So if you did the nonsense sentence activity with your students, I’d love to hear how it went. It serves to introduce the idea that we make use of certain morphological and syntactic rules/tools to categorize words.
This morphological information—the different parts they can have, the ways we put those parts together, and the information those different parts convey—is part of what we use to identify a word as a noun. So here’s what we know:
Nouns can be pluralized – One morphological fact about most nouns (see more about the “most” part here) is that they express number, they can be singular or plural. (Some languages have a different form for “dual,” which is pretty cool.) We usually pluralize an English noun by adding -s/-es/-ies in the written form: rats, spiders, bunnies. So if you take your word in question and pluralizing it works, you got yourself a noun.
Here is a short TED Ed video explanation by John McWhorter for some of the odd plurals in English.Nouns can be made possessive – Another morphological fact about nouns is that they can take the possessive suffix -s. Try attaching the possessive to some words that you know aren’t nouns – they’re terrible. Or it turns that word into a noun. (I follow the linguistic tradition of using * to mark an ungrammatical example.)
*the happy’s hat
*a curious’s question
but
the cat’s tail
the truth’s inevitability
Nouns can have certain other “nominal” suffixes – -ance/ence (perforamance), –ion (formation), -al (refusal), -age (leakage). To find some more of these, try this activity:
Have students come up with words that are created by adding the noun-making suffixes. There’s a table here with some examples. You’ll see that the suffixes will consistently attach to the same part of speech, which is cool too. (Students might notice that some of the suffixes in the table attach to nouns to derive other nouns rather than words of another category.)
What’s the point of this? To show that we all already know what nouns are and how to manipulate them morphologically, by adding the appropriate suffixes. And you get for free some good morphological analysis as words are put together and taken apart.
Here's Lesson 2 as a doc.
Here's a piece by Erika Okrent on nouns that have only a plural form...
ReplyDeletehttp://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=52672
And here's this discussion of plurals on LanguageLog: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7147#more-7147
ReplyDeleteI also taught Nouns Lesson 2. The students equally enjoyed this lesson, but they had some trouble thinking of words that can be changed to nouns using suffixes. I put them in small groups, had them make lists, and shared them with the class. This lesson is one that I constantly refer back to when I'm talking about unrelated topics. I call attention to words I use that can be changed. I hope this will get them to continue to think about it on their own. I extended this lesson and the first one by requiring students to take notes. I occasionally give them an exit pass query like, "What can you do to nouns?" Knowing these categories will help them when it comes to doing sentence trees. We also watched the history of nouns. They loved it! We watched it several times and they told me when to stop when they wanted to take notes. This brought up lots of discussion about language in general, pronunciation of words, dialects, etc. I found a sample of old English. It happened to be of the Lord's Prayer. They loved hearing it. They said they were going to name their pets after some of the words that tickled their fancies. :)
ReplyDeleteGreat! I'll be playing with noun suffixes with Deidre's students this week, and we'll report back on how that goes and what we all learn.
ReplyDeleteJust back from visiting with Deidre's (9-11-year oldish) students and talking about noun morphology. We analyzed lists of nouns made by adding nominal suffixes, similar to this lesson on TeachLing: http://teachling.wwu.edu/node/1436. They separated the roots from the suffixes, tried to come up with other words that ended in that same suffix, and then tried to describe the meaning of the suffix. Some were straightforward (artist), some less so (participant). I enjoyed listening to them test their hypotheses - for -ity: how about 'city'? Oh wait, no, because 'c' doesn't mean anything. For -ship: it means 'boat' oh, wait, no it doesn't when it's on 'friendship.' It means...(that's a hard one - what is 'ship's meaning?) And then applying their knowledge - after discussing -let, as in 'booklet,' they decided to rename the loveseat in the classroom a 'couchlet.' And when I left and told them what great linguists they had been, they immediately spotted the -ist: "There's one! Linguist!"
DeleteI remembered another good example that Deidre's students brought up when discussing -ship. Attitcus and Ollie said 'battleship' for a word that ends in -ship. Quite right, of course, but it's not a suffix. We didn't have time to discuss this, but it would be a great opportunity to allow them to come up with the differences between the bound morpheme (suffix) -ship and the free morpheme 'ship'. One of them wondered if the suffix had originated from the word 'ship.' It didn't, but it's a great idea and showed that they were realizing that they were distinct. Jeanne and I had been discussing the compound word standard for 3rd graders (at least in her district in California) and what its purpose might be. Showing how the pieces of compound words are distinct from the pieces of words that involve prefixes and suffixes seems like a useful way to connect compound words to the larger study of morphology, of analyzing the parts of words in ways that extend beyond just those words.
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