subject pronouns to see this lack of tense marking:

I sing
you sing
he/she sings
we sing
you (all) sing
they sing

So it’s only with he/she that there is a different form: sings. In many other languages, and in older forms of English too, there is a different ending to go with each subject pronoun. Here’s the conjugation of sing in Old English, where there were four different endings. I’ll use the modern version of the pronouns:

I singe, you singest, he or she singeth, we singath, you all singath, they singath

Although the language has simplified the endings used to mark present tense, there is still a present tense form of the verb. It just happens to look like the infinitive in most cases. We know as speakers, though, when it is tensed.

Past Tense. The past tense form of the verb is typically affixed with -ed, and there are some other irregular patterns.

Questions:
What are some verbs that form their past tense by adding –t, such as swept?
What are some verbs that form their past tense by changing the vowel, such as sang?
What are some verbs that form their past tense by changing nothing, such as cut?

Past and Present Participles
The past and present participles of the verb typically occur with an auxiliary verb have or be (which we’ll return to).

The present participle form is the -ing form of the verb. In fact, you can call it that, if you want. These occur with a form of be: am, is, are, was, were.

The koala is eating the eucalyptus.
The kangaroos were hopping over the fence.

The past participle occurs with a form of have: has, have, or had:

A fox has spotted a rabbit.
The hawk had eaten a rabbit.

The present participle is easy to identify; it always has the –ing. The past tense form is a little trickier to identify since it sometimes looks exactly like the past tense. The difference, though, is that the past tense always occurs alone and the past participle has to occur with has, have, or had.

past tense: talk
past participle: had talked

past tense: understood
past participle: have understood

past tense: brought
past participle: had brought


Activity – Past and present participle: Come up with at least eight verbs and write their past tense and past participial forms. Compare with others and discuss.

Activity – present vs. present participle/progressive. Find examples of the present tense in a book or other text. Write them down and discuss your findings.

Is the present ever used to describe something not happening right now? If so, why do you think that is? Are there other ways besides using the present tense verb form to convey that something is happening now? It may be tempting to want to say that examples like the following are in present tense.

She is running a race today.
We are sitting at a café.

However, so far we have only discussed the forms of individual verbs. So in this first example above, is is present tense and running is the present participle. The two words together express what is called the progressive aspect - we’ll get to that – but they don’t express the present tense.

This next part is optional, but I think it's important because it deals with variation and language change.

Dialectal Variation in Past Participial Forms

There has always been some overlap in past tense and past participle forms in English, and probably because of this overlap in forms, there has long been variation. For example, what would you say in these examples?

I have already ____________ (insert past participle of verb swim) across the lake.
You should have ___________ (insert past participle of verb mow) the lawn.
He should have ____________ (insert past participle of verb prove) he could do it.

More than one form is possible in all of these. As you know, language is always changing, and which form of any of these words is considered more standard is determined only be what the majority of speakers end up using.

This lesson may seem like it has a lot packed in, but it's really pretty straightforward and students are very successful at identifying the verb forms. Starting this way with individual verbs then makes tackling long strings like should have been writing much easier.

I'd like to hear from you, teachers, about which directions you'd like to go in. Some possibilities: discussion of verb strings in order to identify passive, discussion of tense and aspect in order to address consistency of the use of tense in writing, discussion of the verb forms to address issues of subject-verb agreement, discussion of the differences between auxiliary and main verbs and what that reveals about our unconscious knowledge, to name just a few. Or, we can continue to march along with discovering facts about grammar, but you can rest assured, and reassure your students, that these tools will then come into play in practical ways soon enough.

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 6: Verb Morphology

So what are some ways to find verbs, if we can’t rely on a meaning-based definition like a verb is an action word? Well, only verbs can be tensed. In English, we indicate past tense and present tense on verbs, but since there’s no much present tense marking left in English (I’ll come back to that), let’s stick with past tense.

The -ed is a past tense suffix that can then attach to a verb. (It’s called an inflectional affix, distinct from derivational affixes. Wikipedia has a decent overview of the difference between the two, , and here’s a bit more technical one by Tom Payne, but you don’t need to get into this now, if you don’t want to.)

Test for Verbs: Can take -ed to indicate past tense.

She walked to school.
She blerked the zongot.
She ambled down the lane.

There are other ways of marking past tense: catch-caught, read-read, and so on.

