Jean Piaget was the "father" of "developmental" theory. At a recent conference, I was informed that "Piaget is out." I didn’t hear who (or what) is currently "in," for I was too busy thinking about the statement that "Piaget is out." Educators tend to treat educational theorists as used tissues: they use them once or twice, and after that no one wants to be seen with them. The problem (and it is a problem) may result from a rather superficial approach to education in general. I am reminded, for example, of one of the students in my Modern Grammar course who, after I summarized Piaget’s theory, promptly went to her education instructor to inform her that I had missed one of the stages, and hence that I apparently did not know of what I spoke. We tend to reduce ideas to sets of lists or categories, and often ignore the underlying concepts. (In Piaget’s terms, we fail to assimilate them.)

     Such is certainly the case in the pedagogy of English grammar. As noted in the previous chapter, we have rejected traditional grammar and replaced it with structural, rejected structural and replaced it with transformational, and now rejected transformational for sentence-combining or for total neglect. This is not to say, of course, that numerous hybrid textbooks have not been published, but mules are rarely productive. What we need to do, I would suggest, is to examine some of the underlying principles of various approaches to grammar in order to see if those principles can be applied to a consistent, theoretically valid, pedagogical grammar. In this chapter, therefore, we will examine some of the principles of structural, transformational, and finally traditional grammar.

     Graeco-Roman grammars were primarily formal and focussed, as noted in the previous chapter, on individual words. Thus nouns were arranged in declensions; verbs, in conjugations, primarily based on the forms of the words. Although some attention was paid to the function of individual words (adjectives modify nouns or pronouns), little, if any attention was devoted to the functions and interrelationships of larger constructions such as clauses or verbals. As a result, traditional grammar has numerous names for pronouns (personal, demonstrative, interrogative, relative, etc.), but relatively few for clauses. What, for example, is the traditional name for "When going to the store," in "When going to the store, Bob wrecked his car"? I do not wish to suggest that a plethora of names is important or even a good test of an adequate grammar: indeed, I want to argue just the opposite. My point, quite simply, is that traditional grammar focussed on categorization of individual words and rarely looked at the functions of groups of words.

     The greatest achievement of the Structuralist movement in linguistics was, indeed, to shift attention away from individual words to the structure of the sentence as a whole. In the classroom, structural grammars failed because they denied the importance of semantics (meaning), but that failure must not result in our overlooking the fundamental contribution of the new structural perspective. Whereas traditional grammars had started from the individual word and worked toward the sentence, structural grammars started from the sentence and worked toward the word. Although this does not sound like such a big change, we should take a few minutes to consider this difference between form and structure.

     Suppose someone is sitting in a classroom, and we ask her to describe the "form" of the room. She may note that it is square, made of cinder-block, has a door in one of the side walls, windows in the other. Steel beams line the ceiling; a black-board covers the front wall. Now suppose that we ask her to describe the "structure" of the same room. She will, of course, describe exactly the same things. But, if she thinks about it for a minute, she will begin to note a shift in her concept of their relative importance. She’ll probably note, for example, that the steel beams in the ceiling run from the front to the back of the room, and not from side to side. They cannot go from side to side because one of the side walls has windows along its entire length and the glass could not support the weight of the beams. Structurally, in other words, the front and back walls are more important than those on the side, since they support the ceiling. A structural perspective, in other words, may include the "formal," but it goes beyond the formal to explore how the individual parts interact to create a larger whole.

     Grammatically and pedagogically, this shift from part to whole has tremendous implications. Consider, for example, the following sentence:

Traditional grammar has no name for this "that" clause, other than "noun" clause. But labeling it a "noun" does not indicate how it relates to the clause of which it is a part: it is not an "object" or a "subject," at least in their normal sense. It was not until Francis Christensen, in the 1950’s that the construction was named -- he called it a postponed subject. Why is a name important? Because it helps us to see how the syntax of the sentence, i.e., its structure, supports its meaning (i.e., semantics). The "It" is an empty pronoun, a space-filler, which, unlike most pronouns, refers to a construction which follows it. The name, in other words, helps us to see that

Some teachers might consider this point as obvious and trivial, but from our students’ perspective, it is not. Any parents or teachers who doubt that can test it for themselves by giving students a short paragraph that includes such a sentence, and then asking the students, for example, what the paragraph presents as being "true." Many students, especially the weaker ones who most need our help, will not be able to answer the question.

