Strand 2/Morphology - Part 8: Verbal Affixes Follow-Up (an -ate problem)

Beth’s astute students may have noticed when making this fine chart that there were some inconsistencies with the -ate suffixes. I have noted in previous posts that, in general, affixes attach to one part of speech and result in another part of speech. -Ate, however, complicates that claim.

Let’s see what they found. They discovered that -ate attaches to adjectives and results in verbs.

activate: active (A) + ate = activate (V)
validate: valid (A) + ate = validate (V)

Oh, but -ate also seems to attach to nouns to make verbs.

motivate: motive (N) + ate = motivate (V)
originate: origin (N) + ate = originate (V)

And mostly, it seems to attach to non-words (bound roots) to make verbs.

frustrate
dominate
emaciate
integrate
legislate
educate
saturate

And then there are these which are all adjectives, not verbs. And the -ate in this set attaches to nouns (fortune), verbs (consider), and bound roots:

fortunate
considerate
desolate
separate
desperate

Notice the pronunciation of the -ate is different in these, with a reduced, schwa vowel.

So what’s going on? Dictionary.com has this to say about the affix –ate:

a suffix occurring in loanwords from Latin. The form originated as a suffix added to a certain class of Latin verbs to form adjectives (fortunate). The resulting word could also be used independently as a nouns (advocate) and came to be used as a stem on which a could be formed (separate, advocate, agitate). In English the use as a verbal suffix has been extended to stems of non-Latin origin: calibrate.

But try to have your students figure out the various patterns first. A rough lesson plan for this is here with some answers provided here. It includes heading to the dictionary to find out more about the history of this suffix. The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say about -ate:

a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -atus, -atum (e.g. estate, primate, senate). Those that came to English via Old and Middle French often arrived with -at, but an -e was added after c.1400 to indicate the long vowel.

The suffix also can mark adjectives, formed from Latin past participles in -atus, -ata (e.g. desolate, moderate, separate), again, they often were adopted in Middle English as -at, with an -e appended after c.1400

So, many of those that attach to roots were just a past participial marker on a word, like these (all from Online Etymology Dictionary):

educate: from Latin educatus, past participle of educare "bring up, rear, educate".

confiscate: from Latin confiscatus, past participle of confiscare, from com- "together" (see com-) + fiscus "public treasury," literally "money basket".

saturate: from Latin saturatus, past participle of saturare "to fill full, sate, drench," from satur "sated, full," from PIE root *sa- "to satisfy".

And some are faux suffixes, such as legislate, which is a backformation from legislation.

An investigation of this affix is a good example of why we should trust our instincts and when they tip us off that something is up, we should be prepared to conduct some analysis. That is, when there are differing answers and students express doubt about their choices (about a part of speech or something else), that’s a superb indicator that there is something to be investigated. When Beth’s students were going through this, perhaps they hesitated on labeling the part of speech of valid (which they labeled as a noun) because motive was the word preceding, which they had correctly labeled as a noun. They were working under the assumption that affixes always attach to the same part of speech, so they labeled valid as a noun as well. But I’d bet that there was some hesitation in doing so. And that’s because it’s in fact an adjective, and that, as we’ve seen above, -ate attaches to all kinds of things.

So thanks for the fabulous chart, Beth’s class, and I look forward to seeing your adjective one!

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 16: More on Adverbs and Other Modifiers – and Punctuation!

Adverbs can occur in a variety of positions in a sentence. This kind of movability is typical of many modifiers.

She carefully picked up the kitten.
She picked up the kitten carefully.
Carefully, she picked up the kitten.

He often forgets to bring his lunch.
He forgets to bring his lunch often.
Often, he forgets to bring his lunch.

Apparently, someone forgot to close the door.
Someone forgot to close the door, apparently.
Someone apparently forgot to close the door.

Do the different positions of the adverb in each of these examples affect the meaning? If so, how?

As mentioned in lesson 14, the term “adverbial” has been used by some to mean “modify.” Lots of different types of phrases can be modifiers: noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases, adjective phrases, and whole clauses can modify, providing extra, non-essential information about reason, place, cause, condition, and so on. Some examples of modifiers, of the category Adverb, but also of other categories, are given below.

Hastily, I ate the cookie. - adverb
Guilty, he walked up to the stand. - adjective
That guy looked at him in a meaningful way. - prepositional phrase
We won the game yesterday. - noun
Laughing loudly, we walked into the theater – participial verb phrase
His lips curled in a snarl, the dog backed away. – participial clause

Notice that when these occur at the beginning of the clause, they are set off by commas. In usage guides, such words and phrases are often called “introductory elements,” a vague term if I ever heard one, and to leave out the comma is considered a fairly serious error of writing. The “comma intonation” is marked by a downward intonation and sometimes a slight pause. See what your students think about these beginning-of-the-sentence modifiers and whether they all have intonational distinctions or pauses or both.

Another clue to punctuating such modifiers is, that if it is indeed a modifier and one that can be set off by a comma, it should be able to move around – to the beginning of the sentence, to the end, and sometimes, even, to the middle (like even in this sentence). If it’s not a modifier and is a necessary component of the sentence, it won’t move around so easily.

