Sandra Wilde's Funner Grammar

I saw something about this book when it came out in 2012, but I’ve just gotten my hands on it (my library didn’t have it, so it had to come from St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington), and I’ve now ordered my own copy because it’s so good. It’s called Funner Grammar: Fresh ways to teach usage, language, and writing conventions, grades 3-8, and it’s making me breathe a sigh of relief. Sandra Wilde has written many other good books and resources for teachers, including You Kan Red This! Spelling and punctuation for whole language classrooms, K-6 (1991), What’s a Schwa Sound Anyway? A holistic guide to phonetics, phonics, and spelling (1997), Miscue Analysis Made Easy: Building on Student Strengths (2000), Testing and Standards (2002), Spelling Strategies and Patterns (2007), but this one makes me so happy, and I want all the 3rd-8th grade teachers I know to give it a look.

How refreshing that she starts off with “Did you know that are about six thousand languages in the world?” and then goes on to talk about language change, grammar, and even the Common Core. For a resource book of this type, it does the best job I’ve seen of talking directly and convincingly about language privilege. “Language variation is a social justice issue just as much as racial identity is” (96).

But it also talks about what a lot of teachers are very interested in – mechanics and usage. Here are the chapter titles, after the introductory one.

2. Mechanics: Conventions Found Only in Written Language
3. Nitty-Gritty Grammar: Words, Tenses, Sentences, and Complexity
4. Usage
5. Language Diversity and Social Justice
6. Linguistics for Kids

And Wilde provides annotated lists of other resources, appendices of suggestions of what to do in each grade (3-8), commentary on the Common Core (saying straight up that to teach about the subjunctive, as indicated in this 8th grade standard is misguided. Yeah, I agree - it’s a bit crazy.), and a careful consideration and explanation of why each subject she addresses should be taught. And it’s a nice slim volume at that.

It's been great to be able to do some reading of some of the other resources out there, like this one, while on sabbatical, so I’ll soon be adding an updated list of resources to TeachLing, which has a list that Dave Pippin compiled a few years ago. But the list is lacking in resource books like Wilde’s, so I’ll add the few other suggestions I have. But in the meantime, get this book. And thank you, Sandra Wilde!

Calling It Like It Is: Noun Clause, Adjective Clause, Adverb Clause

Terminology is a problem in grammar. Maybe it is in lots of fields. Marine biologists get up in arms, I hear, when we call starfish starfish instead of the more correct, apparently, seastar. They aren’t fish, they tell us, so don’t call them fish. (They aren’t stars either, but whatever.)

I’ve already talked about the adverb/adverbial issue here, and a related one that I’ve been asked about is Noun Clause, Adjective Clause, and Adverb Clause. So let’s get to it.

These terms are pretty widespread, perhaps more so in teaching English to speakers of other languages, and in teaching other languages to speakers of English, but are also sometimes used in straight-up descriptions of English grammar to English speakers. Yeah, they’re everywhere.

So, on the one hand, the labels don’t matter that much; call things whatever you want. On the other hand (the more important hand), using these terms once again conflates form and function, which can confuse and mislead. I have discussed elsewhere why it’s better for students to take advantage of their intuitions about morphological and syntactic patterns, rather than on meaning-based definitions and functions. We have some techniques for identifying nouns, for example, (they can be made plural, they take determiners, etc.) but then these noun clauses don’t match up with what we know about nouns.

A noun clause is typically defined as a clause that functions as a noun. Let’s look at some typical examples of things labeled as noun clauses, the bracketed parts below;

She believes [that the fairies are real].
We wonder [when they will arrive].

Good old about.com gives us this – Noun clause: A dependent clause that functions as a noun (that is, as a subject, object, or complement) within a sentence. Also known as a nominal clause.

I would say, however, that these are both simply subordinate clauses. They are subordinate to the main clause and dependent upon the main verb in that clause. We can further label them that-clauses and wh-clauses, but there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to calling them noun clauses. The reason they are considered nounish and labeled as noun clauses by some is that they serve as complements of a verb or as subjects, as nouns can. But it’s a lot more straightforward to simply call them subordinate or dependent clauses and ignore that noun part. You gain nothing from that label, and it leads students to doubt their intuitions about what nouns really are.

So let’s look at adjective clause and adverb clause, to see if those labels help shed light on the noun clause label – or on anything, for that matter.