     Grammatically, a structural perspective helps us not simply to categorize meaningless words, but rather to understand how the structural relationships of words support the meanings which we attempt to convey through language. But the structural perspective also has pedagogical advantages. Using traditional grammar, students have to start with the eight parts of speech and build upward from there. Usually, they don’t get very far: rare is the student (or teacher, for that matter) who understands and can explain why students benefit from studying grammar. Rare is the student (or teacher), who can take the grammar in the textbooks and apply it to any sentence in any text. But the structural perspective gives students a dual attack on grammar: not only can they work from, so to speak, the bottom up, but they can also work from the top (the sentence) down.

     As a result, students, as early as fifth or sixth grade, can begin to use their knowledge of grammar as a tool to see for themselves how they have improved, for example, as writers. Research has shown that the number of words per main clause in written discourse naturally increases with the age of the writer. As soon as they are able to distinguish main clauses, students can analyze a sample of their current writing and compare it to a sample of their writing from a year or two previously: the increase in the number of words per main clause will demonstrate to the student that her writing has "improved." The structural perspective, in other words, can change the subject of grammar from a negative to a positive educational experience.

     But the structural perspective can also make grammar easier to learn since some constructions are easier to see and understand from the top down. For example, consider the following sentence:

Such sentences, relatively rare in traditional grammar textbooks, are frequently met in texts and in the students own writing. How does traditional grammar teach students to analyze such sentences? In essence, it doesn’t. Some textbooks might tell students that the subordinate clause is a noun, the object of the preposition "in," but such information will not help students with sentences such as the following from Virginia Woolf:

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon [what we read,] is to destroy the spirit of freedom [which is the breath of those sanctuaries.]

     First of all, how are students supposed to know what a subordinate clause is? As we saw in the architectural example of the room, a structural perspective naturally prioritizes an analysis: in grammar, this means that some rules are more important than others, and the primary syntactic rule is that "every word in a sentence (except interjections) must relate to the main subject/ verb/ complement pattern." Subjects and verbs are thus like the front and back walls in our example: they support the rest of the sentence. Having located all the subjects and verbs, students then can use their sense of meaning to decide what goes with what, and, beginning with the last subject and verb in a sentence, work backwards to determine clause structure.

     In the sentence from Woolf, students easily see that "the breath of those sanctuaries" goes with "which is" to form a clause. Next they must decide if the clause is main or subordinate. They can do so by deciding if that clause "goes to" a word outside itself. In this case, it goes to "freedom," and since "freedom" is a noun, the clause is adjectival. We have arrived, in other words, at the traditional description of this clause, but the structural perspective gives students a procedure for getting there. Without such a procedure, students have no way of arriving at a conclusion: students cannot, in other words, first decide that the clause is adjectival (they have no basis for making this conclusion) and then decide that it modifies "freedom." Likewise, "what we read" is first recognized as a clause. Then, since it answers the question "what?" after "upon," students can easily decide that it functions as a noun, the object of the preposition.

     The last of the pedagogical advantages of the structural perspective may be the most important: it helps us fairly clearly distinguish between syntax and usage. The structure of a sentence -- how the words in it interrelate as subject, verb, adjective, clause, etc. -- is its syntax. As noted in the previous chapter, syntactic rules differ from those of usage in that they have different sanctions: errors in usage may offend a reader; errors in syntax may distort meaning. Traditional grammar never made this distinction, an extremely important one from a pedagogical point of view. For students, the primary "reader" is the teacher, and the failure to distinguish the errors in

often results in the students’ ignoring both. After all, it’s only the English teacher who is offended, and everybody knows that English teachers are grammatical fusspots. The usage/syntax distinction, however, allows us to explain to students that "more better" is an error in usage, better avoided but not fatal.

