Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread. Being neither a philosopher nor a psychologist, I would hesitate to attempt a definition of "thought," were it not absolutely necessary to my topic. All too often, discussions on the teaching of thinking become hopelessly confusing because we mean different things by the word "thought." An ex-colleague once went so far as to define thought as "any electrical activity that takes place in the brain." He didn’t seem to realize that, in his definition, ants and aphids think, not to mention apes and chimpanzees. Clearly, most teachers would require a more limiting definition of "thought." Ann Berthoff, for example, supplied an intriguing one when she defined a thought as "a mental apprehension of a relationship between an A and a B with reference to a C." (114-115.) Professor Berthoff’s definition is so intriguing because it is so fruitfully ambiguous: are A, B, and C the speaker, the message, and the listener? Or does she have in mind a Platonic universal: A - the perceiver, B - the perceived, and C - the Platonic form? Although the implications of each of these interpretations lead to new perceptions about writing and thinking, they lead out of the area of my topic. I have introduced them only to suggest the necessity of defining "thinking." But Professor Berthoff’s A, B, and C can be interpreted in still a third way, a way that closely coincides with the definition of thought given by the noted grammarian Henry Sweet, a definition that underlies my suggestions in the first part of this chapter. 

The Definition of Thought 

     Suppose we interpret Professor Berthoff’s A and B as two concepts, let us say "earth" and "roundness," and we consider C to be the thinker. We are now close to Sweet’s definition of "thought": 

     As we have seen, such a thought as "the earth is round" is made up of two ideas "the earth" and "round" or "roundness." All thoughts require at least two ideas: (a) what we think of, called the subject -- in this case, "the earth," and (b) what we think concerning it, called the predicate, namely that it is "round," or has the attribute of "roundness." (from "Logic and Grammar," as quoted in Introductory Language Essays, ed. Dudley W. Bailey, NY: Norton, 1965, 259.) 

     From such a collocation as the round earth we can infer the statement the earth is round. Thus assumption may be regarded as implied or latent predication, and predication itself may be regarded as strengthened or developed assumption. (260) 

     We must never forget C, the thinker, but Sweet’s implied definition of "thought" is so fecund that we must concentrate on A and B and on how the minds of thinkers can relate two concepts to form a thought. First we might say that either A or B must always be dominant. In "The earth is round," "earth" is primary, as it is in "the round earth." We can, however, change the relationship in at least two ways to make "roundness" primary: "the earth’s roundness," or "the roundness of the earth." Second, the lack of predication in three of our examples indicates that we can add still another idea to an already conjoined thought: "The earth’s roundness was debateable." We might say that our original A ("roundness") and B ("earth’s") merge into a single A to which a new B ("debateable") can be added as an additional thought. This is, of course, a great oversimplification, and I by no means wish to suggest that it models the thought process itself. But it does, I believe, offer a fruitful approach for understanding students’ problems in "thinking" as it is expressed in their reading and writing. Generally speaking, we might say that words embody concepts or ideas, and that syntax conveys the relationships between them. Most sentences contain, therefore, not a single, complete thought, but rather great hierarchies of interrelated thoughts, interrelated according to the rules of syntax. 
 

Reflections of Students’ Problems with Syntax and Thought 

     With this brief definition, we can turn to students’ problems with their reading and writing. Proving that the inability to decode syntax is one of the roots of their problem may be impossible -- their vocabulary is certainly relevant, as is their innate mental equipment. Then too, some students are just plain lazy. But there is evidence that points to syntax. As noted in a previous chapter, Trevor Gambell surveyed teachers to discover "What High School Teachers Have to Say about Student Writing and Language across the Curriculum." He reports that: 

Teachers ... found problems with texts which employed multiple choice questions with subordinate clauses. Students had difficulty determining the main idea of the sentence and thus the question; the subordinate clause led to ambiguity and confusion." (43) 

     A personal experience drove home, to me, the implications of students’ problems with syntax. I had assigned William Golding’s "Thinking as a Hobby" for my college Freshmen. Golding divides thinkers into three "grades" and gives narrative examples to illustrate each grade. The essay is rather simply organized: after a single introductory paragraph, Golding discusses grade-three thinkers for 29 paragraphs, then grade-two thinkers for 16, and finally grade-one. My plans for the class called for a student moderator -- on such days I simply sit at the back of the room and listen to the discussion. 

