In the preceding chapter, I tried to suggest how EXPANSION, through compounding and formulas, REDUCTION, through deletion and embedding, and SUBORDINATION are the driving forces of syntactic development, which continually interact as an individual matures. With these principles we can now turn to the sequential development of syntactic structures. Do we have a theory of syntactic development? This question is particularly important in view of the NCTE resolution against "the use of isolated grammar and usage exercises not supported by theory and research." None of the major researchers in the sixties and early seventies proposed any theory, and Mellon, speaking of sentence-combining, specifically noted that "we have no theory modeling and thereby explaining the process." (80)

     Psychologically, we could explain sentence-combining as behaviorism -- conditioning. Students are given numerous exercises with short sentences and asked to combine them. In some approaches to sentence combining, as in O’Hare’s study, the combining is conditioning pure and simple -- students are given no grammatical terms, no "instruction." The long-term effects of sentence-combining are untested, but general studies of such conditioning indicate that any effects are short-lived.  But rather than discuss what I believe does not work, I would like briefly to suggest that the theory of development and the approach to teaching suggested in this book is basically cognitive and supported by the basic concepts of both Piaget and Vygotsky.

     In the first place, the cognitive view posits an active, seeking mind, a mind desiring to educate itself, a mind that would, on its own, tend to what we have described as "expansion." Behaviorism, on the other hand, posits a passive mind, a mind acted on and being impressed by external stimuli. Both Piaget and Vygotsky view mental growth as consisting of stages of growth alternating with periods of relative stability, but they have two different visual representations of that process. Piaget pictures it as a graph, with rising periods of growth followed by level "plateaus." Vygotsky, on the other hand, prefers a picture of two expanding concentric circles, the area between which he calls the "zone of proximal development." (Mind, 85-91) The inner circle represents mastered concepts. In math, for example, a child must not only be able to add, but must also feel comfortable with addition, before multiplication becomes part of the zone of proximal development. When the child has mastered multiplication, geometry becomes part of the zone. Vygotsky’s argument is that it makes no sense to try to teach a student something that is not in the zone. If the subject being taught is in the inner circle, the child will be bored. If it is beyond the zone, the child simply will not be able to comprehend it.

     What Hunt and his colleagues have shown us is that in sixth and seventh grades, subordinate clauses are within the zone of proximal development. Students, moreover, must become comfortable with subordinate clauses before they can begin to master the use of reduced clauses such as gerundives or appositives. Ideally, in other words, a syntactic curriculum should be spread out over several years to give the students time to master each construction. Attempting to teach a construction too early will simply result in frustration for both student and teacher. 

     Before I present my outline of a theory, perhaps a few words are in order about the nature of theories in general and developmental theories in particular. A theory is between a hypothesis and an assumption. We all have many assumptions that have not developed from theories, but the kind of assumption I mean is one such as that the earth rotates around the sun. For most people, that is an assumption -- we don’t attempt to explain or prove it, we simply accept the proof of others. A hypothesis or theory, on the other hand, is an attempt at explanation. A hypothesis has few, if any, facts to back it up: it is, so to speak, a mental framework against which various facts will be tested. As facts are seen to support the hypothesis, it ascends to the level of a theory. Theories thus move through stages, accumulating facts that fit them, and are accepted as long as people believe that the preponderance of facts support them. When almost everyone accepts the theory, it becomes, for most people, an assumption. 

     The developmental theory I am proposing fits the facts and concepts presented by Hunt and his colleagues, as well as the ideas of Vygotsky, presented at the beginning of this chapter. It is a theory of the syntactic development that occurs in every individual after the age of five. This distinction is important because many researchers in linguistic development tend not to accept the theory. But they are looking at an entirely different question -- syntactic development from birth to age five and the development of such constructions as "hard to see." This theory, in other words, begins with children who have already mastered, by Crystal’s estimate, 80 percent of syntactic constructions, and it attempts to explain how they develop from there to the complex syntactic combinations used by adult writers.

     As a developmental theory, it differs from a theory about our solar system, or even from theories about mathematics or inorganic chemistry, in that it concerns literally millions of growing individuals. Although every individual goes through all the stages of this theory (there are only three of them), and does so in order, individuals proceed at different rates, and perhaps even in different directions. (Thus, in the stage of subordinate clauses, some people may tend to develop the adjectival more, whereas others may lean more toward the adverbial.) We have also seen that an individual’s rate of development is definitely affected by her environment. A child whose parents almost always speak in complete sentences will, we can now assume, develop a concept of sentence more quickly than will the child whose parents speak in fragments. Should a child have a father who tends to speak using noun absolutes, the child will pick up the absolute construction, first as a formula and then as a mastered construction, much sooner than average.
 