The second sentence, however, is a different story. Interestingly, the error would be detected only if the reader already knew that the writer meant that she was thrown from the car. Students who dangle participles may frequently make such errors, errors that go undetected.  Suppose, for example, that a student had written: "Having waited patiently, Bill called Susan." The reader (teacher) will assume that Bill did the waiting, but it is quite possible that the student -- particularly the student who dangles modifiers -- meant that Susan did the waiting. If we show students that these errors offend not just English teachers, but rather the meaning that the students themselves are attempting to convey, students are much more likely to listen. (For more on syntactic errors, see Chapter Eight.)
 
 

     Whereas structural grammar shifted our perspective from the individual word to the sentence, transformational/ generative grammar set our "model" in motion, actually in two different kinds of motion. Chomsky himself was interested primarily in only one of these: the motion from intent to utterance, from, so to speak, mind to mouth. As we will see in Chapters Four and Five, however, transformational concepts also allow us to study a different kind of motion, the dynamic, developmental growth of language from the child to the adult. We cannot here go into the various details of transformational grammars, for that is not our purpose. Rather we need to look at only six concepts: surface/deep structure, kernel sentences, embedding, deletion, reduction and substitution.

     The surface structure of a sentence denotes the words as they actually appear in that sentence. Deep structures, on the other hand, exist only in our minds: they are the smaller bits of meaning, called by transformationalists kernel sentences, out of which actual, surface sentences are composed. Examples may make this clearer: 

Although both sentences mean the same thing, they have different surface structures. We can postulate, however, that they both arose from the same set of kernel sentences, perhaps:

How the mind gets from the kernels to the surface structure, how the mind "generates" sentences, is the primary focus of transformational grammar. I intentionally wish not to discuss most of the "transformations," or rules of transformational grammar, since they are precisely where attempts to import transformationalism into the classroom have gone wrong. Rather than being helped to assimilate the concepts, students have been forced to memorize a list of transformations: the negative, the interrogative, the passive, etc. The dynamics of transformational grammar were lost in a nomenclature that was as bad as, if not worse than, the traditional. And that nomenclature did not help students understand much that they had not already mastered. (Most five-year-olds can ask questions and use the passive voice.)

      The remaining three concepts are interrelated. A sentence such as

     Indeed, students’ mastery of these basic transformational rules has led some linguists and many opponents of pedagogical grammar to claim that students already know grammar and therefore there is no need to teach it. This argument, a remnant of the Graeco-Roman focus on individual constructions, misses the point. Just as I can juggle two balls, so many students can juggle simple deletions and embeddings. But just as I will start dropping balls if I try to juggle more than two, so students begin to have troubles as they attempt to incorporate the massive number of embeddings typical of adult writing into a single host sentence. Every sentence is the result of such embeddings, and the embeddings must structurally (syntactically) fit the host sentence. Every sentence, in other words, has at least one kernel, or main subject/verb pattern, that acts as a host for embeddings. 

     Deletion and embedding usually work together, but they need not depend on each other. In an example cited earlier in this chapter, "when going to the store" (in "When going to the store, Bob wrecked his car") is a subordinate clause from which the "he was" has been deleted. Such deletions are also known as reductions, and, when speaking of what is left, rather than of what has been taken away, we use the term "reduced." Thus "when going to the store" is simply a reduced subordinate clause. Traditional grammarians, of course, could have explained this construction through ellipsis, and we can say that deletion and reduction are simply a more powerful concept of traditional ellipsis, more powerful both linguistically and pedagogically. Linguistically, ellipsis was never used to explain "white" in sentences such as "It is a white house." The advantage of the transformational concept, in other words, is that it allows us to see ellipsis as the natural extension of a process that is fundamental to language.

     The pedagogical advantage of the concepts of embedding and reduction depend on the sequence in which constructions are taught and will become clearer (I hope) in Chapters Four through Seven. We might note, however, that constructions such as the participle and the appositive are traditionally taught as totally separate, independent constructions, and they are presented to students as no more important than the numberless rules of usage. But they, like most constructions, result from embeddings and reductions. If, at an appropriate stage in their development, students can be helped to assimilate the two principles, then the participle and appositive are easily understood since they have the same cause. 