Adjective clauses are also called (my preference) “relative clauses”. The term is preferable since it doesn’t conflate an actual adjective with the function of adjectives. These types of clauses serve to give more information about a noun, like adjectives do, but they are not adjectives themselves. They’re just clauses. They’re called relative clauses because they “relate” the info in the clause to the noun that the clause modifies.

The man [who I saw yesterday] left his hat here.
I saw the fox [that ate the chickens from our coop].
Let’s eat at the restaurant [where you went last night].

It’s clearer to me – and to my students and the students of other teachers I have worked with – to not use the terms noun clause and adjective clause. Let nouns be nouns and adjectives be adjectives.

Same for so-called adverb clauses. As discussed in this post, adverbs are a bit messy – and all kinds of things get labeled as adverbs. I believe that we should not add clauses to that. Here are some examples of the kinds of things that some people label adverb clauses:

Joe scrubbed the floor [until his arms ached].
The dogs had been barking [since the owners left].
Fay walked to the store [because she was out of eggs].

Huh? The claim is that these are all adverb clauses because they answer the questions where, when, or why. But lots of different kinds of phrases do that. These are prepositional phrases; I’ve discussed them here.

Nothing is gained, that I can see, by calling these adverbial. It confuses form and function, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t actually confusing!

It’s just clearer and more accurate to call nouns nouns, adjectives adjectives, adverbs adverbs, and clauses clauses. Are there benefits to distinguishing among the various kinds of clauses? Yeah, sure, there can be. But I’d want to use labels that don’t conflate form and function. I can discuss different types of subordinate clauses in another post. Till then, let's just call it like it is.

Strand 3/Conventions – Post 5: Apostrophe’s Apostrophes

Mostly, this little punctuation mark gives us no trouble. It stands in for missing letters (don’t, should’ve, e’er), it marks possession (Charlie’s dog, the woman with the hat’s friend), and sometimes it marks plurals.

So the missing letter part is rarely problematic (though it should probably just go away – couldn’t we just write dont?). The possessive apostrophe, however, does sometimes give us trouble since, well, since English hasn’t marked case for many hundreds of years, except for this little remnant. And the plural-marking apostrophe is tangled up with this possessive one, so let’s look into that first.

From the 17th century on, an apostrophe was used in plurals when the noun ended in a vowel: toga’s, opera’s, menu’s, fee’s. Grammarians began to condemn this usage in the mid-19th century, but it continues to appear. And in fact, an apostrophe is strongly recommended by many style guides to mark certain kinds of plurals.

Please bring all the DVD’s to the garage sale.
I got five A’s and one B on my report card.
You need to go back to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.
The 1980’s was a bad decade for fashion.

This practice of using apostrophes to mark plurals in abbreviations, with numbers, with letters, etc. is beginning to fall out of fashion, but is still quite standard. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English says that the “apostrophe is used sometimes to mark plural number and letters (three 6’s, two A’s)” (p. 35). Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says that the use of -’s to mark plurals is not as common as it used to be, but can still be found. They recommend 1980s instead of 1980’s (p. 10).

So there are a few cases where –’s can mark plural. But some apostrophes slip in in plurals where they are not “supposed” to because some words just look weird without a demarcation of their morpheme boundary, and could even be mispronounced: menus, skis, fees, pizzas. And when writers put that apostrophe in, even if it’s just a slip of the pen/finger on the keyboard, it does illustrate an awareness of the distinct morpheme one is adding on. The writers in the 17th and 18th centuries were on to something here - and so are the writers of today who make this "error."

Ok, so we’re used to seeing apostrophes in words where they do not mark possession, sometimes “rightly” and sometimes “wrongly.” But let’s look more at that possessive/genitive use. As mentioned, this -’s is a remnant of case marking in Old English; English used to put different endings on the nouns, depending on how they were functioning – as subject (nominative case), object (accusative case), indirect object (dative case), or possessive (genitive case). You can see some Old English noun declensions here. Now we don’t have case marking, with the exception of our pronouns (I versus me, for example), and this genitive (possessive), which mostly just shows up in writing.