Activity: Come up with more irregular past tense verbs. Are there patterns? Groups of words that take the same kind of irregular past tense? Make up some words. What are their past tense forms? Think of some slang or other newish words. What are their past tense forms? (So all of the new words will take the –ed. The other forms, which we now think of as irregular, were members of larger groups of words that formed their past tense in different ways in older forms of English.)

So the test for verbs is that they can indicate past tense, typically by -ed, but sometimes in other ways.

This could be a good time to start a wall chart for verbs, with the test on it.

There are plenty of other affixes that turn words into verbs (or attach to verbs to make a verb with a different meaning). Here are just a few. (These are all derivational affixes, distinct from the tense-marking inflectional affixes.)

dis- disappear
re- rediscover

-ate activate
-ize regularize, maximize, realize
-en tighten, deepen, thicken

Then the past tense –ed can attach to any of them (always at the end, after the other affixes) to mark tense. This post from the Morphology Strand discusses some verb-forming and adjective-forming suffixes, and links to a lesson plan on that. Here's a link to a TeachLing lesson referenced in the Morph post, but be aware that it also includes adjectives, which you may not have dealt with yet.

Next, we'll delve into the differences between main verbs and auxiliary verbs, and the five different forms that main verbs can have.

Here's a version of this post as a doc.

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 5: Intro to Verbs

So now on to verbs. We all have heard that a verb is an action word, or maybe that a verb is an action or state. But you may have suspected that we’re going to abandon that in favor of identifying verbs according to their morphology and syntax.

Why is the “verb is an action or state” an inadequate definition? Well, adjectives and nouns can also express states; in the phrase “a happy child” happy is a state, but it’s an adjective, not a verb. In a phrase like “your perseverance," you could say that perseverance is a state – but it’s a noun, not a verb. Nouns can also express actions: the kick, a struggle, the mingling, etc. So this is the kind of logical subjectivity that I’m talking about when I say that the traditional notions of parts of speech can be misleading and make us doubt our intuitions. And here again, the nonsense words approach to sentence analysis reinforces that we rely on morphology and syntax not meaning to identify categories. What’s the verb in this sentence?

The quixlets blorked a chorn.

You can identify blorked as a verb here because of -ed suffix, which you know (even if you don’t know you know) is a past tense ending that attaches to verbs. We also know it’s a verb because of its position between the subject noun phrase, the quixlets, and the object noun phrase, a chorn, a typical position for verbs in English. We’ll return to more discussion of the syntax (their position in relation to other words) of verb phrases.

Now on to more verb morphology.

Strand 2/Morphology - Part 6: Analysis Reveals Verbs and Adjectives

A conscious understanding of the other main parts of speech will come along naturally as we discuss various words. Students will see when creating nouns, for example, that many of them are built on either adjectives or verbs. Take these examples; the affix will attach to the same kind of word to make a new word:

run + er = runner
V + er = N

happy + ness = happiness
A + ness = N

So students discover that -er will always attach to verbs (V) to make nouns (N). And -ness will always attach to adjectives (A) to make Ns. You can also have students figure out the meaning of the affixes. What does -er mean here? And -ness? How do you know?

They will see that all of these pieces (morphemes) have meanings of their own even though they aren’t words.

This kind of word analysis reveals that we already know parts of speech categories very well since we use them appropriately to make words all the time. You never mess up and say, for example,

happyful

attaching the –ful suffix to an adjective like happy. What does –ful attach to? Think of words that end in –ful: wonderful, meaningful, careful. Can you figure out the part of speech of wonder, meaning, and care?

There's a lesson plan here. It allows students to explore the categories noun, verb, and adjective by attaching and detaching suffixes. They will see that certain suffixes attach to certain kinds of words, and that they make use of that knowledge unconsciously all the time. They will also discover some quick "tests" to identify parts of speech.

Strand 2/Morphology - Part 5: The Grimm Brothers Make a Discovery or Why Sound Change Matters

This delightful “onion” video by Gina Cooke offers some surprising etymological connections, but it also demonstrates how sound change is often at play and can reveal relationships among words. (She’ll have you consider in the video, for example, how the s of one, onion, and alone are pronounced very differently even though the words actually are related.) Of course, we can’t possibly undertake a study of all of the sound changes that affected English for the last many hundreds of years. We can, however, look at a few that affected a great many words in systematic ways, thus revealing connections among words that we might not otherwise have noticed. The change known as Grimm’s Law, for example, actually affected the whole Germanic branch of languages (before there even was a language we call English). This change affected Dutch, German, Frisian, Swedish, and a bunch of others.

