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.

Sentence Diagrams

I’ve been thinking about sentence diagramming. Both this kind:
(which has gotten some recent press with the release of this poster)

and this kind
Or a more complex version of this linguistically-informed syntax tree, such as this:

Dick Hudson discussed a bit about the history of diagramming recently here and Beth Keyser has been using linguisticky (Like that spelling? And how would you spell the present participial form (-ing) of the verb picnic? We are picnic___. Sometimes our spelling system fails us, but we make do.) trees in her classes for several years; she and I will report on this soon. I’m also planning to write up a more thorough investigation (an article rather than a blog post) of the pros and cons of various kinds of visual representations for sentence diagrams, but in the meantime, these are some musings and some questions.

There were various studies in the 1930s and 1940s about whether sentence diagramming improved student writing. Mostly it didn’t seem to (though the methods of evaluating improved writing were and are messy). But what else can creating and using visual representations of sentences do for us? Certainly, whatever kind of diagram is used, one must know the categories of each word and of each phrase and be able to show how all of those fit together to make clauses. Throughout this blog, there is a presumption that such knowledge of categories, phrases, and clauses is useful. I have emphasized that we have such knowledge unconsciously, so what are the benefits of making it conscious knowledge? Even those who say that in middle and high school you should just teach grammar in context (such as Constance Weaver), and suggest teaching the bare minimum, all include some very basic grammatical information that students should recognize and be able to discuss. These include the basic parts of speech, subject and predicate, and clauses and phrases. Well, that’s a lot, actually. And can using diagramming of one kind or another help with that? Or does it introduce an unnecessary complication? My college students who are planning to become teachers say and write over and over that one of the most important things they learn in my classes that they hope to introduce to their future students is using visual representations - tree diagrams - to help elucidate the structure of sentences. What do you think?

Strand 3/Conventions – Post 7: New Punctuation…☺

We know that language is always changing. Pronunciation changes perhaps faster than other kinds of grammatical changes since it doesn’t match up with the written language very well anyway; so you can say “bought” pretty much however you want, as long as you have something close to a “b” sound at the beginning and something close to a “t” sound at the end. We’re slower to accept morphological and syntactic changes since you can see them in writing. If you say I seen him, that looks a lot different from I saw him, so we notice these variations more. And until recently, I’d say that our punctuation system was pretty set. You can read a very brief history of punctuation in this post, and I’ve also written about how standards of punctuation can vary, as mentioned here, but in general, our system of punctuation has been fairly fixed since the 18th century. So the new punctuation is really exciting! We have old punctuation being used in new ways, and new symbols being incorporated into our punctuation system (emoticons).

Slash/ - Anne Curzan has written about slash, and it was even a runner-up in the Word of the Year vote by the American Dialect Society. The / used to be a not so frequent punctuation mark, but has come in to the spoken language much more frequently of late, and into the written language as slash, written out as a word like that. You can read more about this new conjunction here. What’s especially interesting is that this newish (it’s not clear how new - a former student just wrote me yesterday that she heard a Friends episode from 2002 when Ross says, "So much for my dinosaur slash Amelia Earhart theme park,” so it’s been around at least since then with this newish meaning. Thanks, Mary!) use in which speaking the punctuation (and writing it as slash rather than /) seems to capture something kind of different from how we understand the punctuation mark in writing. And getting a new conjunction is big news, because we just don’t get those very often, like not in 1000 years.

These things: “” - These so-called quotation marks have long been used to mark things other than quotations. I mentioned here the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks which has examples like this one:

. Why are these funny? Let’s first consider the three primary uses for these little marks, “”: (1) to mark direct quotations, (2) as scare quotes, which serve to alert the reader that either the word or phrase is being used in an unusual way or that the writer doesn’t accept the phrase or is using it ironically, or (3) to emphasize, which is what most of the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks’ examples are intending to express. OK, so why are they funny? Because we can read them as scare quotes, even though we know that’s not their intended use: Excuse our “Emptiness”

It seems that all of these writers can’t be wrong in their use of this bit of punctuation. It’s simply less established than the other two uses of the “” marks. It’s true that the emphatic “”s show up a lot more in hand-written signs where we don’t have the benefit of bold or increasing font size in a systematic way, so these marks “” are given yet another duty. But the emphatic use is not something that was likely ever taught. It’s come about out of a need; writers’ ingenuity comes into play. In speaking, of course, we’d have other ways of making the point, with intonation, pitch, and facial expressions. In print, we have to make do with other methods. Would underlining be preferable? Why or why not?