Note that adjectives in prenominal position – before a noun – cannot move, even though they are modifiers. In fact, there is a fairly strict order of adjectives when there is more than one. Which sounds better – a little brown dog or a brown little dog? Can you explain why? Probably not. When we have more than one adjective, there is an order to them that native speakers of English usually have intuitions about but have a hard time articulating. Generally, the adjective order in English is something like this:

1. quality, opinion, judgment, or attitude – ugly, awful, worse, lovely
2. size – huge, tiny
3. age, temperature – old, cold
4. shape – oval, square, twisted
5. color – red, orange, greenish
6. origin – Norwegian, local
7. material – woven, metallic, plastic

Activity. Pick a noun and pick a determiner (a, the, my, your, etc.), and then put up to seven adjectives in between them to see if they follow this order. (We almost never have that many adjectives in regular speech, so you might want to try three or four – but seven is kind of fun as an extra challenge!) Compare your lists to see if you agree on the adjective orderings.

the ___________, ___________, ___________, ___________, ___________, ___________, ___________, thing


There may be some adjectives that you aren’t sure how to categorize. Discuss with each other to see if you can agree what kind of adjective it might be.

Modifiers allow us to add non-essential but important information to a sentence, and they also give us with a way to combine clauses and make our writing more interesting. Consider the two independent clauses below:

Bo talked quietly to his kitten. He didn’t want to scare it.

Or we can use one of the movable modifiers to combine the two independent clauses into one:

Bo talked quietly to his kitten because he didn’t want to scare it.
Because he didn’t want to scare it, Bo talked quietly to his kitten.

Here are some other examples:

Sue tapped Lou. Lou jumped. Sue tapped Lou and Lou jumped. – combining with and
When Sue tapped Lou, Lou jumped. – combining with a clausal modifier

Movable modifiers therefore provide ways to vary clause structure and sentence style. We can stack up several movable modifiers.

Sue tapped Lou very lightly on her way to her seat.
Sue wanted Lou to know she wasn’t mad at him.
Lou knew that Sue wasn’t mad.

On her way to her seat, Sue tapped Lou, very lightly, because she wanted him to know she wasn’t mad at him, even though Lou probably knew that.

We see movable modifiers in written texts quite frequently, and it may well be the case that they are much more of a feature of written language than of spoken language.

Activity. Combine the following short sentences into a single longer, more complex one, which maintains essentially the same meaning.

The cat chased the rat. The rat was probably scared.
I stood on the deck. It was dusk. I saw the sunset. The sunset was beautiful.
My sister doesn’t like eggs. She eats eggs anyway. They have protein.

Here's this lesson as a doc.

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 15: Degree Words

There is a group of words that are sometimes called adverbs which actually are a category distinct from adverb. These degree words (also sometimes called intensifiers) include words like very, so, too, rather, and quite. They serve to express degree of an adjective or adverb.

I ran very quickly. - degree word modifying adverb quickly
They are running so fast. - degree word modifying adverb fast

She is rather happy. - degree word modifying adjective happy.

Notice how adverbs cannot appear in these positions, modifying adverbs or adjectives:

*She is quickly happy.
*They are running happily fast.

There are a few adverbs, mentioned in lesson 14, that can modify adjectives that do not express degree.

She is obviously surprised.
They are probably happy.

Most -ly words that precede adjectives, however, are degree words, not adverbs.

She is incredibly tired.
We are really excited.

Activity: Determine what each of the following italicized words is modifying and whether it is an adverb or degree word.

The chair is significantly damaged.
The student was unexpectedly nervous.
The teacher is visibly frustrated.
The owl is thought to be inherently wise.
The test was incredibly easy.
My friend is overly competitive.
Your room is meticulously neat.
It’s horribly cold outside!
This purse is outrageously expensive.
The cake is sinfully delicious.

When one tries to fit the words of English into eight parts of speech categories, Degree is typically not one of them. Then we’re left confused and doubting our intuitions, which tell us that such words are different from adverbs. They occur in different positions and modify different words. Now, that is very interesting!

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 14: Adverbs

Adverbs are an elusive member of the phrasal categories – they’re a bit difficult to define, both in terms of their meaning and their morphology and syntax. One of the main reasons adverbs cause trouble is terminological. That is, some grammarians over the years have used the term “adverbial” to mean “any category or phrase that modifies another,” so that means prepositional phrases or non-essential nouns or infinitival clauses. This is confusing. There is evidence that adverbs have unique morphological and syntactic behavior, enough to justify a unique category, so they deserve that. And if we reserve the term “modify” for anything that is not required by another element, then both terms, adverb and modify, will be more useful. Here is just one example of the many that use the term “adverbial phrase” to mean, circularly, “playing the role of an adverb”. I do not find that this is useful. All sorts of types of phrases can serve as modifiers, so reserve the term adverb for just adverbs.

So if adverbs are not "adverbial phrases," what are they? Generally, adverbs modify, or give extra information about verbs, and they describe manner, time, attitude of the speaker, possibility, or serve to focus certain parts of the sentence.

The kids all ran slowly. (manner)
My mom runs often. (time)
Your friends will hopefully meet you at the airport. (attitude)
We will probably be late for school. (possibility)

They sometimes end in -ly, but not always. They can have no suffix, or they can have suffixes other than -ly, including -wise, -like, -ward, and -ways.

We are eating fast.
They ran too slow.
He wrote on the page sideways.
She walked backwards in the playground.
The baby crawled crablike across the room.

Note that some adverbs have the same form as their related adjectives, which can be a bit tricky when trying to label them. Adjectives, however, do not modify verbs; only adverbs do.

adverb: We ran hard in the race.
adjective: The hard race was almost over.

adverb: Be safe!
adjective: She is a very safe driver.

(Adjectives don’t modify verbs, but they can be complements of verbs, meaning that the adjective is not just extra information, but is needed to “complete” the meaning of the sentence: She is tired. I’ll have a separate post on complements.)

Although the examples above with hard and safe are acceptable, other suffixless adverbs are considered less standard in formal written English. They are usually quite standard in speech, however, and follow the natural rules of language.

We ran slow.
She walks too quick for me.
I think I did good on that test.

Merriam-Webster's video on flat adverbs is pretty good.