Jacob Grimm (who, along with his brother William collected the tales that became known as Grimm’s fairy tales) noticed that when there were certain sounds in Latin, there were certain other sounds in the Germanic languages, including English. In 1822, he published these sound correspondences, which then became known as Grimm’s Law. Here they are.

b → p
d → t
g → k

p → f
t → th
k → h

And there were some other ones, but I include these since they are the ones that are most useful for our purposes. Because English, later in its life, borrowed so many words from Latin, Greek, and French, there are a great many words that are of non-Germanic origin that did not, therefore, undergo the Grimm’s Law sound shift (since it only affected the Germanic languages). For example, we have the English word tooth and the Latin root dent-, of dentist, dental, dentures, etc. So those "d"s turned into "t"s in English, but stayed "d"s in the languages that English later borrowed from. Some other examples:

d-t: decimal – ten, rodent - rat
g-k: grain – corn (remember we’re talking sound not spelling here)
p-f: patriarch – father
t-th: triple – three
k-h: cardiac – heart, cornucopia, unicorn - horn
b-p: bacillus – peg
(Ok, so there must be a better example of this b-p correspondence. A bacillus is “a straight rod-shaped bacterium that requires oxygen for growth”, according to Merriam-Webster. Hmm.)

And if you compare other non-Germanic words from, say modern French and Spanish, with English ones, you can see the evidence for these sound changes here too; the word deux in French or dos in Spanish, both meaning ‘two.’ Or the words père in French or padre in Spanish, both meaning ‘father’. It’s pretty cool!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This Grimm’s Law diversion is an example of the importance of some sound changes to understanding connections among words, and it isn’t necessarily best introduced at this point to your students. Or maybe it is. Let me know. We should probably just investigate some basic morphological patterns first and put aside sound for now. So on to verbs - and maybe adjectives.

Strand 2/ Morphology - Part 4: What about Greek and Latin Roots?

Morphology is about investigating words and word parts. Those parts of Greek and Latin origin are some of the ones studied more frequently, and which have long been a part of traditional schooling. They do form the basis of many of our more “learned” words; hence, they are studied in school from elementary school on up to high school SAT prep. There are already lots of lesson plans, flash cards, and worksheets out there. Just google something like: “Latin and Greek roots, middle school” and you’ll get more worksheets and lesson plans than you’ll know what to do with. I’m sure many of them are good. These seem like they might be, for example:

Here’s one teacher (Stephanie)’s blog about teaching about word roots with her 4th and 5th graders.

And this looks like a good resource for middle school word study, which also discussed the emphasis that the Common Core Standards place on such study, and some of this teacher (a different Stephanie)’s tips for getting started.

And here's a mini list with a mini activity on Latin and Greek morphemes from TeachLing.

So we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You may want to include some of these Greek and Latin root word kinds of activities in your classes. And once you engage your students in analyzing words, they’ll discover that it’s engaging, it’s useful, it’s revealing. It reveals the incredible complexity of our language(s) and the depth of our knowledge about words, morphemes, meaning, and structure. That’s empowering. But first, just a quick (not at all exhaustive or inclusive) overview of the evidence that morphological analysis helps reading, comprehension, and vocabulary development, in case you need to justify this kind of study to anyone. The work by Nagy et al. is frequently cited:

Nagy, William; Berninger, Virginia W.; Abbott, Robert D., Contributions of morphology beyond phonology to literacy outcomes of upper elementary and middle-school students. Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 98(1), Feb 2006, 134-147

and an article by Mark Pacheco and Amanda Goodwin from 2009 “Putting Two and Two Together: Middle School Students' Morphological Problem-Solving Strategies For Unknown Words” in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.