 

     A general refrain of the studies we have been discussing is that syntactic development is incredibly, "glacially," as one researcher put it, slow. The increases in words and subordinate clauses per main clause, are, with the exception of the two surges we have discussed, minute. A major question we have to address, therefore, is: why is this development so "slow," and what causes the surges? Our general perception tells us that by the age of five, normal children have mastered the basic subject/ verb/ complement structure of English sentences. The next clearly defined surge, the development of subordinate clauses, begins, statistically, around age 12. What is going on, developmentally, in children’s minds between the ages of 5 and 12?

     In terms of the constructions with which we are primarily concerned, this period appears to be almost a big, long "plateau," a period of consolidation. Although I am not an expert in this period of syntactic development, I do wish to suggest that children’s minds have not taken a long vacation and stopped growing. As Carol Chomsky’s research suggests, the "hard/easy to see" distinction develops sometime between the ages of six and eight. Passive voice and especially comparatives are developed and basically mastered during this stage. Verbal forms, especially of irregular verbs, are further developed. And the child has literally thousands of idiomatic expressions still to be formulated and assimilated. Intense, and very complex growth is occurring, even if it shows up only marginally in the statistics.

     Turning to the statistics and the constructions with which we are concerned, we might start with Hunt’s "Moby Dick was a very strong whale." Hunt noted that this reduction of two clauses into one resulted in a "gain of 1.5 words in average clause length [that] is exactly the amount of gain that occurs, on the average, between fourth and eighth grades." (Grammatical, 106) Readers may take this as a suggestion that such a reduction should have a large effect on average clause length. But Hunt does not discuss the context in which this reduction probably occurs. In the first place, what percentage of the child’s sentences consists of sequences of sentences (or thoughts) that share the same subject and have predicate nouns or adjectives as their complements? My own statistics, on adult writers, indicate that only 15% of the finite verbs are followed by predicate adjectives, and these verbs are not in sequence, nor do they necessarily share the same subject. Thus the increase of which Hunt speaks, although large from one point of view, becomes much smaller when seen in the context of total linguistic production.

     Still another factor affects the statistics. A child does not, at a particular moment in time, start reducing all such sentences. Dickens, for example, writes: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . . " He does not reduce this to "It was the best and worst of times." We must, therefore, distinguish between what Noam Chomsky has termed "competence" and "performance." Competence develops as the child becomes able to perform such a reduction, but that does not mean that such reductions will always be reflected in performance, nor that they should be. We might also propose still another hypothesis: that the development of a construction by reduction depends upon the overproduction of the construction from which the new one is reduced. Such overproduction, clearly apparent in the child’s early use of "and," would also account for "retrenchments," such as the apparent decrease in subordinate clauses in 5th grade. But, in the case of the reduction to "Moby Dick was a very strong whale," such overproduction would mean that this sentence might typically be followed or accompanied by "and he was gray, and he was scary." It would, in other words, appear in a flood of simple subject/verb/predicate adjectives sentences, all of which would tend to decrease average words per main clause.

     Statistical studies could be made of numerous other combinations and constructions that continue to develop during this period. How many adverbs per main clause appear in the writing of students at each grade level? How many simple adjectives? Prepositional phrases? Adjectival sequences (the pretty brown kitten)? With how many adjectives in each sequence (the pretty brown hungry kitten)? How many compound subjects? Verbs? Complements? With how many elements per compound? All of these constructions and combinations continue to grow during this period, and, of course, each child is also accumulating, and, especially during the later years of this period, already assimilating more and more subordinate clauses. Indeed, the assimilation of at least one type of subordinate clause, the noun clause used as direct object after "said" ("You said I could"), probably belongs in this first stage.
 
 

     There are two reasons for seeing the development of the subordinate clause as the second stage in our general theory. The first is the statistical increase in their use by students between the ages of 12 and 16, an increase noted by all the researchers. To this extent, the facts suggest the theory. But if we wish to explain this increase, we must, for now, be more hypothetical. 

     Our second reason thus involves the nature of the subordinate clause. Loban’s study is a good beginning to an exploration of the different rates of growth of adjectival, noun, and adverbial clauses. Unfortunately, he presents his results, for three different groups, as percentages of the norm for the twelfth grade "random" group (48-57), which makes it impossible to relate them to clauses per main clause. His statistics do, however, indicate not only that the three kinds of clauses increase at different rates over twelve grades, but also that there are periods of surges followed, in most cases, by retrenchments. Rather than attempt further to interpret Loban’s study, I’ll simply refer interested readers to it, for there is still another distinction in kind of clause that needs to be discussed.

     Hunt’s example, "Moby Dick was a whale. The whale was very strong," involves two nexal predications which use the same verb. (For a discussion of nexus and junction see Chapter Two.) The reduction is thus a deletion of a superfluous nexus, as one of the finite verbs disappears. The situation would be quite different if the two verbs were not identical:

a.) Moby Dick was a whale.
b.) The whale was swimming in the ocean.