Activity: In a book or other text, find examples of adverbs. Do they modify the verb, giving you more information about the manner, time, or purpose? If you think you have an adverb but it doesn’t modify a verb, it may modify the whole sentence. We’ll look at some of these sentence adverbs in a separate post.

Like adjectives, you can indicate comparisons using adverbs with their comparative and superlative forms, either -er/-est or more/less.
(Not all adverbs that take comparative -er can also take superlative -est.)

The runner ran harder during the last mile of the race.
The runner ran fastest during the last mile of the race.

We ate dinner later than usual.
She arrived earliest of all the guests.

My friend runs more frequently than I do.
My friend most often runs in the morning.

Typically, as with adjectives, shorter, one-syllable words take -er and -est and longer, multi-syllabic words take more and most. Adverbs that end in -ly always take -er and -est: more slowly.

Also, as with adjectives, some adverbs have irregular comparative and superlative forms:

Our team played badly/worse/worst at the soccer game.
Our team played well /better/best at the soccer game.

Activity: Some words cannot have comparative and superlative forms. From the following list of adverbs, determine which ones cannot and see if you can come up with a reason why not. For those that can take a comparative form, write whether it is –er or more. Do the same for the superlative forms.

actually, afterwards, almost, always, annually, anxiously, boldly, bravely, briefly, busily, calmly, carefully, carelessly, cautiously, certainly, cheerfully, clearly, continually, courageously, daily, daintily, dearly, defiantly, deliberately, easily, elegantly, energetically, equally, especially, eventually, exactly, excitedly, fairly, faithfully, far, fast, fortunately, frankly, gracefully, immediately, interestingly, knowingly, nervously, often, quietly, seldom, sometimes, soon, surprisingly, suspiciously, sweetly, truthfully, unnaturally, upbeat, vaguely

(The idea is that, like with adjectives, certain adverbs are not gradable, so resist such comparisons. See the post on adjectives.)

Occasionally, adverbs can modify words other than verbs, including nouns:

Only one friend waited for me. (only modifies one friend)

And adverbs can sometimes modify adjectives, though often these will be degree words instead, which we’ll learn about in the next lesson.

She is obviously tired. The cats are clearly happy.

Have fun exploring the poor misunderstood adverb. It is actually quite useful. Writers are sometimes discouraged from using adverbs, especially in fiction writing; examples of such prohibitions are here and here. And though I rarely meet an adverb that should be axed, perhaps your students do use them too abundantly, and now should at least be able to identify them.

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

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 13: Passive

Use of the passive voice is one way we have in English of emphasizing and refocusing information. English has fairly fixed word order, with the subject first, then the verb, and then other stuff (direct object, prepositional phrase, adjective, adverb, etc.). But perhaps you want to foreground the direct object rather than the subject. You can’t just put it up front to emphasize it (as in Latin or Russian or other languages with case marking endings that indicate the functions of the nouns); rather, in English you can passivize the sentence by moving the direct object into the subject position, which then triggers several other grammatical operations:
• the subject appears at the end of the sentence in a by-prepositional phrase
• a form of auxiliary be comes in
• the main verb changes into the past participle
• and then you can optionally delete the by-phrase
Here are some examples. Note that the tense is always maintained; passive doesn't affect the tense:

The eagle ate the rat.
The rat was eaten by eagle.

The police are arresting the suspects.
The suspects are being arrested by the police.

So those are the logistics. For the most part, we all do it – make active and passive sentences – easily and effortlessly. But sometimes we are advised to avoid the use of passive in writing (though that was it right there). It is viewed (passive again) as obscuring the agent (which it can do, but maybe that’s what you want to do), as being too wordy, or as being too vague (which again, could be the point – that’s why we use it in speech, when we don’t want or don’t need to be specific about who is doing something, about who or what the agent is). In student writing, I often see attempts to avoid passive (or what someone thinks is passive) turn into much more garbled, awkward sentences. If students can easily identify passive, however, then they can make good rhetorical choices about whether they want to use passive or not.

The suggestion to avoid passive is often lumped in with another suggestion to avoid all forms of be. And since forms of be are necessarily a part of the passive verb string, that includes passive. But this avoidance of any form of be can also lead to some bad substitutions when students simply comb through their writing for all forms of be and substitute a not-quite-synonym like exist. Getting students to think about the verbs in their writing is useful. And not using be quite so much is probably a good idea. (It is the most common verb in English, according to the Oxford English Corpus. The is the most common word overall, followed by be.) Some writing instructors note that be (and its forms) does not add enough “umph,” or it simply equates (this is that), or that it’s too general. Considering other verbs and considering some reorganization that leads to the use of other verbs can perhaps improve the writing. But just scanning for be or for passive and then substituting generally makes things worse. It’s really not that time-consuming or difficult to discuss passive and the forms of be and doing so will have other pay-offs since students will then have a clearer understanding of this complex syntactic operation, of the unconscious knowledge they already possess about how it works grammatically and rhetorically, and then, if its use or overuse really is an issue in student writing, students will have the tools to revise.

Another problem with simply telling students to avoid the use of passive is that they’ll see plenty of passive out there in “good writing,” and also their intuitions will tell them that it’s not only not a bad aspect of the language, but can be a very useful one. Here’s a nice list of some of the myths about passive in writing. I will not send you to LanguageLog’s many discussions of the passive (which is mostly about pointing out misidentification of passive - a bit too gotcha - but if you must take a peek, here’s the link).

So recognizing passive is straightforward: a form of be plus the past participial form of a verb. Always. (Ok, I should know better than to say always, but almost always - except when be is get: She got hit by the ball.) And you can check it by creating the corresponding active sentence. Every passive has an active counterpart (though not the other way around since there are plenty of sentences that do not have a passive counterpart. Only sentences that have direct objects can even be passivized.) (You can review past participles in the lesson on the five forms of verbs.)