     To my surprise, the students, even the best of them, were hopelessly lost. As they floundered, I listened for some clue to their problem: why couldn’t they understand such a simple essay? Having listened to many of their comments, I interrupted to ask who in the essay is an example of a grade-two thinker. Several students noted that it is Ruth, and none of the students offered any other suggestion. Now it is true that the long narrative example for grade-two thinkers involves Ruth, but Ruth is not a grade-two thinker, she is a grade three! I let the students continue to flounder as I searched for some reason for their seeing Ruth as the example of grade-two thinking. I think I found it in the first sentence of the section on grade-two thinkers. Golding writes: "Grade-two thinking is the detection of contradictions. " Ruth is full of contradictions, but she cannot detect any of them: it is the writer (Golding) who detects the contradictions in her thoughts, and it is the narrator who exemplifies the grade-two thinker. But none of the students perceived the writer as the example of a grade-two thinker. 

     What they had done, I would suggest, is to misinterpret the syntax of Golding’s sentence: they missed the nexal relationship of "detection" to "grade two thinking" and of "contradictions" to "detection." In effect, they read "Grade two thinking is contradictions." As a result, they quite logically viewed Ruth as the example of a grade-two thinker. But since Ruth is actually grade-three, the students couldn’t -- with good reasons -- distinguish her from the grade-three thinkers, and thus they could not differentiate grade-two thinking from grade-three. And since grade one, in Golding’s perception, is a development of grade two, they could not even begin to see its characteristics. Their problems and frustrations with the entire essay, in other words, may have resulted from inaccurate decoding of the syntax of a single sentence.

     Examples of such misreadings are of necessity lengthy as well as difficult to detect, and thus I shall not go into detail about how one student claimed that Golding’s essay is a spoof about thinking "because he himself states that he cannot think." The student got this idea from Golding’s 45-word opening sentence in which he states that when he was a boy he came to the conclusion "that he himself could not think at all." (The students mishandled the subordinate clause.) Similarly,  Donne’s "Reason, thy Viceroy in me, me should defend" throws students who know the meanings of all the words. (They are thrown by the S/C/V pattern, i.e., the complement before the verb.) And  Shakespeare’s "Which by-and-by black night doth take away,/ Death’s second self that seals up all in rest" totally baffles many students. (Among other things, they cannot perceive the apposition, and hence the identity, between "night" and "Death’s second self.")

     Syntactic problems in students’ writing are much easier to document: all we need do is to look at their papers. But here too, the problem is more complex than it is usually considered. To see why, we need to bring C, the thinker/writer back into consideration, and also add D, the reader. We can now look at a sentence written by a student:

The essential thought here is that A ("peer pressure") equals a part of B ("fear"). As D, readers, we may object that the two are not equal, that peer pressure may cause fear, but that it may, on the other hand, have nothing at all to do with fear. Is this, then, an example of poor thought? It may be, but we cannot be certain since we can never be sure of what was in C, the writer’s head. It is quite possible that the writer perceived the relationship as one of cause/effect, but that he was unable to syntactically encode the relationship, in which case we are dealing not with poor thought, but rather with poor communication of thought. 

     It is not my intention to catalog the syntactic constructions which give students problems, but allow me one final example. A student, discussing her previous experiences with writing, wrote: 

The problem here, caused by a voracious verbal, is that the sentence is fundamentally ambiguous, although its ambiguity can be resolved by punctuation or pronunciation. What the student meant was that she considered the fact that she was not getting anywhere and, as a result, she gave up trying, but instead of relating B ("considering") to A ("I") as a participle, she related it to "gave up" as its direct object, and thus wrote exactly the opposite of what she meant. In writing, of course, the comma makes the difference. 

     When I presented this example at a conference, a teacher objected that, in context, we would probably understand what the student meant. That, with the qualification "probably," may be true, but it misses the point. As I suggested in Chapter Eight, in some cases we might not understand, or we might understand something different from what the student meant. As teachers, it is our job to help students control the language. I did not, in other words, present the example because I like to look for errors -- my interest in this example is not even primarily in the fact that it demonstrates a lack of control. I find the example important because I have seen far too many students "give up." They have come to believe that they cannot think, that they are incapable of learning. This disturbs me because I do not believe that it is true, or at least that it is always true. A few students may not have the mental equipment, but most of them do. Some students have no troubles at all -- they are the ones who grow up in homes where reading is a habit. They have, through long experience, absorbed the syntactic patterns of the language. But the majority of students are in between, and they far too often give up, blaming their own incompetence, when what really causes their failure is our inability to teach them syntax, the rules for communicating relationships between A’s and B’s.