     Whereas reduction is an expansion of the concept of deletion, substitution expands embedding. We have already seen an example of substitution in:

Going a bit further, we might say that the syntax of a kernel sentence is a contentless X + Y + Z structure in which X marks the place for a subject, Y for a verb, and Z for an optional complement. Different kernels result from the substitution of different words in the appropriate slots. Substitution goes beyond vocabulary, however, as different constructions can act as substitutes:

Noun: That book is enjoyable.
Gerund: Skiing is enjoyable.
Infinitive: To hike is enjoyable.
Clause: That he can read to me   is enjoyable.

The principle of substitution allows us to replace all these sub-categories with one simple rule: whatever can function as a noun can be substituted for one. Gerunds, infinitives, and clauses can all function as nouns, so wherever a noun can appear, so can they. In our previous example, therefore, "that we should vote" functions as a noun clause in a noun absolute. Students will, at some point, still have to learn to recognize noun absolutes in order to understand the syntax of such a sentence, but there is no need for them to learn all the possible functions of nouns and all the possible functions of noun clauses and all the possible functions of gerunds and all the possible functions of infinitives. Such multiplication of categories simply muddles the water and deters students from using their brains.
 
 

     In saying that the legacy of traditional grammar is pedagogical, I obviously do not mean that traditional grammar, in the way it has been taught, is a good pedagogical grammar. It definitely needs improvement. But we need to remember that structural grammars were first developed in the 30's, transformational in the 50’s, and neither was intended to be pedagogical. Traditional grammar, on the other hand, has been used as a pedagogical tool for hundreds of years, and its terms, with a little modification, are perfectly adequate for pedagogical (as opposed to linguistic) purposes. Structuralism and transformationalism, moreover,  were not spontaneous generations, created out of nothing. The history of the study of language is evolutionary, with new ideas developing out of the old. Thus, for example, the systematic, and sub-systematic nature of language predates structuralism. Traditional grammarians had already realized that language was basically a complex of sub-systems, and the distinctions among phonology, morphology and syntax are a "traditional" accomplishment.

     One of the most famous monuments of traditional grammar is George O. Curme’s massive, two volume, A Grammar of the English Language, first published in 1931. Like all the traditionalists, Curme begins with an exhaustive, descriptive analysis, in Volume I, of the "Parts of Speech." He devotes Volume II, however, to "Syntax." It is true that his concept of "syntax" differs from that of the structuralists and transformationalists, but that is because it includes almost everything about grammar that could be categorized and described. Curme, after all, was not primarily interested in a pedagogical grammar: his objective, as he apparently saw it, was to classify everything about grammar that could be classified. We may scorn such taxonomies today, but we must realize that they laid the groundwork for structural and transformational grammar. In his discussion of complex relative clauses, for example, Curme writes: 

Both restrictive and descriptive clauses may be complex, i.e., may consist of a principal proposition and a subordinate clause, the one sometimes being embedded in the other: "It is a fine opportunity, which I would seize if I were not otherwise engaged." (227) 

     More interesting than Curme’s, from our point of view, is the work of Otto Jespersen, whose Essentials of English Grammar was first published in 1933. Jespersen devotes Chapter Two to "Sounds" and Chapters Three to Five to the "Evolution of the Sound-System." Then, after a chapter on "spelling," a single chapter is devoted to "Word-Classes" (66-77), a chapter we should look at since teaching students the parts of speech has frequently been scorned. Jespersen begins the chapter with:

     In dealing with linguistic subjects it is necessary to have names for the various classes into which words fall naturally, and which are generally, but not very felicitously, called "parts of speech." It is practically impossible to give exact and exhaustive definitions of these classes; nevertheless the classification itself rarely offers occasion for doubt and will be sufficiently clear to students if a fair number of examples are given, as in the following lists. (66) 