Passive exercises by Beth Keyser are here, included in a lesson on auxiliary verbs. Much fun will be had by you and your students. :)

Strand 1/Grammar - Lesson 12: Adjectives

Just as the meaning-based definitions for nouns and verbs can be problematic, so too can a definition of adjective that labels it simply as a “describing word”; nouns can also describe (linguistics book), as can verbs (She is diving.), so, again, it is the morphological and syntactic information that is more reliable and less subjective when identifying adjectives.

Most adjectives take comparative and superlative morphology: -er/-est or the words more and most. (For more on what it is that determines which a word can take, see this document.)

So now we already have a handy test for adjectives.

Test 1 for Adjectives: Does the word have a comparative and superlative form?

small, smaller, smallest
curious, more curious, most curious
ugly, uglier, ugliest
difficult, more difficult, most difficult

There's a lesson on TeachLing on the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives. (I should note that many adverbs also have comparative and superlative forms: I run faster than you. I'll come back to adverbs in some later post.)

Now, some adjectives cannot be compared since they are not gradable, so it might be weird to say

This chair is more wooden than that one.
He is more married than she is.

since you’re either wooden or you’re not, married or not, and so on. Sometimes, however, we use these forms in certain situations and they do make sense. If someone said that one chair is more wooden than another, what might that mean?

Gradability is also relevant for a second test for adjectives, their ability to be used with a degree word, like very.

Test 2 for Adjectives: Can the word by preceded by a degree word?

Degree words (also sometimes called intensifiers) are a part of speech (sometimes misclassified as adverbs, though they have different syntactic and morphological behavior – I’ll come back to that at some point) that, well, express degree, so words like very, so, too, more, less, quite, almost, kind of, rather, pretty, sort of, or extremely.

Again, as with the comparative and superlative forms for adjectives, there are some adjectives that resist a word like very since they are already opposite ends on a scale – complete/incomplete, married/not married, wooden/non wooden, pregnant/not pregnant. Does very work with these adjectives? We do use it that way, so you might want to have your students explain what something like "very complete" might mean and when it might be used (rather than just saying "don't say that" or "we can't say that").

Test 3 for Adjectives: Can the word follow a linking verb?

Adjectives occur in two basic positions: before a noun (the furry cat) and following a linking verb (the cat is furry). Linking verbs do just that – “link” to the subject noun phrase by renaming it. Linking verbs include sense verbs like taste, smell, feel, as well as verbs of “existence” like be, remain, seem, appear, grow, or become.

Jojo is tall.
The cat remains skittish.
The toast tastes burned.

So there you go. Three easy tests to use to verify whether a word is an adjective. Anywhere where there is uncertainty or disagreement among your students provides the perfect opportunity to do analysis, some figuring out. If you’re uncertain, that simply means something interesting is going on. One place where there may be some debate is figuring out whether participles are adjectives or verbs. So here’s a document and exercise on that. Another place for disagreement may be with color terms. And a third is with noun modifiers of nouns, so here’s a link to a document on that.

Strand 3/Conventions – Post 4: Clauses and Punctuation

The writing errors considered the most serious have to do with marking (or not) clause boundaries. See examples on various Top 10 error lists here and here and here and here and lots of other places.

So once students can identify clauses, they can easily avoid these errors. The lessons previously posted on this blog here, here and here and the TeachLing lessons cited within those are all good ways to identify subjects in order to identify clauses, and therefore avoid writing in run-ons/comma splices or fragments, if that’s your goal.

There’s a lesson here on punctuating complex clauses and a short one here on choosing different punctuation to create different meanings and effects. Write on.

Strand 3/Conventions – Post 3: Punctuation clarifies – or doesn’t

The primary purpose of punctuation is to clarify, to help the reader understand the text. There are some common examples of how punctuation can disambiguate phrases and sentences that would otherwise be ambiguous.

Let’s eat Zelda.

With no comma this example, of course, means that we will eat Zelda. Simply add a comma and we are now addressing Zelda.

Let’s eat, Zelda.

The comma in the example above helps the reader to read the text in the way that is intended. Although the previous post discusses the fact that punctuation does not typically correlate with speech pauses, it often does correlate with intonation – the pitch across the string of words. And in examples like those above, the intonation distinctions in the spoken versions of these sentences would allow the listener to understand the words just as they were intended.

You can find plenty of other examples of changes in punctuation leading to changes of meaning – often unintended. I don’t even want to link to them since many of them are rants, suggesting the downfall of a society that doesn’t pay enough attention to punctuation, but if you’re so inclined, you may search. A few of the most prevalent examples are the one above (usually with Grandma instead of Zelda, the “dear John” example (ok, I’ll link to that one), and the panda joke, now also the title of a book by Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves.

A panda walks into a bar, sits down and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich, pulls out a gun and shoots the waiter dead. As the panda stands up to go, the bartender shouts, “Hey! Where are you
going? You just shot my waiter and you didn't pay for your sandwich!” The panda yells back at the bartender, “Hey, I'm a PANDA! Look it up!” The bartender opens his dictionary and sees the following definition for panda: "A tree dwelling marsupial of Asian origin, characterized by distinct black and white coloring. Eats shoots and leaves.

So the punctuation in these examples certainly is useful, marking various kinds of phrases and clauses, resulting in different interpretations. (Though the panda one is really an artificial example since writers don't typically leave out that first comma between eats and shoots. Now, the so-called Oxford comma is a different story, which perhaps I'll return to.)