     Thus far, however, we have preferred not to teach this; instead, many of us sit back and complain that students can’t think. And, unfortunately, our students believe us. Many of them "give up." Are they giving up because we have failed? There is, after all, a difference between thinking and communicating thought. I’m not sure that we can teach thinking, but we certainly can teach the syntactic system through which thoughts are communicated. And we can do a much better job of explaining to students how syntax conveys the relationships of ideas. Only when our students understand these rules, only when every high school senior can analyze all the clauses in his or her own essay and still fails to produce any meaningful thoughts, only then will I agree that our students can’t think. 
 

Syntax and Logical Relationships 

     Here are the finite verbs a college Freshman underlined in a quiz: "It was one of those warm, placid summer evenings when the neighbors congregate outside to socialize and talk over the day’s events." Although I do not consider "talk" a finite verb in this sentence, I allow it as an answer since one could argue that the "and" connects "congregate" and "talk." What bothers me is the "socialize," and it bothers me not just because the student missed the obvious sign of the infinitive. More important, the student missed a cause/effect relationship (a why), and interpreted it as a simple fact (a what).

     For years I had been complaining, along with my colleagues in English, that no matter what question I gave my students, the poorer students always told me "what happened." I began to listen to my colleagues in other departments: they have the same complaint. Asked to discuss the causes of the Civil War, students tell what happened. Asked to compare Communism and Capitalism, students tell what each is, but make no comparison. The problem, which affects all fields of education, concerns the very nature of "thought." Perhaps it can be addressed, in part at least, by having students, as they study syntax, discuss and explore how syntax expresses logical relationships. Logic is, of course, a complicated field of its own, and I obviously do not have in mind a college course in logic. Rather, I am thinking of a few basic premises with which students could be invited to begin their own investigation. 

     Suppose, for example, that we were working with a class of tenth-graders, students who had followed the curriculum suggested in Chapter Seven and who were therefore quite comfortable with syntactic terms and with analyzing sentences. We might tell them that the vast majority of logical relationships are simply particular cases of seven "patterns": 

 a) X is identical to Y 
 b) X is a part of Y 
 c) X is a cause/effect of Y 
 d) X is characteristic of Y 
 e) X is related to Y in time 
 f) X is related to Y in space 
 g) X is better/worse than Y 

     I will not catalog the various constructions that can express our seven logical relationships. As I suggested in Chapter Three, the teacher’s job is not to supply the answers, but rather the questions and a framework for discussing them. Students do not need to find all the constructions that express a relationship, and they should certainly never be asked to memorize a list of them. The objective of this exercise is to make students aware that there are relationships between syntactic and logical concepts. As Suzanne Langer argues, questions are more important than answers. (15).  The seven categories, moreover, do not include concession ("although") and condition ("if") relationships. From the point of view of mental development, it is interesting to note that such logical relationships as those of time and place are usually expressed through prepositional phrases, whereas concession and condition can be expressed only through the subordinate clause. And just as children use prepositional phrases of time and place long before they fully understand temporal and spatial relationships, so too, perhaps, students must assimilate subordinate clauses (probably in grades seven through nine: see chapter Four.) well before they can master concession and condition.

     The lack of inclusiveness in our list of logical relationships is not a major problem because the second kind of exercise invites students to expand the list. We can give students a short paragraph (double-spaced, dittoed) and ask them to place the appropriate letter label over each word or construction that expresses one of the relationships. If they find relationships that do not fit the categories, they can add to the list. The following passage illustrates the kind of discussion that may result. 

     Let us take a look at the process by which-(d)a mere-(d) fact about-(d) the past is transformed into a fact of-(d) history. At-(f) Stalybridge Wakes in-(e) 1850, a vendor of-(d) gingerbread, as the result-(c) of some petty-(d) dispute, was deliberately-(d) kicked to death by an angry-(d) mob. Is-(a) this a fact of-(d) history? A year ago-(e) I should have said "no." It was recorded by an eyewitness in-(e) some little-known-(d) memoirs; but I had never seen it judged worthy of mention by any historian. 