The basic convention of the possessive apostrophe is straightforward: insert an apostrophe before an [s] and before another noun when that noun is owned by or “possessed” by the first noun. If the word is a plural already ending in [s]; then, just add an apostrophe.

the girl’s shoes (one girl)
the girls’ shoes (more than one girl)
the traveler’s suitcase (one traveler)
the travelers’ suitcases (more than one traveler)

Well, it’s not always so straightforward. Here are some reasons why.

Pronunciation and words that end in ssssssss,zzzzzzzzzz
Consider, for example, the possessive apostrophe with singular nouns that end in [s] like molasses, hippopotamus, walrus, octopus, boss, or floss. Should an [s] be added after the apostrophe when these singular nouns indicate possession? Is it the walrus’ friend or the walrus’s friend? It actually depends on who (or whom!) you ask. The Associated Press Stylebook recommends omitting the -’s after the apostrophe in singular words ending in [s], but, according to The Chicago Manual of Style, if the [s] at the end of a singular word is pronounced, the possessive is formed by adding -’s. So pronunciation matters too? To some, but not too others, so this leads to confusion about the rule. And what happens, for example, if it’s spelled with x, which is of course pronounced “ks”? It should probably be a fox’s tail, not a fox’ tail, don’t you think? Sometimes we’re faced with dilemmas that don’t have a neat resolution. LanguageLog has another example of that.

Proper Nouns
Proper nouns seem to cause a host of other problems. Consider, for example, names such as Jones or Thomas or even one that doesn’t end in -s, such as Yin. You may see a sign on someone’s house that reads "the Jones" or "the Yins." Or it could read "the Jones'," "the Jones’s" or "the Yin’s".

Why the multiple possibilities? Well, the meaning is actually ambiguous. It could mean the group of people named Yin – so it would be the plural. Or it could be possessive, meaning the Yin’s house. So there is not necessarily an error here, but two possible meanings, as indicated by the possessive apostrophe or lack thereof.

And pronunciation factors in here too. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first published in 1892, recommends omitting the [s] after the apostrophe only for names ending in an “iz” sound, as in Bridges’. Do they mean just “an iz sound”? What about just “z” as in Jones? Is it the Jones’ house or the Jones’s house? And this example is especially interesting because there is more than one way to pronounce it, with one syllable or two. And we seem to want to make the spelling with an additional [s] correspond to the additional syllable. So if you say “jownziz,” you might feel better spelling it Jones’s, but if you say “jownz”, you might want to spell it Jones’. And the style guides – some of them – will agree. Some of them try to simplify the rules, giving a single rule (like maybe your fourth grade teacher did), but then you end up with words that just don’t seem to fit.

(And what if there is, say, a reunion of the Jones family, so you have multiple Jones families in attendance. Can you pluralize a proper name and have Joneses? And then if we're talking about the multiple houses of those Joneses, can we write Joneses' houses? Looks weird. Try it with a name that doesn't end in [s] - Yins' houses. That seems fine.)

Important historical people?
And finally, a very strange rule of many style guides with respect to the possessive of proper names states that ancient names or important, historical, or classical names that end in [s] should end with an apostrophe alone; so, Moses’ sandals, Jesus’ friend, Venus’ name. But The Chicago Manual of Style, for instance, doesn’t follow this rule, offering Aristophanes’s plays and Zeus’s wife. Such a rule is, of course, subjective too, raising the question of how old is ancient or who should be considered important enough.

Of course there’s its/it’s
The most common issue I see in student writing with the use of apostrophes is it's for its. None of the possessive pronouns or possessive determiners use apostrophes: mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs. So most of us would have no problem with this rule if it weren’t for the contraction of it and is to it’s; therefore, we’re used to seeing the word it’s, and we know that apostrophes indicate possession, so it’s an easy slip to make – and actually illustrates the knowledge that apostrophes in general do indicate possession. Somewhat less common, but also prevalent is who’s instead of whose: Who’s hat is that? might not look so wrong, but the standard version would be Whose book, using the possessive determiner.

So one reason there are so many “errors” of apostrophe usage is because there is a great deal of variation, even among writers of edited academic English. And another reason is due to an unconscious linguistic savvy; we add in morpheme boundaries and spelling helpers where they seem useful.

Why pick on just apostrophes?
And now really finally, sometimes there are practical considerations that lead to an apostrophe being left off where it might otherwise appear. For example, many people have picked on the errors of apostrophe usage on signs. Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves fame writes about wanting to protest the movie Two Weeks Notice because it had no apostrophe in its title – and should, she claimed.