Ellipses… - My students brought the changing meaning of ellipses to my attention. We all know the basic use of these within a quotation where you’ve left some of the stuff out: Harry Potter said, “In school if you make a mistake, you can just try again…but out there, you don’t know what that’s like.” That’s not new or interesting. The new use is mostly in texting. Texting has brought about all kinds of appropriation of existing punctuation, and in some cases, these are gaining new meanings. So one student mentioned a text he received from his dad which read something like “Give me a call when you get a chance…” The student was worried; he interpreted the ellipses as a marker of anger or disappointment. Other students agreed that they would too. When he talked with his dad, though (abandoning texting in favor of a voice call since he thought Dad was mad), Dad was fine and hadn’t intended that meaning at all. I think I got the dad’s intended meaning from the ellipses, though: this isn’t urgent, call when you can, no big deal. The ellipses as used in text messages have completely different meanings for these two writers.

The Period. - Similarly, there’s an article here on the changing meaning of the period in texting and other informal online communication: When there is a shift in topic, a line break can do the job. Most texters would agree that

I’m home now
what’s for dinner?

can sound a lot friendlier than

I’m home now. What’s for dinner?

The question I like to pose to my students is how they know all this. Where do their ideas about the meanings of the punctuation and the contexts in which they are appropriate come from? How are these standards and new uses emerging? My students – and yours too – definitely have a sense of when certain marks are appropriate and when they are not. And because some of these uses are relatively new, we’re not all on the same page, so to speak, and so misunderstandings can emerge. I just think this is a cool way to begin to explore the notion of standardization and language change and to realize that now, as always, we the people are the creators of the standards. And it’s important to drive home that the students are really savvy about these evolving rules of etiquette and conventions. And, in fact, students are knowledgeable not only about conventions of texting, but also about when to use various genres of writing styles (despite the myth that texting language is ruining “language skills”. See here for a LanguageLog post on that). Focusing on their knowledge is a good way to introduce these topics - You’re good at this! Now let’s explore what you know! Linguist John McWhorter, in this New York Times piece, writes the following about texting and email:

“…the looseness and creativity of these new ways of writing are a sign of a new sophistication in our society. This becomes clear when we understand that in the proper sense, e-mail and texting are not writing at all….Keyboard technology, allowing us to produce and receive written communication with unprecedented speed, allows something hitherto unknown to humanity: written conversation. In this sense, [emails and texts] are not “writing” in the sense we are accustomed to. They are fingered speech.”

I think there are lots of conversations and activities that could emerge from the info in this post, but here are a few:

Activity: Have students consider their uses of capitalization in texting, in email, and in other online communication. Do they ever not capitalize the first letter of their name? If so, when? What factors enter in to that choice? What about ALL CAPS? Would they ever use that in a message, and if, so, what is the intended effect?

Activity: Have your students consider their use of acronyms and abbreviations such as lol, brb, or ttyl. Do they use them? If so, in what situations? Have them come up with other acronyms and abbreviations that are completely integrated into the language, such as radar, laser, and scuba or DVR or tv, or ID. If they aren’t aware of what the full forms of these words and phrases are, have them look those up in a dictionary. (Many of my students report that their parents, in their 40s and 50s, for the most part, are much more consistent users of abbreviations such as u for you and ur for you’re or your, and also of the acronmyms.)

Activity: What is the future of emoticons? Emoticons offer us an opportunity to express emotion in writing in a way that is otherwise really cumbersome. We can convey that something is ironic or silly or sad, without using words. We can soften the way that something is read. Now, the use of emoticons is restricted to texts, chat, and some email communication, but have your students discuss whether these features might ever enter into more formal written discourse. What would be the benefits? Drawbacks?