     Of the things I did label, several are in categories (e) and (f), time and space. Of our "logical" categories, these may be the least significant, but I would still suggest the importance of having students note them since weaker writers tend to omit such details. More interesting are those in category (d), characteristics. Some teachers might wish to compare this category with Aristotle’s concept of "qualities," but even without such classical allusions, students can find much to discuss. One way to begin would be to ask students to create subcategories. (Many teachers denigrate "categorization," often using the word "taxonomy." I would suggest, however, that categorization is one of the primary areas in which students need help. I often use brainstorming techniques in class. Students rarely have problems filling the blackboard with ideas. But when they are then asked to "group" the ideas, i.e., categorize, they are often lost.) As I look at the items labeled (d), for example, they seem to fall into four categories, the first of which we might call "syntactic ID." The subordinate clause beginning "by which," for example, simply identifies the process the writer wants to talk about. A different kind of identification, we might call it "categorical," is illustrated in the two prepositional phrases that modify the word "fact"-- "about the past," "of history." These phrases label Carr’s categories -- if the reader does not understand their function, he will completely miss Carr’s argument.

[This book is primarily about syntax, but we need to remember that syntax is only part of the linguistic system. I have often noted that students are thrown when a writer uses a synonym to refer to one of his categories. An interesting exercise, therefore, is to have students read an essay that includes several categories and have them trace the various ways in which the author refers to each of them.]

     A more important consideration, however, is which of the logical relationships in the passage is the most important? Experienced readers will probably unanimously agree that it is the single appearance of category (a): "Is this a fact of history?" It is to answer this question that Carr has included all the other sentences (and several sentences that follow our selection). He wants the reader to answer the question with him because he wants the reader to distinguish his two categories of "fact." Those two categories, we might say, are second in importance in this specific passage since they had been introduced earlier, but the reader cannot forget that this entire passage itself is intended to clarify the distinction between them. Everything else in the passage is of tertiary importance (or less) since it is all there to support the categories and the single question which serves as an example. 

     I have included this rather lengthy analysis of a single passage to illustrate what kinds of things might be said and discussed: I do not mean to suggest that teachers should necessarily "guide" the discussion, although they may need to ask a few leading questions to get things started, especially the first time. What, we might ask, would be the purpose of such discussion? I have already suggested that many students, no matter what the question, answer it as if it began with "what happened?" As I wander around my classroom while my students are doing in-class writing, I frequently note what they have marked in their books -- they tend to mark dates, places, names, and "what happened." Since this is how they read, it is natural that their writing follows it.

     Such a discussion therefore has as one of its purposes the shifting of students' attention to the "logical" relationships in what they read. Since most argumentative texts "cohere" only in their logic, we might even suggest that students’ problems with them is that they frequently totally miss the logical structure. To them, the texts may often appear as a series of unrelated stories about things that "happened." They read the text, in other words, for the examples, but they have no idea of what they are examples of. Another important purpose for such discussion, and my reason for including it in this book, is that it moves from syntactic analysis to meaning. It is one more way of interrelating the study of grammar and the study of reading, writing, and thinking. 

     Before leaving our seven "logical" patterns, elementary as they are, we should note their relationships to the paper assignments often made by teachers. Assignments made in terms of modes or forms (the definition paper, the comparison/contrast paper, etc.) have frequently been criticized, and the criticism is just if the instructor looks at the modes as separate, non-mixable molds into which students must pour their ideas. Our patterns, however, may help both us and students see how these logical structures interrelate. The core of a definition paper is usually a sentence on the pattern "X is identical to Y" (A computer is a tool.) The definition is then usually fleshed out with sentences based on the other patterns. (Perhaps our seven patterns could even serve as a simple generative heuristic for short papers?) "Natural division" papers, as defined in Sheridan Baker’s widely used The Practical Stylist, are essentially based on a variation of our pattern (b), i.e., X, Y and Z are mutually exclusive parts or divisions of A, each being treated in sequence. The cause/effect paper may go a step beyond natural division. When I assign such a paper, I note that students might select any topic, T. Then they have several options: they can explore several causes and or effects of T, organizing their paper on our pattern "X is a part of Y." Thus they might discuss three or four causes (or effects) of their selected topic. They may, however, wish to study causes of causes (or effects of effects). In such a case they would develop a causal chain (on our pattern (e), time) as they explain how Q causes R, which causes S, which causes T. 