Some with online links to the full articles are Prince 2009, “Morphological analysis: New light on a vital reading skill”

Mary Stowe, “Teaching Morphology: Enhancing Vocabulary Development and Reading Comprehension”

Pamela J. Hickey and Tarie Lewis, “The Common Core, English Learners, and Morphology 101: Unpacking LS.4 for ELLs"

Tom S. Bellomo “Morphological Analysis and Vocabulary Development: Critical Criteria”

Lindsay A. Harris, “Adolescent Literacy: Wordy Study With Middle and High School Students,”

So there’s plenty of research-based evidence that word study - not just of Greek and Latin roots, but of any old word - is useful, practical, enlightening, and will basically help us all be better people. There are already lots of helpful hints, useful lessons, and engaging word matrices out there. So what to add here? I said in the plan for this morphology strand that using the parts of speech as a roadmap through morphology might be a good way to organize it, so I’ll try to do that. That takes us next to verbs. OK, good. Verbs it is. I did, though, want to make a brief foray into sound change, so I’ll do that first in my next post about the Brothers Grimm.

Strand 2/Morphology - Part 3: History Lessons

Actually, a whole lot of morphology is a history lesson so this title is too broad and this lesson is actually many lessons. I'll just say this is an overview, and it contains lots of links to lots of other lessons, so you can choose to go in a variety of directions.

English has borrowed and continues to borrow lots of words from lots of languages. The language now known as Old English (spoken from about 700-1100) was greatly influenced by Scandinavian languages because of the Vikings’ presence in England. Then the French invasion of England in 1066 led to a vast amount of borrowing from French, as the French speakers ruled England for several hundred years. The printing press was introduced in England in 1476. It changed the language forever, fixing some spellings and conventions and beginning the process of standardization and prescribed rules about English (which you can read more about here). Mass production of books and pamphlets meant that literacy gradually was becoming more widespread. Because the London dialect appeared in print, other dialects came to be seen as less prestigious because they were no longer written down. Latin had long been an important (though dead) language, and there was renewed and active borrowing from Latin in the 18th century. This age of scientific and intellectual discovery led to the creation of many new words, many of which are based on Latin and Greek roots. Here’s a humorous video of the history of English (in 10 minutes!). And we have a fairly succinct overview of the history of English in chapter 11 of Linguistics for Everyone (by Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck). Order yours today! (I'm sorry it's so expensive.) There are, of course, lots of others, but we’re partial to this one.☺

TeachLing has some lesson plans on the history of English, so I'll link and summarize some of them here.

Lesson: Origins of names:
This lesson is designed to acquaint students with the languages that contribute to the development of English. The teacher researches the etymology of students' first names, and in discussion it emerges that the languages of origin (French, English, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Spanish) tell us a lot about the history of the language.

Lesson: Cognates of the name John:
This lesson is a follow up to Origins of Names. Students will be familiar with the languages from which many English names derive (French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Celtic languages, etc.). This lesson introduces them to cognates, related words across languages, through names. Students see that the name John has many different cognates, and can then investigate other cognates, expanding their knowledge of English vocabulary.

Lesson: More on Cognates and Language Families
This lesson introduces students to cognates across different languages, and what these cognates tell us about language families (and about Indo European in particular).

Lesson: English Words from Greek and Roman names of gods:
Students learn the meanings of the names of Greek and Roman gods, and explore English words that have those roots and associated meanings. Lesson is set up using flashcards that can be exchanged.

LessonS: Language is Fluid is a whole series of lessons (6 45-minute) that Mary Buzan put together. This lesson sequence moves from lessons on personal language to solving problem sets in Standard American English and Nicaraguan English. It aims to develop students' awareness that through regular observation, data collection, analysis, and testing, they can recognize patterns in language and acknowledge that variation and change characterize language. (These incorporate several of the lesson plans on TeachLing mentioned above: Cognates of name John, Language Change: Origins of Names, More on Cognates and Language Families, Origins of Names.)

So you can see that discussion of history will play a role throughout our morphological exploration.

Here’s a good video on why doubt is spelled the way it is if you’re overwhelmed by all of this etymological investigation and just need some screen time.

Spelling Detour

You should check out Ann Whiting’s students’ techniques for talking through morphological boundaries and spelling changes in the video in this Determination post and many of her other videos and discussions at her blog from her 7th grade class last year and this year’s blog. Here’s a great lesson, “Should ‘e’ stay or should ‘e’ go”, demonstrating how the students themselves hypothesize about spelling patterns. I think I’ll be checking out her blog a lot – tons of great strategies there.

Also, Dan Allen’s blog on his fifth grade class has a nice collection of posts on spelling and language analysis.

