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.

Spelling Detour

You should check out Ann Whiting’s students’ techniques for talking through morphological boundaries and spelling changes in the video in this Determination post and many of her other videos and discussions at her blog from her 7th grade class last year and this year’s blog. Here’s a great lesson, “Should ‘e’ stay or should ‘e’ go”, demonstrating how the students themselves hypothesize about spelling patterns. I think I’ll be checking out her blog a lot – tons of great strategies there.

Also, Dan Allen’s blog on his fifth grade class has a nice collection of posts on spelling and language analysis.

Both Whiting and Allen reference the French-based Real Spelling and Neil Ramsden’s site, “Word Building and Spelling: Experiments in English Morphology”. It looks pretty cool, and there is a lot of information about morphological patterns and the connections to spelling. I’m not going to take the time now to delve deeper, but you might want to check out the Mini Matrix Maker. Also, the Word Searcher is a great tool for morphological analysis and spelling patterns. You can search for all the words with certain letters in that order, and then use that list to look for words that may be related to each other. If there’s interest out there from whoever is reading this, let me know and we can spend some more time with morphology and spelling. Also, Dave, Wayne, and Maya have a paper on spelling that will soon be linked here. (Right, Dave?)

Strand 2/Morphology - Part 2: Breaking Real Words into Morphemes

After doing the nonsense words and made up words investigations, you can move on to real words. The goal here is simply to break words into their meaningful parts, their morphemes. You can do this, of course, with any category, but it will be easier to limit the focus at this point on nouns, and the kinds of suffixes that nouns take, so it’s probably best to offer a list rather than have the students generate their own words, at least at first. Here are some ideas. You can use others (that may related to topics you’re covering in your classrooms).

cats = cat + s
probability = probabil + ity (probable)
freedom = free + dom
happiness = happi (happy) + ness
wreckage = wreck + age
runner = runn (run) + er

Some of these examples illustrate how spelling can change with the addition of some of the affixes (affix is a cover term for suffix and prefix), so you can decide if you want to detour here to focus on spelling. There are lots of interesting spelling detours to take, actually, so I’ll have a separate post about some of them and some of the many excellent resources.

This lesson on TeachLing is good, but it's on breaking words of all different parts of speech into their morphemes, so I wouldn’t do it here if you’re trying to limit the scope to just nouns. It might, however, be useful as a model.