     Following Confucius (See the epigraph to Chapter Three.), I will not go on to discuss descriptive or comparison/contrast papers. What I have tried to suggest is that what may begin as syntactic analysis can end up with questions of logic or organization. Many theoreticians of writing instruction argue that instruction should begin from the "top down," (global issues first); others maintain that it should work from the "bottom up" (grammar and mechanics first). Either approach might work if students stayed with one teacher for twelve years, but they don’t. Their sixth grade teacher may begin at the top; their seventh at the bottom. Usually, top and bottom never meet. To me, it makes more sense to combine top and bottom, and to show students how what they are learning about grammar is relevant to the organization of ideas, etc., and vice versa. My readers may not agree with the way I have put top and bottom together, but most will probably agree that top and bottom share many characteristics. Subordination is a syntactic concept, but it is also a logical one. Some students are masters of grammatical terminology and write perfect, empty sentences. But we may be able to use their mastery of sntax to help them understand a similar concept, in this case "subordination," in another (such as outlining). 

     The process can work. A typical paper in an introductory literature course is the "characterization." I particularly like this assignment since we make characterizations regularly in our daily lives (of TV programs, music, and people), and some of us are better at it than others. Yet most college Freshmen have no idea of how to do it "formally." As a general rule, they simply tell what the character "did." Thus, in in-class characterizations of Phoenix, in Eudora Welty’s "A Worn Path," I will inevitably be told, among other acts, that Phoenix "stole a nickel." I usually wait for that response, since it gives me the opportunity to ask "Does that mean that she is a thief? Can we, would we want to be, characterized by a single one of our acts?" This question usually leads to a shift in the nature of the words being written on the board, from verbs (what she did), to nouns and adjectives -- predicate nouns and predicate adjectives form the essence of the characterization paper. These nouns and adjectives must then be backed up with action verbs, with or without complements. For the weaker writers in the class, this may mean that their thesis and topic sentences will take the S/V/ PN (or PA) form. Once again, however, instruction is not a straight-jacket. The better writers may well come up with sentences such as "A devious woman, Phoenix did not tell the hunter that he had dropped the nickel." The better writers will always find ways to go beyond our direct instruction, and will freely do so as long as we clearly let them know that our instruction is meant to be built onto, not squeezed into. 
 

Induction, Deduction, and Students’ Ability to Think Abstractly 

     It is frequently claimed that students, especially the younger ones, lack the mental capacity to reason abstractly and that therefore they cannot understand, nor should they study, grammar. As noted in Chapter Six, Charles Suhor mistakenly claims the authority of Piaget to argue that high school students cannot handle concepts such as the gerundive or absolute. On the other hand, we have seen that Vygotsky specifically states that the study of grammar is "of paramount importance for the mental development of the child." We might reasonably wonder, therefore, about the nature of the relationship between abstract thinking and the study of grammar.

     In doing so, we should distinguish between the ability to think in abstractions (to formulate them) and the ability to think with abstractions (to manipulate them). Well before they reach school age, all children can think in abstractions. Almost every adult male has had the pleasant and slightly embarrassing experience of having a stranger’s small child call him "Dada." "Daddy," like almost every word with the possible exception of some proper nouns, is an abstraction. In learning to distinguish their own fathers from all the other existing males, children are teaching themselves to think in abstractions, and they succeed remarkably well. They learn to manipulate abstraction much later, primarily because before they can learn to manipulate them, they must have a good store of them. Conventional wisdom places the beginning of the ability to manipulate somewhere between the ages of seven and twelve, but this is a moot point since there are different kinds of manipulation (mathematical, verbal, etc.) in different realms (space, time, cause/effect), and indeed there is even much disagreement about what constitutes "manipulation." (The child’s designating the correct person as "daddy" is, in a broad sense, a manipulation.) Finally, every individual develops differently; some adults are terrible at giving directions (manipulating concepts of space); others, at time, etc. We must therefore be very careful with any generalizations about when children can begin to manipulate abstractions, but we can fairly safely say that their ability to manipulate will depend on their ability to formulate.