Both Whiting and Allen reference the French-based Real Spelling and Neil Ramsden’s site, “Word Building and Spelling: Experiments in English Morphology”. It looks pretty cool, and there is a lot of information about morphological patterns and the connections to spelling. I’m not going to take the time now to delve deeper, but you might want to check out the Mini Matrix Maker. Also, the Word Searcher is a great tool for morphological analysis and spelling patterns. You can search for all the words with certain letters in that order, and then use that list to look for words that may be related to each other. If there’s interest out there from whoever is reading this, let me know and we can spend some more time with morphology and spelling. Also, Dave, Wayne, and Maya have a paper on spelling that will soon be linked here. (Right, Dave?)

Strand 2/Morphology - Part 2: Breaking Real Words into Morphemes

After doing the nonsense words and made up words investigations, you can move on to real words. The goal here is simply to break words into their meaningful parts, their morphemes. You can do this, of course, with any category, but it will be easier to limit the focus at this point on nouns, and the kinds of suffixes that nouns take, so it’s probably best to offer a list rather than have the students generate their own words, at least at first. Here are some ideas. You can use others (that may related to topics you’re covering in your classrooms).

cats = cat + s
probability = probabil + ity (probable)
freedom = free + dom
happiness = happi (happy) + ness
wreckage = wreck + age
runner = runn (run) + er

Some of these examples illustrate how spelling can change with the addition of some of the affixes (affix is a cover term for suffix and prefix), so you can decide if you want to detour here to focus on spelling. There are lots of interesting spelling detours to take, actually, so I’ll have a separate post about some of them and some of the many excellent resources.

This lesson on TeachLing is good, but it's on breaking words of all different parts of speech into their morphemes, so I wouldn’t do it here if you’re trying to limit the scope to just nouns. It might, however, be useful as a model.

Strand 2/Morphology - Part 1: Nonsense and Made-Up Words, Focusing on Nouns

You could start with Lesson 1, the nonsense sentence activity from Strand 1, where the goal is to understand our unconscious knowledge of parts of speech and our use of morphology and syntax in accessing that knowledge. We can figure out a lot about words, categories, and meanings by using morphology, syntax, and even phonology. (The phonology focus will be unique to this strand. We’ll examine, for example, some sound changes and correspondences that can shed light on relationships between words of Latin origin and those of Anglo-Saxon origin.) There’s a great version of this lesson, called “Morphology Games: What making up words reveals,” posted by Christina Galeano on Teachling here.


We can also see how we use morphological knowledge by looking at made-up but “real” words, words you likely have never heard before: unsluglike. How do you know what that means? Because you know the meanings of the parts, the morphemes. What does un- mean? What does the suffix -like mean? The strategy here and in figuring out morpheme meaning in general will be to think of other words that also have that same piece. So, words like unhappy, uninteresting or childlike. (Un- is actually trickier than most morphemes because there are two uns with different meanings that attach to different parts of speech – the un- of unhappy which means ‘not’ and attaches to adjectives, and the un- of untie that means ‘reverse the action’ and attaches to verbs. So that could be a separate lesson or you could choose a word that’s easier to analyze than unsluglike.)

Strand 2/Morphology Syllabus

I think that focusing on lexical categories (parts of speech) for this morphology/vocabulary strand is a good way to organize it. So we can begin with nouns, move on to verbs, and then clauses, with the other pieces coming along (or not) along the way, but the thread connecting the lessons will be vocabulary development and word analysis rather than applications to writing.

We’ll be exploring words and their pieces, and how breaking down words into their meaningful parts can help with all sorts of things – reading, comprehension, vocabulary development, critical thinking.

Deidre and I talked the other day about how so many of the word roots and pieces that one might choose to investigate (say lists of Latin and Greek roots) come up in context and you can then explore them on the spot (or decide you’d like to; no one is supposed to know the meanings of all of these pieces just off the top of your head). And that such a spontaneous approach is much preferred to, say, having a list of words and roots to cover every week. However, we also think it might be useful to have some master list that you (and your students?) can check off as you do encounter them. So I’ll think about that.

I think the so-called syllabus for the morphology strand will be much more loosey-goosey than the grammar strand. And I’ll be responding to what’s happening in the classrooms of Deidre, Dave, and anyone else out there who ends up following along. But the following few Strand 2 Morphology posts have some ideas to get us started.