Oh, and no discussion of punctuation is complete without mention of the interrobang. My students always lament its lack of popularity. I tell them they have the power to make it happen.

Strand 3/Conventions – Post 6: Punctuation Variation: the Oxford Comma

At first, I didn’t think there was really anything interesting to say about the comma with items in a series, but I think it’s actually a good example of how we latch on to some of the early things we were taught, and then we stick to these things, often passionately, just because. Also, even if you’re not interested in this serial comma, the Common Core State Standards are. It shows up here for fifth grade: but is asterisked as one of those “Language Progressive Skills” that “are particularly likely to require continued attention in higher grades as they are applied to increasingly sophisticated writing and speaking.” They suggest revisiting this skill in grades 4-8. That seems really strange to me since it’s so straightforward. I guess it’s the lack of a clear yes or no/right or wrong strategy that bothers people.

So you know the scoop: there are two ways of writing items in a series, with either a comma before and or no comma before and (or other conjunctions).

The kid ate the bread with a peanut butter, jelly, and a banana.

It’s the comma after jelly that can either be there or not, depending on what your fourth grade teacher told you. That really seems to be how people decide - whatever they were taught first is what they stick to. So this comma is sometimes called the Oxford comma because Oxford University Press uses it - and they’re very fancy, so maybe that’s a good reason to go with it. Then again, those Brits do other funny things with punctuation, like put the “end punctuation” outside the quotation marks. (Wait, that actually makes a lot more sense.) So what do American style guides say? The Chicago Manual of Style recommends its use, while The Associated Press Style Guide (and therefore most journalistic writing) says to avoid it, unless doing so results in ambiguity. Consider the following sentence:

I went to the LSA meeting with Anne, a linguist, and a horseback rider.

This is ambiguous, of course, because it is not clear whether a linguist is an appositive describing Anne, or is the second person in a list of three different people. When we remove the final comma, we lose the possibility that a linguist is an appositive, but still have the possibility that we have three separate people attending the meeting.

I went to the LSA meeting with Anne, a linguist and a horseback rider.

And we now have the possibility that Anne is both a linguist and a horseback rider (and in fact, if you know Anne, she is), so there is ambiguity both with and without the final comma. We can, of course, change the wording to remove the ambiguity.

And this particular Anne and I are good examples of the two different acceptable standards here. I’m a consistent user of the Oxford comma, and Anne is a consistent user of the no Oxford comma. We write a lot of things together, so I put them in and she takes them out, or she leaves them out and I put them in, and then we have to wait for some copyeditor to make the call.

Let’s see, a good activity for this funny little punctuation rule is to go on an Oxford comma (or lack thereof) treasure hunt to see where it appears and where it doesn’t in published writing. And have your students look for the possibility of ambiguity as well. And if this wasn’t a blog targeted at middle school, I would provide you a link to the Vampire Weekend song “Oxford Comma,” but it might get you in trouble if you play it at school. (The first line of the song would have made a much better title for this post too.)

Strand 1/Grammar: Lesson 20 - Restrictive and Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses - and punctuation again

Relative clauses are clauses (so they contain a subject and a predicate) that describe, or modify, a noun. They fall into two classes, restrictive and nonrestrictive. The restrictive ones limit, or “restrict” what the noun refers to.

The realtor [who is selling our house] is really funny.
The place [where we love to go on vacation] is usually Orcas Island.
The child [who is juggling] wants to be in the circus.

So the bracketed clauses here pick out which realtor, place, and child.

Nonrestrictive relative clauses, on the other hand – though they might provide similar information – do not restrict the reference of the noun in the same way as restrictive relative clauses. In writing, nonrestrictive relative clauses are set off by commas, and you can also usually detect “comma intonation” in a speaker’s voice, distinguishing the two types.

restrictive: The PlayStation which we bought recently from a friend wasn’t too expensive.

nonrestrictive: The PlayStation, which we bought recently from a friend, wasn’t too expensive.