But sometimes punctuation is purely convention. It doesn’t mark grammatical distinctions or intonation contours or anything. But it’s conventional, so we do it. We learn to put a comma between a city name and a state name (Ferndale, Washington) and between the day of the month and the year (April 15, 2000), but wouldn’t these be just as easy for the reader to understand with no commas?

And capitalization – is that punctuation? We capitalize certain words by convention: proper nouns, of course, but also the pronoun I. Does capitalization of I serve to clarify? We’re accustomed to it as a convention, so it would be odd to us not to do it, but we don’t capitalize any other pronouns like She, They, or even the other first person singular Me. That would be strange, wouldn’t it?

And what about the apostrophe used in contractions? By convention, we put an apostrophe when letters have been deleted, so do plus not becomes don’t, but wouldn’t dont be just as clear in context?

Why dont you try it? Cant you read it just fine? Wouldnt it be easy enough?

Another example of punctuation as simply convention is the rule regarding end punctuation and quotation marks. The convention within the US is for all punctuation to go inside quotation marks, so it looks like the following example, with the period after okra preceding the ”:

The girl said, “I like okra.”

However, the convention in the UK is for the punctuation to go outside the quotation marks:

The girl said, “I like okra”.

One rule does not necessarily make more sense than the other and neither has anything to do with grammatical categories or with even clarity – it’s simply convention.

Such rules of punctuation are often lumped in to the study of “grammar,” broadly defined. However, these rules of writing do not depend on and are not affected by our spoken language or our unconscious (or conscious) knowledge of it. These “conventional” rules must be taught and learned, and are not the natural rules of language itself.

Ok, but on to the rules of punctuation that do correlate with grammatical distinctions.

Strand 3/Conventions - Post 2: Mini History of Punctuation

Early punctuation was more related to speaking than to reading. Latin texts were originally written without spaces between words. Punctuation marks began as a guide to reading texts aloud, and word spaces were finally introduced around the eighth century BCE. Early Old English texts needed marks to indicate when the speaker should pause to give emphasis or indications of where to breathe.

Because Old English texts were handwritten and because there were not yet any standards for punctuation at the time (800-1100), it is not surprising that there was great variability in the punctuation used. Although some scribes used no punctuation at all, most used the point (a period) to mark a rhetorical break of some kind or a suggestion for where to breathe when reading aloud. Points were written on the line or above the line. Semicolons indicated longer breaks, and punctus elevatus, looking something like our modern comma, marked a shorter break. Question marks (punctus interrogativus) were sometimes used, but not required, in questions.

Spaces occurred between words in compounds, between prefixes and suffixes and the roots or words to which they were attached, and sometimes between syllables. Prepositions, pronouns, and adverbs were typically attached to following words, and word breaks at the end of a line were often at syllable breaks, sometimes marked with a hyphen, sometimes not. Proper names were not capitalized, and although some scribes capitalized the first letter of the word beginning a sentence, not all did. Nouns were often written with the determiners and prepositions they formed constituents with.

It’s pretty cool to look at some old texts to see these techniques. Here’s one, The Leechbook of Bald, which was an Old English medical text probably compiled in the ninth-century, possibly under the influence of Alfred the Great's educational reforms. And here's a link to other Old English manuscripts.

It was not until the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century that we see the beginnings of the practices of modern day punctuation, which then became fairly codified by the 18th century. The British playwright Ben Jonson is often given credit for putting down many of the rules as we know them. In his 1640 book The English Grammar he discusses the primary functions of the various punctuation marks, marking the point at which punctuation correlates more with grammatical function of the words than with breathing patterns of speakers. In an 1892 book by John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, we see an acknowledgement of this shift.

It is sometimes stated in works on Rhetoric and Grammar, that the points are for the purpose of elocution, and directions are given to pupils to pause a certain time at each of the stops. It is true that a pause required for elocutionary purposes does sometimes coincide with a grammatical point, and so the one aids the other. Yet it should not be forgotten that the first and main ends of the points is to mark grammatical divisions. Good elocution often requires a pause where there is no break whatever in the grammatical continuity, and where the insertion of a point would make nonsense. (John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, 1892)

What Hart said in 1892 still holds true, and teaching comma and period usage as correlating with pauses in speech can lead writers to make errors of comma usage. A study by Danielewicz and Chafe (“How `Normal’ Speaking Leads to `Erroneous’ Punctuation,” in S. Freedman, ed., The Acquisition of Written Language. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 213-225. 1985) reports on punctuation practices of college freshmen. They suggest that what might appear to be punctuation errors in freshman compositions are attempts to capture prosodic features of speech in writing. The writers seem to be punctuating to mark the intonation they would have used in speaking. Consider this example from the writing of one of the students in the study:

One of these categories, that I can be classified in is that of an only child.

Danielewicz and Chafe propose that the comma in this student's example indicates an intonation boundary. Such “errors” are likely reinforced from one of the only things that most students are taught about commas – that they mark pauses. In fact, most commas – one estimate says 70% – do not correlate with pauses in spoken language. We know that punctuation used to mark breathing pauses, but does not do so consistently anymore.

Ok, so commas and periods no longer correlate with spoken language pauses. What do they mark then?

Strand 3/Conventions - Post 1: Oh, Punctuation!

Punctuation is not linguistics (except when it is – see Geoff Nunberg’s The Linguistics of Punctuation). However, one of the primary concerns of many of the pre- and in-service teachers I work with is dealing with convention errors in their students’ writing – comma splices, fragments, and other usage errors (some are perceived errors, not actual ones, so I'll discuss that too). And there have been some requests from you to post some lessons related directly to punctuation, so here goes.