     Vygotsky notes that "instruction usually precedes development," (Thought, 101) and I would suggest that grammatical instruction could be (and may traditionally be) instrumental in helping students improve their abilities to formulate and manipulate abstractions. Although I have already stated that children learn to formulate abstractions before they reach school, concept formation is a never-ending process which can be done better or worse. The history of science is a story of changed and changing concepts, and philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein have struggled with the problems of definition and language. We may thus view concept formation (the ability to abstract) as a continuum from the very practical, but not very rigorous ("Give me a cookie.") to the extremely rigorous abstract definitions of scientists and philosophers. Technically, we might say that the more rigorous the definition, the better is the abstraction -- and therefore any manipulation of it, but when we speak of students’ ability to think abstractly, we usually have in mind a point somewhere near the middle of our continuum. We want students to understand the nature of a rigorous definition, but we are content to leave the extreme end of the continuum to the philosophers: it was, I believe, Aristotle who said that one should define a term as finely as one needs to and then stop; otherwise, one could spend one’s whole lifetime defining a single word.

     If we now look at the nature of a concept defined to medium rigor, we can say that it is probably an induction made from a more or less complete examination of perceptions. My concept of "insect" is the result of all the insect-like creatures that I have seen. If I wish to make my concept more rigorous, then I have to expand the scope of my perceptions, by looking in my back yard, and/or by reading and looking at pictures. Other people’s definitions of "insect" may help me, but by themselves they will not suffice. As Vygotsky notes, "memorizing words and connecting them with objects does not in itself lead to concept formation; for the process to begin, a problem must arise that cannot be solved otherwise than through the formation of new concepts." (Thought, 55)

     What does all this have to do with grammar? I would suggest that the study of grammar, done the right way, may be the easiest, and perhaps the best, pedagogical introduction to the study of abstractions. The qualification "done the right way" is important, since the traditional approach has been to rely heavily on other people’s definitions, which, as Vygotsky notes, is insufficient. Janice Neuleib and Irene Brosnahan, for example, tested prospective teachers at the beginning of a grammar course. The students 

rated themselves rather high (mostly 3 or above on a scale of 1 to 5) in most grammatical skills listed, particularly in knowing names of and identifying parts of speech and parts of sentences, standard grammatical usage, and correct punctuation rules and applications. 
     The results of the grammar test, given with the questionnaire, however, indicated little retention of formal grammatical knowledge and an inability to apply grammar to editing problems. Only three out of twenty-four prospective teachers could accurately name the eight parts of speech -- most of them could name four or five (usually noun, verb, adjective, adverb), but function terms like subject and object were mixed in. (32) 

     The traditional approach thus limits the "problem" in two important ways. First, there is no interference from competing constructions: if all one need look for is adverbial clauses, then one can, and usually does, erase all other constructions from one’s mind, thereby greatly simplifying the task. Second, the "inductive field," so to speak, is limited to twenty or so examples, and these examples, as we have noted in previous chapters, are usually too simplistic. If we visualize a concept, following Vygotsky, as a circle, we can add color to say that the center of the circle is a bright blue that pales towards the circumference. Traditional texts take for their exercises sentences from the bright blue center, but "protect" students from the paler fringes such as the semi-reduced "When ready, call me." We can thus say that in the traditional approach, students are not really allowed to form a concept for themselves. If we add to this the facts that students are rarely asked to use these concepts after they have finished the exercise and that the constructions are, with the exception perhaps of some minor diagramming, rarely related to each other systematically, we should not be surprised that students fail to retain them. Vygotsky notes that "the absence of a system is the cardinal psychological difference distinguishing spontaneous from scientific concepts," (Thought, 116). and the traditional approach totally fragments the systems of language and thus fails to present the students with a system. 

     If the traditional approach is so weak, how is it that some students do manage to learn from it, and how might it be improved such that instruction in grammar could simultaneously be instruction in concept formation? In the strict sense, we cannot teach students to induce -- to abstract from a mass of data some common characteristic. We cannot, in other words, give them samples of language, oral or written, and tell them to construct a grammar from them, thereby putting the students in the position of the first grammarians. Fortunately, we do not need to do so: the purpose of education is to give students the advantage of all the thinkers who lived before them. We can therefore use "guided induction" as suggested by John Bolton and Robert Carey at Montgomery College, both to help students understand the logical process and to assure that their endeavors will quickly bear fruit.

