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

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

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

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

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

Auxiliary Have and Main Verb Have

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Negation and Questions

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

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

*The boy has not a horse.

And auxiliary have can move to the front in questions.

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

He has three dogs.
?Has he three dogs?

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

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

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

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

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

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.