But we don’t seem to get similarly bothered by the lack of punctuation on signs in general. We do not expect fully-punctuated sentences on signs.

SLOW not PLEASE GO SLOWLY.
Or even Please drive slowly.

We could have a book-length – which this almost is – discussion on apostrophe usage alone. One thing I mean to emphasize here is that there are some reasons for the variation and reasons for the “errors” that go beyond people simply being “ignorant” or “lazy.” Remember, language change is ongoing, and quite often the variety used by a minority of people – and thus the stigmatized form – eventually becomes the form adopted by the majority and then becomes standard.

But apostrophe usage that differs from standard expectations really bugs a lot of people. The Apostrophe Protection Society has an impressive collection of apostrophe errors found out in the world. You too can send in your own. Spotting these errors gives people a “gotcha” moment, where they can proudly point out how someone misused the apostrophe. I get it. No one wants to not conform to expectations for fear of being judged. But what I think is more interesting is to think about why people make apostrophe errors - variations, we'll call them - and in what particular cases they do.

OK, this has gotten way too long. Oh, but in other punctuation news, it would be so fun to talk about the use of so-called “scare quotes”. If you’re still with me, you can just check this out. It’s actually a useful exercise to figure out why these are funny. It demonstrates that, just like spoken language, punctuation is evolving and these marks “” have more than one use and meaning, just like apostrophes.

Here is an activity on collecting and analyzing apostrophe data.

Strand 1/Grammar: Lesson 19 – Preps or Particles? Learning about Phrasal Verbs

Particles look just look prepositions, but over time they have shifted to become a part of the verb. The bolded phrases are all verbs that contain particles.

Don’t run down the batteries.
We looked up the answers.
Turn on the light, please.
Don’t forget to turn in your homework.
I’m excited to pick out a present for my friend.

We know that these are particles instead of prepositions because of their meaning. The verb plus particle has a meaning that is distinct from the sum of the meanings of the parts. And also they have a neat trick, called Particle Shift; they can move from their position right next to the verb to a position following the noun phrase complement.

Don’t run the batteries down.
We looked the answers up.
Turn the light on, please.
Don’t forget to turn your homework in.
I’m excited to pick a present out for my friend.

Cool, huh? Prepositions can’t do that.

We ran down the street. ACK! We ran the street down.
We looked up the street toward the park. ACK! We looked the street up toward the park.
We turned onto the freeway. ACK! We turned the freeway onto.

Activity. Have your students figure out if the bolded words are prepositions or are part of the verb (particles). Have them describe how they know.

They climbed up the fence.
He shot off his toy rocket.
Bert looked for a banana.
The rabbit hopped through the grass.
Please turn up the radio.
They brought up the issue several times.
You should think through the problem carefully.
I already handed in my paper.

So what’s kind of weird and kind of cool about particles is that they are really part of the verb, so you’d expect them to fuse to the verb, but instead they can move away from it. This is a remnant of English’s Germanic roots; German (and Old English) have these “separable verbs,” as they’re called, too.

There are certain particles that seem to have a distinct meaning from the meanings of the parts, like the ones above, but that cannot undergo Particle Shift. Sometimes these are called “prepositional phrasal verbs” to distinguish them from phrasal verbs. Distinguishing the two types of phrasal verbs from each other is not important unless you are using the movement diagnostic to distinguish phrasal verb particles from prepositions. You may encounter some that really seem to make meaning in conjunction with the verb, but are unable to undergo Particle Shift, like the following.

She can pass for an American.
The smallest puppy often gets picked on.
I ran into a good friend at the café.
The grandparents are looking after the kids.
You should stand by your principles.

Also, there are multi-word phrasal verbs with more than one particle. For these too, the meaning suggests that the particles have glommed on to the verb. (There's one - glom on!)

You shouldn’t put up with that noise.
I am really looking forward to the party.
We loaded up on junk food for the game.
They have been sitting in for me while I’ve been sick.

So when discussing either verbs or prepositions, it’s important to know about these particles. Also, English Language Learners (ELLs) often learn long lists of these phrasal verbs since they are quite common in speech, more so in American English than British English, apparently, and are a marker, therefore, of real fluency. There are a gazillion books and websites like this one to help ESL students with phrasal verbs. It's important to note that phrasal verbs often have more formal synonyms – put off vs. postpone, get together vs. assemble – so are used somewhat less in the written language.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite strings of prepositions (and other stuff? Are there any particles here?). I grew up in Appalachia, and this was a phrase my third grade teacher, Genave Montgomery, had recalled hearing someone say. It's great.

