Last Updated 5/23/99
    

Introduction

        As you may already know, different grammars and grammarians define grammatical constructions differently. Thus, two grammarians, looking at the same sentence, may describe it in different terms. Our purpose here is to provide a group of concepts which can be used to explain how every word in every English sentence chunks either to another word or phrase in that sentence, or to the main Subject / Verb / Complement pattern of the sentence. It is my belief that the constructions and concepts explained here, though limited in number, are adequate to explain 99.9%, if not 100%, of the syntactic connections in any English sentence.
 

A "syntactic connection" is simply the relationship between one word in a sentence and the word that it modifies, "goes with," or chunks to. For example, in "a white house," there are three words and two "connections": "a" goes with, modifies, or chunks to "house." (Whether you prefer to use "goes with," "modifies," or "chunks to" is largely a matter of choice and perspective.) Likewise, "white" connects to "house." Thus, there are two connections in the phrase "a white house." One way of looking at what we are trying to do is to consider it as similar to a child's connect-the-dots puzzle. In such a puzzle, there will be one fewer lines than there are dots (because the first line connects two dots). In sentences, there will, generally speaking, be one less connection than there are words. The constructions and concepts presented in this section are the "rules" for making those connections.

      I want to note here that I lie, and that I believe that in education, lying can be good. In essence, I believe in what the well-known educational psychologist Jerome Bruner calls the "spiral curriculum":
 

in which ideas are first presented in a form and language, honest though imprecise, which can be grasped by the child, ideas that can be revisited later with greater precision and power until, finally, the student has achieved the reward of mastery.
     --On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand
     (NY: Atheneum, 1976. 107-108)

Note that Bruner refers to this as being "honest," but most grammar books don't do it, which leads me to believe that their authors consider it dishonest. Indeed, many grammarians and teachers, looking at the definitions presented here, will immediately start spouting exceptions to them. But this is exactly what has caused the ineffectiveness of most attempts to teach grammar. The student becomes overwhelmed with rules and exceptions, before the student has even learned the basic concept.

     In contrast, I believe that if a general rule or definition covers 95+% of the examples that can be found, students should master this general rule first. That is, after all, how we all taught ourselves the language - we all said, at one point in our development, "cutted" instead of "cut." ("I cutted out the pictures.") Once a student can confidently apply the general rule, the exceptions are much easier to master. That is why, throughout this approach, I note that students are expected to make mistakes.
 

This border is a reproduction of
 Georgio de Chirico's
(1888-1978) 
Melancholy of a Beautiful Day
1913, Oil on canvas 
 from Jim's Fine Art Collection http://www.spectrumvoice.com/art/index.html

Click here for the directory of my backgrounds based on art.
[For educational use only.]