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 4 Charting Noun Morph and Syn

A useful next step in your classrooms is to have students come up with lists of the morphological and syntactic rules of and cues for nouns. You can see an example here, modeled on one made in Dana Smith’s high school class (10th grade, Dana?), in collaboration with Anne Lobeck. (And you can see a presentation called “Teaching Teachers to Teach Scientifically” from the AAAS last year in Vancouver that includes a similar wall chart and some other context and explanation of this kind of approach to parts of speech. Also, Anne Lobeck, who organized the panel, and David Lightfoot, who presented "Language Puzzles: What They Tell Us About Biology, Experience, and Explanation" have a draft of an article "Teaching Science through Language" that grew out of that.) Oh, and TeachLing has a few lessons that approach parts of speech this way.

With something like this chart hanging in your classrooms or posted in students’ notebooks or whatever, students will have a handy way to identify a noun.

Happy nouning.

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 3 on Noun Syntax

So far, we’ve looked at some of the suffixes that attach to nouns. This is part of their morphology. Now we can look at the syntax of nouns, considering the kinds of words that occur alongside them.

Nouns occur after Determiners like a, the, and an (also called articles); this, that, these, those (also called demonstrative determiners); and possessive determiners (my, your, her, etc.).

Nouns occur after Numerals, both the Cardinal ones (six, eleven, four thousand) and the Ordinal ones (second, fifteenth).

Nouns occur after Quantifiers, words that express quantity like all, each, both, every, some, several, many, more, less, much, few. (Quantifiers behave differently from other words, so they are a distinct part of speech category, albeit one that your students may not have heard of. I can post something more about them later. Feel free to just ask me, though. And remember that for many of you locals, I make house (classroom) calls!)

And finally, nouns can be modified by (or described by) Adjectives: the furry kitten, a rainy day. The term modification is one we’ll be exploring in more depth later. And we'll take another look at adjectives too.

Importantly, though, as with the noun morphology, don’t just tell your students all this. Have them figure out by examining sentences that either they have come up with or that you find in texts and looking for nouns. How do they know that something is a noun? It’ll be these kinds of clues, as well as the morphological ones from Lesson 2. The next step will be to summarize all this. We’ve found that a wall chart is a nice way to do this. That’s coming up in Lesson 4.
Here's this lesson as a doc.

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 2 on Noun Morphology

So if you did the nonsense sentence activity with your students, I’d love to hear how it went. It serves to introduce the idea that we make use of certain morphological and syntactic rules/tools to categorize words.

This morphological information—the different parts they can have, the ways we put those parts together, and the information those different parts convey—is part of what we use to identify a word as a noun. So here’s what we know:

Nouns can be pluralized – One morphological fact about most nouns (see more about the “most” part here) is that they express number, they can be singular or plural. (Some languages have a different form for “dual,” which is pretty cool.) We usually pluralize an English noun by adding -s/-es/-ies in the written form: rats, spiders, bunnies. So if you take your word in question and pluralizing it works, you got yourself a noun.

Here is a short TED Ed video explanation by John McWhorter for some of the odd plurals in English.

Nouns can be made possessive – Another morphological fact about nouns is that they can take the possessive suffix -s. Try attaching the possessive to some words that you know aren’t nouns – they’re terrible. Or it turns that word into a noun. (I follow the linguistic tradition of using * to mark an ungrammatical example.)

*the happy’s hat

*a curious’s question

but

the cat’s tail

the truth’s inevitability

Nouns can have certain other “nominal” suffixes – -ance/ence (perforamance), –ion (formation), -al (refusal), -age (leakage). To find some more of these, try this activity:

Have students come up with words that are created by adding the noun-making suffixes. There’s a table here with some examples. You’ll see that the suffixes will consistently attach to the same part of speech, which is cool too. (Students might notice that some of the suffixes in the table attach to nouns to derive other nouns rather than words of another category.)

What’s the point of this? To show that we all already know what nouns are and how to manipulate them morphologically, by adding the appropriate suffixes. And you get for free some good morphological analysis as words are put together and taken apart.

Here's Lesson 2 as a doc.

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 1 on Nouns

Take a nonsense sentence. Make up your own or use something like this:

The dorbling groobies frandled a bonkled slank.

Ask students to identify the part of speech of various words. They’ll quickly tell you that groobies and slank are nouns. They will likely add that frandled is a verb. They may stumble a bit on dorbling and bonkled, but will soon label these as adjectives. (If they do stumble, it’s because these forms, in other positions, could be verbs; they’re aware that those -ing and -ed endings are typical verbal endings.) So how do they know all this? How do they know that groobies and slank are nouns? It’s certainly not because they are “persons, places, things, or even ideas” since these “things” don’t even exist. They know because of the morphology and syntax, because of the suffixes, in this case, on the words (their morphology) and because of the position of the words in relation to the other words (some of which are “real” words) in the rest of the sentence (the syntax). It is that kind of knowledge that we make use of all of the time to identify parts of speech and to learn real new words and how they function.

