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.
When talking about abstract and concrete with Deidre’s students last week, Atticus used a test for the word "uncle." He said that it was concrete because it would be weird to say I see the uncleness in the room. He was conscious of –ness being a suffix that occurs on abstract nouns, even though we hadn’t discussed that. Cool.
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