     Without guidance, for example, it would take several lifetimes before a student would arrive at the concept "preposition" (and I mean the concept, not the word). We can, however, guide the students by giving them an initial definition and even a list of prepositions. This is, of course, the approach of traditional grammar -- where is the induction and where is the "problem" that Vygotsky posits as a necessary prerequisite of concept formation? The induction and problem exist in our requiring students to test our definition in as wide a field of experience as possible. The field should include numerous questionable cases, and the testing can be facilitated through deduction. In effect, we create a set of axioms which the student can use to guide the inductive process: 

a.) "To" followed by a verb is not a preposition. 
b.) A word (on the list of prepositions) followed by a "sentence" is not a preposition. 
c.) A word (on the list of preposition) which follows a verb is not a preposition if a single verb can be substituted for the original verb plus the preposition. 

     Since in Chapter Seven I suggested that students should study prepositions starting in third grade, I should note that I do not mean that they should be formally introduced to the syllogism. Most of the prepositions that third graders will run across will be quite regular, right in the center of the concept. When they learn to recognize verbs, they could begin to apply axiom (a), without being told that they are using a syllogism. In later grades, they could apply axioms (b) and (c). But at some point in their study of grammar, perhaps in high school, I can see no reason for not telling them that they have been using induction, deduction, and syllogisms. College students often balk at these terms, claiming that they do not understand them, but they would easily understand if we were to point out that they have been using induction, deduction, and syllogisms for years in their study of syntax. With the single exception of the basic understanding of subjects and verbs, the entire procedure presented in this book for teaching syntax is based on induction and deduction through guiding axioms: 

A subordinate clause functions as a noun, adjective, or adverb. 
A verb that is not finite has to be a verbal. 
A verbal that has the form of a participle and functions as an adjective has to be a gerundive. 
A verbal that is not a gerund or gerundive has to be an infinitive. 

     I have attempted to suggest how the study of grammar can not only be based on induction and deduction but also that it can help students improve their ability at inductive and deductive thinking. My claims went beyond that, however, for I claimed that the study of grammar might be the easiest and even the best area for teaching inductive and deductive thinking. On what do I base this claim? Although induction and deduction can play an important role in any subject of study, no other subject studied in grades K-12, not even the sciences, offers the student such a rich potential field for inductive investigation. Chemistry lab experiments, for example, clearly will not do, for they are, after all, demonstrations, not even real experiments. The results are known beforehand, the experiment is performed once, and, if the student faces any problem to be solved, it is procedural, not logical. Biology would be a possibility, but what teacher, at any grade level, would want to fill the classroom with a couple thousand insects so that students could rummage around in them and sort them into species? We think inductively about social systems, wars, and literary works, but before such induction can begin students must know a great deal about numerous systems, wars, or works. They cannot, for example, begin to arrive at conclusions about Twain’s typical themes without having read a number of Twain’s works, and gaining such preliminary knowledge requires more time than students have.

     For the study of grammar, on the other hand, the classroom is already stocked with millions of words in sentences. If the textbooks do not have enough, students can easily import more by bringing in library books or newspapers. Or they could simply write more themselves. They could even tape conversations, transcribe them, and study the syntax of oral language. And finally, we should not forget that students would be doing this not just to learn about induction and deduction, and not just to learn the "rules" of grammar. They would also be studying the logic of language as discussed in the first part of this chapter, and they would also be using their new knowledge to help them with their reading and writing as discussed in the two preceding chapters. And, if teachers so wish, students could use this same knowledge of syntax as a basis for learning about -- and actually engaging in -- statistical research of language development and stylistics, to which we now turn. 

1. How do you define "thought"? "Logic"? Is syntax related to either?

2. This chapter suggests that syntactic constructions underlie the communication of (and perhaps the existence of) seven logical relationships. Do you agree or disagree? If you agree, can you extend the list?

3. The chapter suggested grammatical constructions which normally appear in a "characterization" paper, but it did not discuss those which teachers would probably expect to see in  descriptive or comparison/contrast papers. What are they?

4. The chapter suggests that the approach suggested in this book can also teach students both inductive and deductive thinking skills. How can it do so?
 

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