I walked out up over in back of yonder.

Ponder on that.

Abandon "A Sentence Is a Complete Thought"

A typical, traditional way of teaching about clauses, primarily in order to get students to avoid writing fragments or run-ons (also known as comma splices), offers the notion that sentences are complete thoughts, while fragments are incomplete thoughts. The definition from Springboard, which is in turn taken from The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue University, is the following:

“An independent clause is a group of words that contains a subject and verb and expresses a complete thought” (357).

As I’ve written before (here) it’s time to do away with this “complete thought” quip. This shortcut to a real description of fragments and clauses can lead writers to doubt their intuitions; that is, it is important for students to recognize that fragments occur naturally and appropriately in speech, often in writing, and that they are a feature of all languages. Fragments serve as useful rhetorical devices; they appear quite commonly, not only in fiction, but also in more formal work. (Schuster (2006), has a great article which challenges the idea that students should be taught to avoid all sentence fragments; in it, he examines 50 essays in The Best American Essays 2001, finding them chock full of fragments. He writes, “In every case, the fragments express the same idea as the sentences and do so in fewer words – significantly fewer, in several cases. In every case, too, the fragments are more emphatic…Thirdly, the fragments are almost always more natural, more like conversational English…On the basis of this evidence, we might ask the question: Can one be in favor of economy of wording, emphasis, and naturalness of expression and be against the use of sentence fragments?” (79). And another shout-out to Schuster - he has a great article "Beyond Grammar: The Richness of English Language, or the Zero-Tolerance Approach to Rigid Rules", also published in English Journal in 2011 that deals not only with fragments, but with "flouting" of other admonitions, including avoid passive, avoid be, and do not begin with conjunctions. Read it.)

Fragments function, both in speech and writing, to introduce new information; the old, or understood, information does not need to be stated. Consider the dialogue between speaker A and speaker B, with the fragments in B's replies.

A. Where are you going?
B. To the bank.

A. She probably should wear a painting smock.
B. Yeah, because those are nice clothes.

Such replies are, of course, perfectly normal and acceptable ways to speak. And the fragment replies in the B examples are certainly complete thoughts. Understanding how fragments function and that they are a natural feature of language helps student realize why they might write in fragments, and to understand and appreciate one of the differences between spoken and more formal varieties of written language.

But if you want your students to avoid them, then having each sentence have a subject is key, and I’ve written about that here and here and here.

Strand 1/Grammar: Lesson 18 – PPs and Subject-Verb Agreement (and a rant about Springboard)

A typical method for teaching about language is to integrate in to writing instruction, often in mini-lessons, or, in textbooks, in “Grammar and Usage” sidebars, such as this one in

from The College Board’s Springboard: English Textual Power (Level 2, p. 97), for grade 7. Too often, these approaches attempt shortcuts to real explanations about language, leading students to miss the intended lesson and doubt their intuitions; consequently, students, regardless of writing ability, do not gain command of grammar as a rhetorical tool, nor do they have any confidence in their ability to analyze language.

Let’s look at this “Grammar and Usage” box a bit more closely. Here's the whole text from the photo, which occurs alongside a text about persuasive writing.

“A preposition links the noun or pronoun following it (its object) to another word in a sentence. Prepositional phrases add specific or necessary detail in sentences. They function as adjectives or adverbs.

Adverb phrase modifying the verb has swerved:
“…Skateboarding has swerved from the fringe.”

Adjective phrase modifying the noun cost:
“…the cost of doing business.”

You can use prepositional phrases to add specific details when you write. Take care to use correct subject-verb agreement. When a prepositional phrase separates the subject and verb, the verb agrees with the subject, not with the object of the prepositional phrase.

(Springboard: English Textual Power, Level 2, p. 97)

It is at the end of this sidebar that a connection to a typical "error" of writing, subject-verb agreement, is made. However, no examples are given, and it would be very difficult for students (or teachers) to glean how prepositional phrases are related to subject-verb agreement, or even to understand what is meant by that phrase or others such as “object of the prepositional phrase.”