While I am obviously a strong advocate for taking time to delve into the study of grammar beyond its relation to punctuation, it is at least beneficial to better understand how the two relate to each other, and I've already alluded to this in some other posts (for example, this one on identifying clauses mentions fragments in writing). A brief investigation of the history of the punctuation, a better understanding of the various roles it has in our written language, and the ways in which standards of punctuation vary can all help students negotiate its use and will result, I’m certain, in fewer errors in writing.

Certainly knowledge of grammatical categories (like phrases and clause types) and certain grammatical functions (like modification) correlates with certain conventions; for example, to accurately punctuate complex clauses, one must know the distinction between subordinate clauses and coordinated clauses, or to accurately punctuate various kinds of modifying phrases, one must know whether something is a modifier or not. Now it is likely the case that the primary way we learn punctuation is by reading “accurately-punctuated” texts – but then there’s lots of variation there too (fragments are all over casual text and much fiction writing). Consider the fragments in this passage from Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch:

Inside, a tall, pale man dressed in black stood halfway down the hall, staring into a doorway. Beyond him, a dark room. A worn bed. White sheets dull in the shadow. Didn’t look like anyone had slept there in months. Dusty floor. Even before he’d started seeing Sintra, his place hadn’t looked this bad. (3)

So students will pick up on the fact that fragments are out there in "good" writing. It's all about making good rhetorical choices.

Strand 2/Morphology – Part 7: More on Verb Affixes

The Strand 1/Grammar post on Verb Morphology fits in nicely here. It focuses on ways to identify verbs, using affixes unique to verbs, such as the past tense -ed (an inflectional affix), but also derivational affixes (that “derive” new words) like dis-, re-, -ate, -ize, and -en. (And not focusing on a meaning-based definition of verb as an action word or a state of being.) There are lots of different kinds of problem-solving activities that could grow out of this verbal affixation topic. It’s important, however, to make sure that the students discover the patterns and categories, rather than simply telling them that some affix attaches to some verb and changes the meaning in a particular way. (See my rant on that here.)

Here’s one lesson plan that focuses on re-, illustrating the patterns – the kinds of verbs re- attaches to, the restrictions on the attachment, and re- with roots that are not stand-alone verbs.

And there are lots of lists of prefixes and suffixes (and Latin and Greek roots) and accompanying lessons already out there, some mentioned here.

An example of the kind of exploration comes from a prefix like un-. It has a straightforward meaning that students can discover when they examine a set of data:

undo
untie
unfasten
untangle

The prefix means something like “reverse action” of whatever the verb is. There’s another un- that attaches to adjectives:

unhappy
uninhibited
unequal

And this affix doesn’t mean “reverse” but rather “not.” So there are two affixes that look the same, but have different meanings and attach to different parts of speech.

(These two distinct affixes which attach to two different parts of speech and have different meanings results in a cool ambiguity with words like the adjective unlockable. Notice that this word can have opposite meanings, that the door can be unlocked (able to be unlocked) or that the door cannot be locked (not lockable). You can have students think about how this can be. It’s not a typical situation since there are not many homophonic affixes like un-; there’s the un- that attaches to adjectives and means ‘not’ and the un- that attaches to verbs and means ‘reverse.’ It’s a good activity to get students to think about these pieces of words and how much meaning is packed in there that we usually take for granted.)

Another take-away from these activities is the awareness that we build up words in a step-wise fashion, attaching certain affixes before others. Again, we do this automatically as native speakers, but understanding the complexity of this automatic process is empowering for native speakers and instructive for non-native speakers of English. There’s a lesson on that here.

Don't forget to check out Ann Whiting's 7th graders' word exploration blog for other great ideas and similar word study. And if you're feeling intimidated about your analysis of these complex words, Whiting's students take advantage of a great resource, the Online Etymological Dictionary, where you can look up affixes as well as whole words. This dictionary offers a way to continue the exploration using something other than a standard dictionary, especially when seeking a single answer to "what part of speech is this?" That is, you want to encourage students to figure out the parts of speech on their own, but if this is too challenging, or if you want to focus on research tools and etymology, send them to this dictionary to help them explore the meanings of the parts.

Middleschoolling's wordle

Top-Down Word Study - Grr

I’ve just spent a bit of time perusing a word study curriculum by Benchmark Education Company that our local school district is using. The basic content seems generally fine. 3rd grade is focused primarily on spelling patterns. 4th too, though it gets more into prefixes, suffixes, and homographs/phones. Then 5th grade really tackles learning suffixes, prefixes, and Greek and Latin roots. This content overlaps with materials I’ve been using with 3rd to 5th grade teachers, and also ties into the Common Core. But there is a fundamental problem that runs throughout this curriculum. It tells students what the morphemes are doing. Aside from providing belittling scripts for teachers to use, those scripts are completely top-down, not allowing students to discover the unconscious knowledge that they already have about words, and not allowing them to discover the patterns that emerge if they analyze a set of word data (say, if they are not native English speakers – they can still discover the patterns). For example, it says,

“Write the suffix –ion on the chalkboard. Explain to students that today they will be working with the suffix –ion. Say: This suffix appears in many words and refers to an “action or process” or “the result of an action or process.” Adding –ion to a base word usually changes it from a verb to a noun.”

Students are simply told what this suffix does, when they could discover that, as well as the fact that it attaches to verbs to make nouns. With the top-down model, such suffixes and their functions just become things to memorize. The discovery, the critical thinking is missing. But the sense of empowerment that comes when students understand that these grammatical distinctions are not handed down from on high but come from within cannot be underestimated. When we teach about language, guiding students to discover the spelling patterns, the parts of speech categories, the complex systematicity that they already make use of everyday in their language, the effects can be huge.