The restrictive relative clause, which (or that - I’ll come back to that) we bought recently from a friend, limits which PlayStation we’re referring to, to the one we bought recently from a friend. The non-restrictive relative clause, on the other hand, does not restrict the reference of the noun PlayStation; it isn’t information that distinguishes this PlayStation from other ones. That we bought the PS from a friend is simply extra, incidental information.

This difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive is really revealed when you have a noun that there is only one of - a proper noun. In that case, restricting that already singular set is weird, but using a non-restrictive clause is fine.

Hailey, who I saw on the bus yesterday, has a new graphing calculator.
??Hailey who I saw on the bus yesterday has a new graphing calculator.

This second sentence could only work if there is more than one Hailey and this is picking out the intended Hailey - the “on the bus Hailey” not the “next door neighbor Hailey” or something.

Activity. Identify the relative clauses in the following sentences and then determine whether they are restrictive or non-restrictive by putting commas around the non-restrictive ones. Many of them could be both, but the meaning would be slightly different. If that’s the case, briefly explain the difference.

The kid from your class who has that cool dog is walking towards us.
The store only allows returns that have the tags on and a receipt.
The sunglasses which I bought last month already broke.
Some gum is in my bag which is on the table.
The girl who is going to buy our old bikes is coming over tomorrow.
Sue who is going to buy our old bikes is coming over tomorrow.

There is a prescriptive rule of writing that suggests that which should be used with non-restrictive relative clauses and that with restrictive relative clauses. This rule, however, varies, by style guides and editors, and is also a fairly recent restriction. Both which and that are and have been common for centuries with restrictive relative clauses. Most speakers and writers would agree that it sounds odd, however, to use that in a non-restrictive relative clause; you probably wouldn’t write (or say)

Sushi, that I love, is on sale at the market.

MS Word seems to be reinforcing this rule, though. When its grammar checker finds which not preceded by a comma, it suggests the change to that. It’s not incorrect, however, to have which in restrictive relative clauses. British English conventions care even less about this. Oxford Dictionaries writes, “In British English, restrictive relative clauses can be introduced by that or which when they are referring to things rather than people.”

The coat that/which Dan had on yesterday was new.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about this debate - whether which should be used in restrictive relative clauses - can be found here.

It’s a question which you can think about and analyze for yourself. Sometimes I just think which sounds better (but Word has given me a green squiggle line for that last one!).

Sandra Wilde's Funner Grammar

I saw something about this book when it came out in 2012, but I’ve just gotten my hands on it (my library didn’t have it, so it had to come from St. Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington), and I’ve now ordered my own copy because it’s so good. It’s called Funner Grammar: Fresh ways to teach usage, language, and writing conventions, grades 3-8, and it’s making me breathe a sigh of relief. Sandra Wilde has written many other good books and resources for teachers, including You Kan Red This! Spelling and punctuation for whole language classrooms, K-6 (1991), What’s a Schwa Sound Anyway? A holistic guide to phonetics, phonics, and spelling (1997), Miscue Analysis Made Easy: Building on Student Strengths (2000), Testing and Standards (2002), Spelling Strategies and Patterns (2007), but this one makes me so happy, and I want all the 3rd-8th grade teachers I know to give it a look.

How refreshing that she starts off with “Did you know that are about six thousand languages in the world?” and then goes on to talk about language change, grammar, and even the Common Core. For a resource book of this type, it does the best job I’ve seen of talking directly and convincingly about language privilege. “Language variation is a social justice issue just as much as racial identity is” (96).

But it also talks about what a lot of teachers are very interested in – mechanics and usage. Here are the chapter titles, after the introductory one.

2. Mechanics: Conventions Found Only in Written Language
3. Nitty-Gritty Grammar: Words, Tenses, Sentences, and Complexity
4. Usage
5. Language Diversity and Social Justice
6. Linguistics for Kids

And Wilde provides annotated lists of other resources, appendices of suggestions of what to do in each grade (3-8), commentary on the Common Core (saying straight up that to teach about the subjunctive, as indicated in this 8th grade standard is misguided. Yeah, I agree - it’s a bit crazy.), and a careful consideration and explanation of why each subject she addresses should be taught. And it’s a nice slim volume at that.