I offer what I think the intended lesson is here. Subject-verb agreement is often listed as one of the most common errors of writing; it shows up on lists from elementary to college-level writing. Most writers, however, do not have issues at all with subject verb agreement in general. Our unconscious intuitions serve us quite well in guiding this agreement. (English language learners may have specific issues with subject-verb agreement, and these learners deserved a distinct, targeted lesson. Also, some English dialects have different patterns of subject-verb agreement that might deserve a separate lesson. Such variations should not be called “errors” since they are patterned and logical for each dialect, but they may differ from the so-called academic writing expected in most classroom writing.) However, one place in which there is variation with respect to subject-verb agreement involves subjects which contain prepositional phrases, as in the following examples:

Each one of the birds are/is going to leave the nest soon.
Neither of my two suitcases is/are adequate for this trip.
Bellingham is one of those cities which is/are working hard to reclaim a waterfront.

The typical usage suggestion is to make the verb agree with the subject noun preceding the prepositional phrase. However, when there is a mismatch in the “number” – singular each compared to plural birds, for example, as in the first example above – then speakers and writers choose either a verb to match the noun preceding the prepositional phrase or the noun within the prepositional phrase. And the facts are, of course, more complicated. The type of noun preceding the prepositional phrase can affect the form of the verb. Consider these examples with a term of measurement, like gallon or quart.

Three gallons of milk is enough.

Here singular is seems better even though gallons is plural. In contrast, plural are is preferred in the following example:

Three cats with long fur are enough.

Or consider nouns that have two meanings, as either a mass or a count noun, like chicken.

All of the chicken is gone.
All of the chickens are gone.

The all, the noun preceding the prepositional phrase in both examples, is irrelevant in determining the agreement; instead, we do and should use the noun in the prepositional phrase to determine the appropriate agreement, just as we are advised not to by the general usage rule. Whether or not you decide to deal with the additional data that make this particular usage rule a bit more complicated (but really interesting!), it certainly illustrates that patterns of language can be complex and sometimes murky. And that we should take more time to discuss grammatical terminology (prepositional phrases), grammatical functions (subjects), and the reasons behind the variations. After that, students can make informed choices about, for example, subject-verb agreement in writing. However, I challenge any student to understand these lessons or adjust their own verb choices in writing from an oversimplified sidebar such as the one discussed here.

A second issue I have with this particular “grammar and usage” sidebar is the conflation of adjective phrase, adverb phrase, and prepositional phrase. There has long been a tendency to conflate “form” and “function”, or syntax and meaning, in pedagogical grammatical explanations. To do so, however, ignores the actual patterns of language. Such conflation of terms is not only not useful, but it leads students to doubt their intuitions about word categories, and it provides no tools of analysis to extend to other examples. Consider the italicized words below.

“A preposition links the noun or pronoun following it (its object) to another word in a sentence. Prepositional phrases add specific or necessary detail in sentences. They function as adjectives or adverbs”

And it offers the following example, where the italicized prepositional phrase is called an adverb phrase.

Adverb phrase modifying the verb has swerved:
“…Skateboarding has swerved from the fringe.”

And the next, where the italicized prepositional phrase is called an adjective phrase.

Adjective phrase modifying the noun cost:
“…the cost of doing business.”

Why this conflation of terms? Why call prepositional phrases adjectives and adverbs? I believe the point is to illustrate that prepositional phrases can modify verbs (like adverbs can) and nouns (as do adjectives). This is true, and discussion of modification is important and useful. It's also true that there is overlap in how the various parts of speech function, as modifiers and complements of other categories. However, the category distinctions are real distinctions – categories that we all have in our heads that function uniquely in terms of their morphology and their syntax. Terms like noun, adjective, preposition, or adverb are not labels arbitrarily imposed on a language, but are real (and complex) categories. Understanding this is another useful lesson for students, and using the terminology that matches their intuitive categorization will allow them to make use of labels in a productive way, extending the conversations beyond simply labeling to how to manipulate phrases in their writing. We can offer students straightforward tools of analysis that allow them to discover these category distinctions and see how they employ such tools unconsciously all the time. We all have unconscious knowledge about categories. By using accurate labels, we are simply connecting that unconscious knowledge to terminology to help make it conscious knowledge which we can then apply in all sorts of ways – to our writing, to our analysis of literature, to investigation of other linguistic patterns, and so on. Sidebars or mini-lessons such as the ones described here are attempts to cut to the chase, to deal with common writing errors in a fast and efficient manner. However, the assumed background knowledge, the misleading terminology, and the lack of discussion of reasons behind the variations ("errors") render such lessons essentially useless.