The good news is that we can accomplish the same goals that Benchmark aspires to (“Engaging students in word study gives them strategies for analyzing multisyllabic words and a deeper understanding of prefixes, suffixes, and root words. Explicit instruction in word-solving strategies helps students read and spell quickly and accurately. It also encourages comprehension”) without even spending much more time – and with big payoffs. I think a lot of teachers already encourage this kind of introspection from students without even thinking about it, but it’s just irritating that the curriculum materials themselves are so “teachy.”

Deidre's students sorting nouns: abstract and concrete

Variants of this noun morphology lesson are getting lots of action. As a follow up to this discussion of abstract and concrete nouns, Deidre's students explored this distinct in more depth. Here is an image of students sorting nouns into abstract and concrete.

And another, where they've made three categories, clearly abstract, clearly concrete, and not sure.

They then put them on the board. Where there was complete consensus, those words went in the "clearly" columns. (Some of these we would want to come back to and discuss some more - money, for example.)

From there, we turned to the noun suffixes discussed in this lesson and in its comments.

Dave Pippin's morphology whiteboard

This photo is a fine display of some morphological happenings from Dave's 7th grade class last spring.

The Do-Si-Do you can see there is mentioned in this lesson and came from John Horner's 7th graders at Whatcom Middle School.

Send more pictures!

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 11: Subject-Auxiliary Inversion and Fragments

Distinguishing subordinate clauses from independent clauses is an important aspect of learning not to write in fragments, since one of the most common types of stigmatized fragments in writing is a subordinate clause. Consider, for example, the following complex sentence.

The monkey can see that the banana is ripening.

This sentence contains two clauses: the independent clause and the subordinate clause, that the banana is ripe, contained within it. Apply SAI, and you get

Can the monkey __ see that the banana is ripening?

Employing SAI picks out the independent clause subject, the monkey. Even though the banana is also a subject (of the subordinate clause), SAI will not work with that subject since the banana is not the subject of the independent clause.

*The monkey can see that is the banana __ ripening?

SAI is, therefore, a useful test to determine whether a sentence has the subject that is required in most forms of writing. When SAI is attempted with a sentence without an independent clause subject, it's terrible.

Because he does not like it. → *Because does he not like it?

SAI fails here since because introduces a subordinate clause and there is no independent clause subject. Similarly for other kinds of fragments, SAI will not work since there is no subject.

At the skateboard store. → ??

There is no auxiliary verb and there is no way to turn this into a question.

Here’s a version of this on TeachLing. And a doc version of these last three clause posts is here.

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 10: Clauses (Subject-Auxiliary Inversion)

Another cool way to identify subjects is to use Subject-Auxiliary Inversion, which we already saw in Lesson 8. There, we saw that one way to turn a statement into a question is to move the auxiliary verb to precede the subject. Not only does this allow us to “discover” the auxiliary verb, but it will also “reveal” the subject. Remember, of course, that we make use of subjects all of the time in our speech, and have no problem doing so. But if we want a trick to consciously find the subject, simply make a question:

The chicken will eat the corn. → Will the chicken __eat the corn?

The portion of the sentence that the auxiliary verb inverts with or moves around will always be the subject, no matter how long or how short it is.

Mo is eating carrots. → Is Mo __ eating carrots?

The kid with a gigantic hat can’t see his friend.

→ Can the kid with the gigantic hat __ see his friend?

You can have students turn some sentences like these into questions by using SAI.

The kids should take their lunches on the fieldtrip.
The teacher visiting from Chicago will be our substitute next week.
The test on factors could be next week.
The man who talked with us on the bus about safety could also visit the classrooms.

Subject Auxiliary Inversion (SAI), like Tag Questions, will always pick out the subject of an independent clause, not a subordinate clause, so it will distinguish these from each other. Being able to easily pick out the subjects of our sentences will help ensure
• that each sentence has a subject, a required element of most academic writing
• that the subject “agrees with” the verb, if that’s something that you’re concerned about in your students’ writing
• that each independent clause has only one main subject, if you’re seeing comma splices/run-ons in students’ writing

I want to emphasize, though, that there are good reasons to talk about subjects other than simply dealing with issues in writing. That will come along for free, but it’s important to draw students’ attention to these phenomena. At the risk of repeating myself, subjects, like so many other features of language, are an aspect of the language that speakers already know about, that we have unconscious knowledge of. Figuring out the evidence for that is a useful exercise in scientific inquiry, and allowing students to “discover” the subjects that emerge beautifully when they make tag questions and perform SAI, reveals this knowledge.

A related lesson, which includes both Tag Questions and SAI, is here.

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 9: Clauses (Tag Questions)

There have been a couple of requests to get to clauses, so let’s do it. There’s more to say, of course, about verbs, but it makes more sense to come back to them in the context of clauses. Once you’ve got nouns and verbs, clauses are the obvious next step – they’re all you need to make a clause. So, here’s a definition: A clause contains a subject, which is a noun phrase, and a predicate, which is a verb phrase.

And here is NOT a (good) definition: a clause (or a sentence – I’ll come back this distinction below) is a complete thought. The “complete thought” quip is an old standby, but, I would argue, a useless one. I’ll have a separate post about this and its connection to sentence fragments.

So clauses can have noun phrase subjects and verb phrase predicates that can be short:

She likes eggplant.

Or long:

The girl with the striped pants who I met yesterday adores eggplant fresh from the garden.

Each of these clauses is made up of a subject (NP) and a predicate (VP), but in the second example, each phrase is simply longer.

A clause is distinct from a sentence since a single sentence can contain multiple clauses.