It's been great to be able to do some reading of some of the other resources out there, like this one, while on sabbatical, so I’ll soon be adding an updated list of resources to TeachLing, which has a list that Dave Pippin compiled a few years ago. But the list is lacking in resource books like Wilde’s, so I’ll add the few other suggestions I have. But in the meantime, get this book. And thank you, Sandra Wilde!

Calling It Like It Is: Noun Clause, Adjective Clause, Adverb Clause

Terminology is a problem in grammar. Maybe it is in lots of fields. Marine biologists get up in arms, I hear, when we call starfish starfish instead of the more correct, apparently, seastar. They aren’t fish, they tell us, so don’t call them fish. (They aren’t stars either, but whatever.)

I’ve already talked about the adverb/adverbial issue here, and a related one that I’ve been asked about is Noun Clause, Adjective Clause, and Adverb Clause. So let’s get to it.

These terms are pretty widespread, perhaps more so in teaching English to speakers of other languages, and in teaching other languages to speakers of English, but are also sometimes used in straight-up descriptions of English grammar to English speakers. Yeah, they’re everywhere.

So, on the one hand, the labels don’t matter that much; call things whatever you want. On the other hand (the more important hand), using these terms once again conflates form and function, which can confuse and mislead. I have discussed elsewhere why it’s better for students to take advantage of their intuitions about morphological and syntactic patterns, rather than on meaning-based definitions and functions. We have some techniques for identifying nouns, for example, (they can be made plural, they take determiners, etc.) but then these noun clauses don’t match up with what we know about nouns.

A noun clause is typically defined as a clause that functions as a noun. Let’s look at some typical examples of things labeled as noun clauses, the bracketed parts below;

She believes [that the fairies are real].
We wonder [when they will arrive].

Good old about.com gives us this – Noun clause: A dependent clause that functions as a noun (that is, as a subject, object, or complement) within a sentence. Also known as a nominal clause.

I would say, however, that these are both simply subordinate clauses. They are subordinate to the main clause and dependent upon the main verb in that clause. We can further label them that-clauses and wh-clauses, but there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to calling them noun clauses. The reason they are considered nounish and labeled as noun clauses by some is that they serve as complements of a verb or as subjects, as nouns can. But it’s a lot more straightforward to simply call them subordinate or dependent clauses and ignore that noun part. You gain nothing from that label, and it leads students to doubt their intuitions about what nouns really are.

So let’s look at adjective clause and adverb clause, to see if those labels help shed light on the noun clause label – or on anything, for that matter.

Adjective clauses are also called (my preference) “relative clauses”. The term is preferable since it doesn’t conflate an actual adjective with the function of adjectives. These types of clauses serve to give more information about a noun, like adjectives do, but they are not adjectives themselves. They’re just clauses. They’re called relative clauses because they “relate” the info in the clause to the noun that the clause modifies.

The man [who I saw yesterday] left his hat here.
I saw the fox [that ate the chickens from our coop].
Let’s eat at the restaurant [where you went last night].

It’s clearer to me – and to my students and the students of other teachers I have worked with – to not use the terms noun clause and adjective clause. Let nouns be nouns and adjectives be adjectives.

Same for so-called adverb clauses. As discussed in this post, adverbs are a bit messy – and all kinds of things get labeled as adverbs. I believe that we should not add clauses to that. Here are some examples of the kinds of things that some people label adverb clauses:

Joe scrubbed the floor [until his arms ached].
The dogs had been barking [since the owners left].
Fay walked to the store [because she was out of eggs].

Huh? The claim is that these are all adverb clauses because they answer the questions where, when, or why. But lots of different kinds of phrases do that. These are prepositional phrases; I’ve discussed them here.

Nothing is gained, that I can see, by calling these adverbial. It confuses form and function, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t actually confusing!

It’s just clearer and more accurate to call nouns nouns, adjectives adjectives, adverbs adverbs, and clauses clauses. Are there benefits to distinguishing among the various kinds of clauses? Yeah, sure, there can be. But I’d want to use labels that don’t conflate form and function. I can discuss different types of subordinate clauses in another post. Till then, let's just call it like it is.