Strand 2/Morphology - Part 9: Contractions and spelling and conventions oh my

Deidre and her students have been talking about possessive nouns and the apostrophes that go along with them. I joined them today as they looked at contractions of verbs with pronouns. She had given them a list of pronouns and a list of verbs and they were to make a list of all of the possible contractions: I + am = I’m, you + are = you’re, who + s = who’s and so on. They noted that some looked odd in writing, like it’d, it’ll and who’re even though they sounded fine in speech. Deidre mentioned that in formal writing in general, you don’t find as many contractions. Next they broke into groups to investigate is and has and how pronouns contracted with these. One of the goals was to discover that you end up with identical-looking contractions that are made up of different words:

she’s = she + is or she + has
he’s = he + is or he + has

The group I was hovering near immediately contracted the pronouns with has but then came up with the example sentence: He has candy. “Oh, but then you can’t contract it.” Another said, “But you can contract it if it’s like, He’s got three chickens.” They were coming up with great data to illustrate that there are two distinct types of have.

The students did great with the contractions and were really clear on the fact that the apostrophe represented the deleted letters. Deidre had them say which letters were missing to reinforce this. She was able to talk about the oft-conflated it’s/its and who’s/whose, so a spelling lesson comes along for free.

Auxiliary Have and Main Verb Have

What this activity made me think about as a possible follow-up lesson was the distinction between auxiliary verbs and main verbs, because, along with recognizing that is and has both contract to -‘s, the students were also discovering that there were two different verbs have. One could continue this exploration to see how auxiliary have and main verb have differ not only syntactically but also phonologically.

Have students describe the different pronunciations of have and has in the following examples or some like them:

I have ten dollars. - have pronounced with /v/
She has ten dollars. - has pronounced with /z/

I have to go. - have pronounced with /f/
She has to go - has pronounced with /s/

Cool, huh? We just know that these are different words with different functions, and the pronunciation is an indicator of those differences. And they have already noticed that only auxiliary verb have can contract with a preceding pronoun, so that’s a syntactic fact about it:

She has been to Twisp.
She’s been to Twisp.

But main verb has, meaning ‘possess’ cannot contract. No main verb can (except main verb be, but that’s a story for another day); only the auxiliary verbs (forms of be and forms of have and the modal verbs).

She has a horse.
*She’s a horse. (Can only mean that she is a horse, not that she has a horse.)

Negation and Questions

Auxiliary verb have but not main verb have can also contract with not:

The girl has not seen a horse.
The girl hasn’t seen a horse.

*The boy has not a horse.

And auxiliary have can move to the front in questions.

She has seen that movie.
Has she seen that movie.

He has three dogs.
?Has he three dogs?

For this one – has he three dogs - students might think it sounds ok since we’re accustomed to hearing this in older literature. (Have you any wool?) But for American speakers (and most British speakers too these days), we’d have to say Does he have three dogs?.

As speakers of a language, we just know that auxiliary verbs can do things that other verbs can’t. They contract with pronouns. They contract with not. They move to precede the subject in questions. AND, here's some syntactic evidence that some contractions are their own grammatical beast; they aren't just squished versions of the whole words. Consider the following:

She has not seen that movie.
She hasn’t seen that movie.
Hasn’t she seen that movie?
*Has not she seen that movie?
Has she not seen that movie?

When the auxiliary verb is negated, the contracted form (here, hasn’t) can go at the front, but with the uncontracted (has not), the not has to go after the subject. How do we know that? We just do. It’s an example of the syntactic information that we all have. It’s pretty cool. And students can come work together to discover these patterns about auxiliary verbs and main verbs, but also, more broadly, about the vast amount of grammatical knowledge that they already have a firm handle on.

Other lessons that deal with main and auxiliary verbs are here and here.

Sentence Diagrams

I’ve been thinking about sentence diagramming. Both this kind:
(which has gotten some recent press with the release of this poster)

and this kind
Or a more complex version of this linguistically-informed syntax tree, such as this:

Dick Hudson discussed a bit about the history of diagramming recently here and Beth Keyser has been using linguisticky (Like that spelling? And how would you spell the present participial form (-ing) of the verb picnic? We are picnic___. Sometimes our spelling system fails us, but we make do.) trees in her classes for several years; she and I will report on this soon. I’m also planning to write up a more thorough investigation (an article rather than a blog post) of the pros and cons of various kinds of visual representations for sentence diagrams, but in the meantime, these are some musings and some questions.

There were various studies in the 1930s and 1940s about whether sentence diagramming improved student writing. Mostly it didn’t seem to (though the methods of evaluating improved writing were and are messy). But what else can creating and using visual representations of sentences do for us? Certainly, whatever kind of diagram is used, one must know the categories of each word and of each phrase and be able to show how all of those fit together to make clauses. Throughout this blog, there is a presumption that such knowledge of categories, phrases, and clauses is useful. I have emphasized that we have such knowledge unconsciously, so what are the benefits of making it conscious knowledge? Even those who say that in middle and high school you should just teach grammar in context (such as Constance Weaver), and suggest teaching the bare minimum, all include some very basic grammatical information that students should recognize and be able to discuss. These include the basic parts of speech, subject and predicate, and clauses and phrases. Well, that’s a lot, actually. And can using diagramming of one kind or another help with that? Or does it introduce an unnecessary complication? My college students who are planning to become teachers say and write over and over that one of the most important things they learn in my classes that they hope to introduce to their future students is using visual representations - tree diagrams - to help elucidate the structure of sentences. What do you think?