     Still another factor that may contribute to the surge in subordinate clauses is the embedding of subordinate clauses within subordinate clauses, as in "Moby Dick was a whale who was floating on the surface when Ishmael first saw him." Here the "when" clause is subordinate to the "was floating," and thus forms a clause within a clause. My statistics for professional writers indicate that 78% of their clauses are embedded at level one, 18% at level two, 4% at level three, and 1% at level four or more. My preliminary, comparable statistics for college Freshmen indicate 81% at level one, and 19% at level two. [This does not mean that college Freshmen do not write sentences with clauses embedded beyond level two, in fact, I have seen some papers with clauses at level 5 -- perhaps examples of "overproduction"? My preliminary studies, however, clearly indicate that less that .5% of Freshmen’s embeddings are beyond level two.] 

     I am unaware of any statistical research on the embedded level of clauses in grades 3-12, but I would not at all be surprised to find a surge in level 2 between seventh and ninth grades. I would even go so far as to suggest that second level embeddings are one of the doorways to the third stage of development.
 
 

     The third stage includes a variety of constructions, not each of which every individual develops, or develops at the same rate. Once again we must remember that gerundives, appositives, and even noun absolutes and constructions functioning as interjections may appear in the speech and writing very early, but almost always as formulas. Hunt and O’Donnell both agree that they are "late-blooming constructions," and, as Hunt states, "the great majority of the syntactic changes that increase with maturity are those that reduce a clause to less than a clause." (Syntactic, 43)  We can see how and why this occurs with our example of

Moby Dick was a whale who was floating on the surface when Ishmael first saw him.

 The whale Moby Dick ...   (an appositive)

 was a whale floating ...   (a gerundive)

     At some point during this stage after the development of the gerundive, some students will also develop the noun absolute, which, for our purposes here (See also Chapter 6.), is simply a subordinate clause reduced to a noun plus gerundive:

 When Bill arrived, Mary left.
 Bill having arrived, Mary left.

     Three other constructions significantly influence clause length, but about two of them, infinitives and gerunds, I don’t have much to say. The formulaic infinitive develops before age 5, i.e., before the beginning of our time frame, in such statements as "Do you want to eat" and "It’s time to go to bed." Research might reveal some interesting conclusions about the infinitive, or perhaps its use remains relatively constant, increasing only as additional clauses, gerundives, appositives, etc. carry it with them into host sentences. The development of the gerund may be similar, at least in the early stages, to that of the infinitive ("Do you like playing ball?" "Eating vegetables is good for you.") We might note, however, that in professional writing, these constructions are primarily used for different purposes. Infinitives are used most frequently as direct objects, 17 times per 100 main clauses, and appear in the other noun functions no more than twice per 100 main clauses. Gerunds, on the other hand, occur most frequently as objects of prepositions (10 per 100), and only twice per hundred main clauses as direct objects.

     The third construction is not really a construction, but a function -- the interjection. The interjection is usually thought of as a part of speech ("Ah!" "Oh!" "Ugggh!") the function of which is to express the writer or speaker’s attitude toward the information conveyed in the sentence. But, as we will see in the following chapter, numerous constructions can fulfill this function. When George Orwell writes:

Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse.

     Much remains to be filled out in the preceding theory of syntactic development, but the theory does account for the conclusions reached by Hunt, O’Donnell and their colleagues. Indeed, most of its elements were discovered by them, so much so that we might ask why they did not propose the theory. I can see five reasons, three of which, although they did not write about their lack of a theory, they themselves probably saw as gaps. The problems that they did not see involve transformational grammar and formulas. In the sixties and seventies transformational grammar was new, exciting, and applied to almost everything. Hunt and his colleagues were fascinated by it and used it. But transformational grammar itself is a very complex tool and, I would suggest, still very important for such areas as linguistic development before the age of five. But for some areas it is simply not appropriate. Using it is comparable to attempting to put a small nail in a wall with a sledge hammer -- one is likely to drop the hammer or break the wall. The complexities of transformational grammar thus probably absorbed much of their attention and obscured the subject they were using it to examine. Their attention to transformational grammar, i.e., the transformation of one construction into another also led them to overlook the importance of formulas and environmental influences. As we have seen, formulas ("Uncle Bob") explain the appearance of very advanced constructions very early in life, and may even explain the initial appearance of all the constructions we have discussed.