I like eggs. (one clause, one sentence)
I like eggs, but I don’t like bacon. (two independent clauses, one sentence)
I like eggs that are cooked well. (two clauses (one is a relative clause), one sentence)

For the most part, identifying subjects is easy. We all make use of them all the time in our speech and writing, and we all have subconscious knowledge that a subject is a necessary element in a clause. But sometimes we may want to double check for a subject, and a really useful test to help identify a subject is through the use of a tag question. We discussed tag questions in Lesson 8 in the context of auxiliary verbs, but here we focus on the pronouns that occur in the tag questions. You will discover that the pronoun that attaches to the end of a sentence refers back to the subject of the independent clause. (In writing, we set off the tag question with a comma.)

The student could write more quickly, couldn’t she?

The pronoun she refers back to the subject, the student. So, tag questions are useful little questions; they not only turn statements into questions, but they also pick out the subject of the sentence. No matter how long or how short the subject is, the pronoun will refer back to the whole segment:

The student with the really heavy backpack who usually takes the bus should be here soon.

→ The student with the really heavy backpack who usually takes the bus should be here soon, shouldn’t he?

And when there is a subordinate clause (which I’ll discuss in separate post, but here’s a link to a TeachLing lesson fragments, Figuring Out Fragments), the pronoun in the tag question cannot refer back to that subject, only to the subject of the independent clause – so this is a great way to address writing sentence fragments:

Sue thinks Bob will eat shrimp, doesn’t she?
not
*Sue thinks that Bob will eat shrimp, doesn’t he?

Even though Bob is a subject, it’s not the subject of the main/independent clause, so the pronoun in the tag question cannot refer back to it, only to Sue. You don’t need to get into this yet; however, if you do the activity suggested below, students will surely find subordinate clauses. You might want to use some controlled sentences first if you aren’t prepared to deal with all sorts of complex clauses.

Activity: Have students find (from a list of sentences you’ve created, from their own writing, from books) the subject of each sentence by using tag questions. Make sure they identify the whole noun phrase subject, not just the noun.

When students understand the difference between independent and dependent (or subordinate) clauses, there are lots of applications: learning how to punctuate, how to not write in fragments or run-ons, how to make sure the verb agrees with the subject. And other, broader, but even more important, reasons that I'll discuss in the next post.

Here’s a TeachLing series of lessons, Learning about Verbs, Identifying Subjects, Identifying Clauses, that has several tag-question documents to use in class: and another, Subjects: Finding Them Is Easy.

The next post will be about Subject-Auxiliary Inversion as a test for subjects. You may want to take a look at it before doing this one to see if you want to use the two tests together.

Strand 1/Grammar – Lesson 8: Main verbs and auxiliary verbs

As we move into the syntax of verb phrases, it’s important to discover some of the differences between verbs and auxiliary verbs. There are very few auxiliary (or helping) verbs, so it’s fairly straightforward to label them, but it’s instructive to really understand some of the ways in which the two categories differ. Then one can much more easily see how auxiliary verbs and non-auxiliary verbs behave in different ways in passive constructions, in progressive and perfect aspect, in representing the future tense, and so on.

Three of the ways in which auxiliary verbs differ from “main” verbs.
1) They occur before not and can contract with it.
Lulu has not eaten lunch yet.
Lulu hasn’t eaten lunch yet.
Compare to a sentence without an auxiliary – they’re terrible (as indicated by the *)!
*Lulu eats not lunch till noon.
*Lulu eatsn’t lunch.

2) Auxiliary verbs occur in tag questions.
Bobo is running the race, isn’t he?
Bobo hasn’t finished the race yet, has he?
Try to form a tag question on a sentence without an auxiliary – yuck.
*Bobo runs the race, runsn’t he?
*Bob finished the race in second place, finishedn’t he?

3) Auxiliary verbs move to the front of the sentence in a yes/no-question. We call this Subject-Auxiliary Inversion (SAI).
Are you guys singing at the concert? (You guys are singing at the concert.)
Have you been to New York? (You have been to New York.)
Main verbs can’t do that:
*Sing you at the concert?
*Like you New York?

Another difference between main verbs and auxiliary verbs is that auxiliary verbs are a closed class: new members are never added, while we add new verbs all the time.

But it’s a better idea to let the students discover these differences for themselves. They could discover that auxiliary verb have and main verb have have different patterns (and meanings). Since have can be both an auxiliary and a main verb, they can compare sentences such as the following to see how tag questions and SAI behave differently in the two sets.

She hasn’t been feeling very well.
The penguins have already been fed, haven’t they?
Have your friends left for the party?

I have four dollars left.
She has an injured elbow.
We have lots of energy.

They should also come up with all of the forms of be. Everyone knows these, of course, and uses them appropriately all the time, but students sometimes don’t realize that am, is, are, was, were, being, been are all forms of be. There’s a lesson on TeachLing on this.

The auxiliary verbs are have and be.
The "dummy" auxiliary verb is do. (See more on this below.)
And the modal auxiliaries are may, might, can, could, shall, should, will, would, must). These are different from these auxiliaries since they do not express tense or change their forms depending on the subject. They do, however, do all of the things in (1)-(3) above. We’ll return to a discussion of them.

There are related lessons on auxiliary verbs here and on auxiliary verbs and subjects here.

Dummy Do
When there is no auxiliary and the language needs one, a form of do is stuck in. Have them figure that out.

She likes eggs. - Make it negative. What happens?
She likes eggs. - Make it a question (both by SAI and a tag). What happens?

Be: Main Verb and Auxiliary Verb
Be is the only verb that has features of both auxiliary verbs and main verbs. It can be the only verb in a sentence (so act like a main verb), but also it does all of the things that auxiliary verbs do: precedes and contracts with not, moves to the front in questions, appears at the end in tag questions. It’s the last verb that can do all this, which other verbs could do in older forms of English. (“Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?” Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew; “Get thee to a nunnery.” Shakespeare, Hamlet)

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

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.