     The reader will have noticed that some words were given as examples both of substantives and adjectives, others as substantives and verbs, and others again as adjectives and adverbs. This shows that in order to find out what class a word belongs to it is not enough to consider its form in itself; what is decisive is the way in which the word in connected speech "behaves" towards other words, and in which other words behave towards it. (70-71) 

I want to talk about grammar. In order to do so, we need terms for classes of words. These are the terms and classes I want to use. I can’t define them, but if you look at my examples, you will clearly understand what I mean. If a question arises about the class of a word, that question is settled by its function, not by its form. Now that you understand that, let’s get on with the discussion of grammar. 

Take the three words "terribly cold weather." They are evidently not on the same footing, "weather" being, grammatically, most important, to which the two others are subordinate, and of these again "cold" is more important than "terribly." "Weather" is determined or defined by "cold," and "cold" in its turn similarly determined or defined by "terribly." We have thus three ranks: "weather" is Primary, "cold" Secondary, and "terribly" Tertiary in this combination. (78) 

a tertiary may in some cases be further determined by a word that is subordinated to it, and this again by a fifth word, as in "a not very cleverly worded remark"; but this has no grammatical importance. . . . (79) 

     More important than the ranks are the concepts of junction and nexus:

If we compare "the red door" and "the barking dog," on the one hand (junction), and on the other "the door is red" and "the dog barks" or "the dog is barking" (nexus), we find that the former kind is more rigid or stiff, and the latter more pliable; there is, as it were, more life in it. A junction is like a picture, a nexus is like a drama or process. (95) 

     Although he gives no examples of adverbs for junction, he gives a variety of examples of verbals for nexus, including infinitives ("I hear the dog bark") and gerunds with subjects ("I saw the King’s arrival.") He expands these examples in later chapters, and, although our purpose is not a complete examination of Jespersen’s theory, one example is particularly interesting:

The object of a verb is often a nexus expressed by a simple collocation of a primary and its adnex. As a first example we may take "I found the cage empty," which is easily distinguished from "I found the empty cage," in which "empty" is an adjunct. In the former sentence the whole combination "the cage empty" is naturally the object (cf. "I found that the cage was empty" and "I found the cage to be empty"). This is particularly clear in sentences like "I found her gone" (thus did not find her!) (309-310) 

     Nexus and junction are extremely important concepts since, if we include adverbs as adjuncts and thus equate junction with modification, every word in every normal sentence (except interjections) must stand in either a nexal or junctional relationship. Adding the concept of nexus to modification actually simplifies students’ problems in understanding relationships, since every word must be either nexal or junctional. Instead of being overwhelmed with countless categories, students can thus work from one central principle, and the eight "parts of speech" can, with little revision, be made to assist:

VERBS function as the core of a nexus.

NOUNS function primarily as subjects, objects, or predicate nouns in nexal relationships. 

PRONOUNS function in any way that a noun does. [Syntactically, there is no reason to distinguish pronouns from nouns. Pronoun reference, as we will see in a later chapter, is a separate system from syntax. Since many students have problems with pronoun agreement and need to talk about it, I have retained it among the "parts."] 

ADJECTIVES function as adjuncts to nouns.

ADVERBS function as adjuncts to verbs.

PREPOSITIONS create a junctional relationship between a noun and another noun or a verb. (Ninety-nine percent of these phrases function as adjectives or adverbs; those that do not can be viewed as  interjections.)

CONJUNCTIONS are the only traditional part of speech whose subcategories are syntactically important. CO-ORDINATING conjunctions join like constructions.  SUBORDINATING conjunctions reduce an independent clause to a noun or adjunct in another independent clause.

INTERJECTIONS are words or constructions that have neither a nexal nor a junctional function.

Given the current animosity toward the parts of speech, I must emphasize that these are not parts of speech in the sense of "word-classes." "Nouns," for example, includes clauses, gerunds and infinitives used as nouns. Likewise, these definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive. Students will obviously find parallel ideas joined by co-ordinating conjunctions but expressed in different constructions ("I remember my mother’s happiness and that my father was sad"). But given these basic terms, the students can understand and discuss grammatical structures; they can then decide for themselves whether or not they wish to adhere to many of the rules. Without such terms, can students understand their problems (or their options)? 

