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.

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.