Move some of those words around and see what happens:

While she was dorbling, she bonkled some slank groobies.

He groobies on the weekends.

Now what part of speech is dorbling or bonkled? Yep, they’re both verbs. We know this because of the morphology (the endings, or the affixes, on the words) and the syntax (the position of the words in relation to the other words). What’s slank here? It’s an adjective, which we know because of its position preceding groobies, which is still a noun. But in the next sentence, groobies is a verb. How do we know? Again, the endings and the position.

So a key lesson here is that we all already know everything we need to know about parts of speech, about the various lexical categories. We just need to make that unconscious knowledge into conscious knowledge. We make use of morphology and syntax constantly. Another important thing to note is that meaning-based definitions (a noun is a person, place, or thing; a verb is an action or state) are very limited and limiting, and can sometimes lead us astray. They can be good starting places, but it’s really the other information that our brain relies on to create the good sentences it creates all the time. So when we start paying attention to morphology and syntax, we’ll see that a whole new linguistic world opens up.

(You can read about doing a version of this with elementary kids in this article .)


If you'd like to print this out, here it is as a doc.

Strand 1/Grammar Syllabus

I'm going to attempt to lay out a rough order of topics here that we may (or may not) pursue in the Swanson and Keyser classrooms.

1. Nouns and Noun Phrases 2. Verbs and Verb Phrases 3. The Clause 4. Adjectives, Adverbs, and Prepositions 5. Independent, Coordinate, and Subordinate Clauses 6. Complementation and Modification

The basic grammar components and their order are based on Navigating English Grammar: A guide to analyzing real language by Lobeck and Denham. Get yours here. (Actually, I can get you copies if you think you can use them. Let me know.)

The novel (re)introduction to nouns and verbs will allow students to see that they already have strong intuitions about these basic parts of speech, and that the traditional meaning-based definitions (a noun is a person, place, or thing; a verb is an action or state) are insufficient. Instead, they will discover new tests and tools to employ in determining parts of speech.

Understanding nouns and verbs is critical in order to identify clauses. And there are some great tests and tools to help students find subjects (and therefore clauses). [I’ll add some links to these soon.] There are lots of applications here to writing – connections to fragments, run-ons, subject-verb agreement issues, for starters.

Tackling verbs is big, so I think it’s probably best to do a short introduction in order to get to clauses, but then come back to it to discuss the various kinds of verbs (modal, auxiliary, and main/lexical), the tests/tools to identify them, and then applications of all of this knowledge (discussing tense and aspect to address consistency of tense, if that’s an issue for your writers; identification of and discussion of passive voice; the power (and lack thereof) of be, etc.).

Mostly, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions (and particles, which are actually part of verbs, like look up), are straightforward and don’t cause any issues in writing. However, there are some prescriptive shibboleths associated with adjectives and adverbs (Don’t say drive slow or cook good) that it is useful to talk about to discover how and why such variation comes about, that they are not actually “incorrect,” but that we can come to understand how to make educated rhetorical choices. Also, they need to be able to identify prepositional phrases, for example, to understand the variation that exists in certain subject-verb agreement constructions. [Link to lesson plan and draft of article - will add soon.]

Having students understand how and why language changes and varies is a crucial thread throughout this grammar story. The stigmas associated with certain variations (typically deemed “incorrect”) are based on socially-determined biases rather than linguistic fact. Discovering this through investigating linguistic patterns and exploring the origins of some of the prescriptive rules is enlightening, and, again, allows writers to make informed choices.

The bigger discussion of clauses connects very directly to writing in a variety of ways – understanding how to punctuate subordinate clauses compared to coordinate independent clauses, for example; avoiding fragments; adding variety to writing by using different kinds of clauses, and so on.

And the last section on complementation and modification also connects directly to writing – movable/dangling modifiers, putting ‘modifying’ information at the beginning, setting it off by commas, discovering the difference between essential and non-essential information (and learning to listen for cues in our intonation to discern the difference). Lots of applications here, which we’ll return to.