Hmm, I titled this "lesson" but I'm not sure that it is, except maybe it's a lesson to avoid using Springboard, which many of the teachers I know don't like anyway. And it does provide another justification for studying prepositions and prepositional phrases if you want to wrestle with subject-verb agreement as it arises in your students' writing. Of course, intervening prepositional phrases are just one of the reasons that agreement with the verb varies. Browse through this or this or this one from my alma mater to find some others - but I wouldn't suggest marching through all of the reasons that subject-verb agreement "problems" arise.

Strand 1/Grammar: Lesson 17 - Prepositions

What to say about prepositions? Their main job is to relate or connect two parts of a clause. But that's vague - lots of categories do that. As mentioned here, many of them convey some kind of directional, spatial, or locational meaning. I mentioned there too that we have seen preposition meaning undergo changes, like all words, and that many of the original spatial relations have been extended, often metaphorically, to convey other kinds of meanings like time (until 6 o’clock, since I was four), manner (by train), accompaniment (with fries), among others. And consider the prepositions in the following examples.

I am standing by the pole.
The poem was written by my friend.
She wore a shirt with stripes.
They hit the ball with a stick

So their meanings are quite polysemous, which is cool, and is just one indicator of how they have lost some of their meaning, on the one hand, while gaining more subtle meaning distinctions on the other. Believe it or not, there’s a great little 5-minute video from The Human Language Series by Gene Searchinger where Ray Jackendoff talks about the complexity of prepositions.

Prepositions’ transition from being content words to function words means that that their “contentful” meaning is lost, which is why we find variation in which one can be used.

I waited in line for the movie.
I waited on line for the movie.

I picked up the wrong shirt on accident.
I picked up the wrong shirt by accident.

I feel sick to my stomach.
I feel sick at my stomach.
I feel sick on my stomach.

Prepositions have changed over time from being meaningful, content words to being more grammatical, function words. (See the Parts of Speech doc here.) And the fact that we can use varying prepositions also demonstrates this lack of specific meaning. Their presence is key, though. No one that I know of can have no preposition in any of the examples above.

Prepositions ride the line between being content/form/meaningful/open class words and function/grammatical/closed class words. Our main content words are nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We can and do add new words to these categories all the time. The other classes of words (which includes determiners, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, degree words, modals, pronouns, and quantifiers) have members that are fairly fixed, and new words do not join these categories very frequently. (One recent exciting new conjunction, though, is slash. Read what Anne Curzan says about it here. My students are in solid agreement on the new usage of this conjunction slash conjunctive adverb.) Prepositions haven't been added to the language in a very long time, so in that way they seem like a closed class. They, however, do still have some "real" meaning - up means up, down means down. But others are more ethereal.

As discussed in that other post, there are a group of prepositions, sometimes called subordinating conjunctions, which introduce clauses. Some don’t like the “conjunction” part of this label since conjunctions join “like” things – NPs (dogs but cats), VPs (runs or jumps), PPs (in and out), APs (big and tall), clauses (We ate all the cereal, but then we bought some more.). And this subtype of preposition introduces subordinate clauses, so they are not equal to, but subordinate to or dependent on, the main clause. They include after, as, before, since, until, because, while,(al)though, when, where, and phrasal ones such as even though, as much as, and as though.

We arrived at school [after the doors were locked].
The squirrels simply looked at us [as we filled the feeder].
My relatives give me money [because they have no idea what I like].

If you feel more comfortable calling these subordinating conjunctions, I see no problem with that. Or, as I mentioned, my students prefer the term subordinating prepositions.

I haven't constructed a lesson plan for prepositions because the teachers I work with have seen no need for one. Students are able to identify them fairly easily, and there aren’t many usage rules surrounding them (except the one about not ending a sentence with a preposition, which I can’t bear to draw more attention to, especially since it’s a faux rule, but if you want to read about it, there certainly are places you can do that. And in fact Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary has a good short video about it). Common Core Standards want students to know about prepositions. Here's just one example from 5th grade, but there are several others. And I will post soon about how prepositional phrases correlate with subject-verb agreement. Oh, and there are a whole group of words, called particles, that used to be prepositions and now glom on to the verb. So I'll talk about those. They're cool - and they can be a pain in the neck for non-native English speakers. In the meantime, prepositions are interesting little beasts, so you should bring them up.