     Once we realize that the "rules" of syntax are simply explanations that students and teachers can understand, much of traditional grammar can be dropped. Many textbooks, for example, insist on including "There is/are ..." as a separate construction, usually called an "expletive." But consider the following sentences: 

There will be little disagreement that in (a), "there" is an adverb, but what is it in (b)? Would anyone seriously argue that in (b) it does not function as a noun? But if "there" can function as a noun in (b), why can it not also do so in (c), thereby giving us a simple subject ("there") / verb ("were") / predicate noun ("friends") pattern? Is there any reason for complicating grammar, for giving students another construction, the expletive, to memorize?

     "There" used as a noun is related to another interesting syntactic phenomenon: nouns used as adverbs. We cannot explain a sentence such as "He arrived six hours ago" as an ellipsed preposition: "at six hours ago"? "in six hours ago"? Clearly these will not do. Since no preposition will fit in such cases, we need the construction "Noun Used as an Adverb." Interestingly, many idioms use the construction:

Since it tells, more or less, "where" Dad went, "shopping" functions as an adverb. But it is not an adverb: it has the form of a participle or gerund. The simplest answer is to say that it is a gerund, i.e., that it functions as a noun. And since nouns can function as adverbs, here we have a gerund, i.e., a verbal noun, functioning as an adverb. 

     The terminology needed to master syntax is not extensive:

The Eight Parts of Speech
Prepositional Phrases
Subjects/verbs/complements (PN, PA, DO, IO)
Subordinate Clauses (Noun, Adjective, and Adverb)
Verbals: Gerund, Gerundive, and Infinitive
Nouns Used as Adverbs
Noun Absolutes
Appositives
Direct Address
Retained Complements (and Passive Voice)
Delayed (Postponed) Subjects
Interjections

     Throughout this chapter I have attempted to demonstrate that grammatical "rules" and definitions are not set in concrete and that modern linguistics has provided some potentially significant concepts for pedagogical grammar. Implicit in my argument has been the assumption that a pedagogical grammar should be as simple (but not simplistic) as possible, and I discussed a few examples to demonstrate how the syntactic theory presented in this book can eliminate many of the traditional categories. Pedagogically, our objective should be, not, as it now often is, to have students memorize the names of parts of speech and constructions, but rather to provide students with as few categories as necessary and teach them how to think and use those categories to analyze the relationships of words in sentences. Paraphrasing Bernstein, we might say that parsing must be fruitful since it helps us and our students understand and discuss the syntactic background which makes individual words meaningful. But before such discussions will occur in our classrooms, we need more than a theory of syntax: we must also reconsider the role of the teacher in the classroom.

 1. Does the approach taken to grammar in your local schools emphasize sentence structure (top-down), or does it concentrate exclusively on individual constructions, such that, if students are studying subordinate clauses, they look for subordinate clauses and nothing else?

2. What were the teachers taught about grammar? (Depending on when and where they went to college, some teachers studied structural grammar, others studied transformational, and still others studied none at all. This means that some teachers should be able to verify, expand, or perhaps even contradict what I have said about structural, transformational, and traditional grammars.)

3. To what extent are the concepts explained in this chapter ("structure" vs. "form," "embedding," etc.) applied in the textbooks used with the children in the school? [Remember that "applied" does not mean "named": sentence-combining, for example, applies the transformational concepts of embedding, substitution, and even reduction, often without using those terms.]

4. Near the end of the chapter, I have listed a set of terms and claimed that they are all that students need to know to understand the structure of any English sentence. How many of those terms are new to the teachers? The list uses traditional terms (rather than structural, transformational, etc.) because most teachers are familiar with traditional terminology. Should there be national agreement about some basic pedagogical grammatical terms (so that, for example, a child who moves from Atlanta to Omaha would not face a whole new set of terms?)
 

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