     Whereas they may not have been aware of the obstacles posed by transformational grammar and formulas, they were quite aware of their lack of any explanation for the surges in the appearance of various constructions or for the triggering mechanism for reduction. We might say, in other words, that they lacked the cognitive theory of Piaget and Vygotsky, neither of whom are discussed in their works. One need not apply the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky in any detail to see how their concepts of assimilation and plateaus, or of zones of proximal development, provide a causal explanation for the surges and retrenchments and for the movement from single main clause, to subordinate clauses, and then to the finer aspects of reduced clauses. Feeding the mind is like feeding the body: in youth we ingest small and relatively simple meals; as we grow older, both the size and the complexity of our meals change, as do our individual tastes.

     When O’Donnell states that "As Loban (1963, p.87) has pointed out, earlier research [including his own] has not resulted in identification of clearly defined stages of development in language proficiency in the elementary school years." (99), he proposes, in essence, an obstacle to any theory -- if we can’t define what follows what, obviously we can’t explain why it does so. But once again we have to make a distinction. If we are talking about structures such as "hard/easy to see," then O’Donnell is correct. But if we are talking about the major constructions that add to clause length, the situation is somewhat different. We may never be able to develop a theory in any more detail than that suggested above. By the time children enter kindergarten, their linguistic development already varies tremendously: we can never collect a group of five-year-olds whose linguistic development is exactly equal such that we can study their development and see exactly which constructions and combinations follow which. The children who are slightly ahead, the children slightly behind, the different formulas which each child has acquired, all will tend to blur any statistical analysis. The purpose of a theory is not only to provide an explanation, but also to suggest which questions should be studied next, which questions might confirm, amplify, or refute the theory. Many such questions have been presented throughout this chapter.

     Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a theory, felt by people such as O’Donnell, Mellon, and O’Hare, was the great gap between the 14.4 words per main clause of twelfth grade students and the 20.3 words of professional writers. How could it be explained? O’Donnell writes:

     Can further evidence be found relating to order in the development of older children?
     This investigation offers no simple, direct answer to that question. If some item of syntax had been found absent in the speech of younger children but present in increasingly frequent use in more advanced grades, it would have seemed evident that it was a characteristically later acquisition. No such instance was observed. Among the thirty-nine specific structures and functions identified for attention, the three completely missing in kindergarten speech were not much used by older children, either. (91)

I was then living on the top floor of a ludicrously grim hotel on the rue du Bac, one of those enormous dark, cold, and hideous establishments in which Paris abounds that seem to breathe forth, in their airless, humid, stone-cold halls, the weak light, scurrying chambermaids, and creaking stairs, an odor of gentility long long dead.

     What, then, accounts for the length of this clause? For one thing, Baldwin likes to pile up adjectives: "of those enormous dark, cold, and hideous establishments," "in their airless, humid, stone-cold halls." And he compounds the object of a preposition, modifying each element of the compound: "in their . . . halls, . . . light, . . . chambermaids, . . . and stairs." This single prepositional phrase is 14 words long, almost as long as the main clause of the average twelfth grade student. Still another fourteen words result from the chain of prepositional phrases--"on the top floor of a ludicrously grim hotel on the rue du Bac." It is not the kind of constructions that differentiate child-like writing from professional, it is the degree to which they are used and made interdependent.

     O’Hare recognized this when he proposed his famous study on sentence combining. But, unfortunately, the proponents of sentence combining err in that they fail to see that syntactic maturity, to produce professional-like writing, must be accompanied by perceptual maturity. Baldwin did not simply have to combine words to create his sentence -- he had to perceive the establishments as "enormous, dark, cold, and hideous." It is precisely such detailed perceptions that weak writers tend to leave out of their writing. Telling students to "add details" does no good -- what, after all, is a "detail"? But if we involve students in the syntactic analysis of good writers, if we let them see for themselves not only which kinds of constructions are used in which different combinations but also what kinds of ideas are used to "fill" these constructions, are they not much more likely to assimilate such constructions for themselves? 

     To be effective, of course, such instruction must remain within the children’s "zone of proximal development," and advocates of sentence-combining frequently ignore, or are unaware of, developmental theory. A personal example illustrates my point. In fourth grade, my son brought home a worksheet with the innocent title "Punctuation."  The instructions were: 

Read each pair of sentences below. Rewrite each pair of sentences as one sentence, using an appositive.

Carla asked Lesley to join her on a bike hike. 
Lesley is her best friend.

     If our theory of syntactic development is correct, we can also see why traditional approaches to grammar have failed -- they focus on teaching students to identify constructions, constructions which the children have already learned to use, but they totally fail to show students how these constructions intercombine to create adult-like sentences. Our theory also suggests that traditional grammar treats constructions in a logical, but pedagogically unsound sequence. Chapter Seven will explore this question of sequence, but first we must look at our theory of syntax in more detail.

1. Why would it be important for teachers of K - 3 to understand grammar?

2. What is "developmental theory"? Can you give any examples of your own? What do you know of the work of Piaget and Vygotsky?

3. Can you give any examples of grammar being taught at stages at which, according to this chapter, it is inappropriate?

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