Because preposition

If you haven’t already done so, you might want to talk with your students about the 2013 Word of the Year selections just voted on by the American Dialect Society at the annual Linguistic Society of America meeting.

The word, as you may have already heard, is because. You can check out Ben Zimmer’s post here and Anne Curzan’s here and LanguageLog’s here.

If you’re worried about the classification of because as a preposition, as some are, you can read this by Geoff Pullum. However, he can be offputting; he calls those who label because an adverb “stupid” and those who call it a conjunction “flamingly and demonstrably wrong.” Yikes.

So let’s look at some data. We, on this blog, haven’t discussed prepositions or conjunctions, for that matter, so a real exploratory investigation of this is perhaps best delayed, but let’s take a preliminary look.

Let’s first see how because does behave like other prepositions. Most prepositional phrases (bracketed below) contain a head preposition and a complement (in second set of brackets) of that preposition. Those complements are typically noun phrases:

I sat [on [the roof]].
We walked [to [the store]].

But they can also be participial verb phrases:

She replied [without [reading the email]].

or another prepositional phrase:

They put the food [out [on the table]].

And they can be clauses:

The dog was tired [after [we took her for a walk]].

We seem less uncomfortable – more comfortable – with after (than with because) as a preposition because it can also occur with just noun phrases. Same for since.

I’ll call you [after [10 o’clock]].
I’ve been waiting [since [the dawn of time]].

After and since both occur with clauses too.

I’ll call you [after [I finish my coffee]].
I’ve been waiting [since [you walked out the door]].

And, like after, since, even though, until, and when, because can also be followed by a clause:

I like you [because [you are funny]].
I like you [even though [you are funny]].
I liked you [until [you weren’t funny anymore]].
I liked you [when [you were funny]].

So if our definition of preposition allows clausal complements like these, because fits right in.

I think that one reason that some are uncomfortable calling because a preposition is that many of our prepositions are directional/locational. And some may have learned a little ditty like a preposition is anything a bunny can do to a hill or anything an airplane can do to a cloud: in, out, on, around, above, inside, behind, and so on. Because doesn’t fit that mold. But the meanings of prepositions have been expanding for centuries, becoming much more metaphorical, for one thing: from two to four o’clock is no longer strictly directional, for example, and we're ok with it being called a preposition.

This notion of spatial or directional meaning is reinforced in some dictionaries. Remember how we have discussed how meaning-based definitions of other categories can be problematic. See posts here, here, and here. And here are a couple of dictionaries' definitions of preposition.

Merriam-Webster’s definition of preposition: a word or group of words that is used with a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to show direction, location, or time, or to introduce an object.

And Dictionary.com: any member of a class of words found in many languages that are used before nouns, pronouns, or other substantives to form phrases functioning as modifiers of verbs, nouns, or adjectives, and that typically express a spatial, temporal, or other relationship, as in, on, by, to, since.

So when you’re working with these kinds of definitions, calling because a preposition may seem weird. And it’s important to note that for the most part, those definitions work, just as calling a noun a “person, place, or thing” usually works. Some huge majority of our prepositions are spatial and directional. There are good reasons to call because a preposition, but there are also reasons to not fault those who don’t like that label. I’ve had students who really want a different label for this group of words that introduce clauses that are not subordinate clauses. Some classes have settled on “subordinating prepositions.” Maybe your students have some other ideas. Let’s briefly look at how these prepositions that introduce clauses are different from another group of words that introduces clauses.

A group of words called complementizers or subordinating conjunctions introduces clauses, but these link a subordinate clause to a main clause, like the following:

I know [that [she is hungry]].
I wonder [if [it will rain]].
She asked [whether [she should dance]].

That, if, and whether introduce whole clauses too (like because), but behave very differently syntactically and semantically. They link one clause to another, introducing the subordinate clause, and the predicate in the main clause depends on that lower clause in order to complete the sentence. Our because doesn’t do that. More on all this in another post, because lunchtime.