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KISS Level 1.1. Identifying Subjects
and Finite Verbs
The key to enabling students to understand
the structure of their own writing is to enable them to identify the subjects
and finite verbs in it. Even if you have been fairly well-taught
in grammar, the odds are that you have never heard of "finite" verbs. That's
because almost all instruction in grammar is really just an explanation
of some grammatical terms. I am unaware of any grammar textbook that even
claims to try to give students a practical understanding of grammar.
Consider the typical instructions about subjects
and "verbs." Students are given some basic definitions and are then asked
to underline subjects once and "verbs" twice. But consider the sentence:
Swimming is good exercise.
"Swimming" fits the typical definition of a verb, and thus many students
would underline it twice. But in this sentence, it is not a verb; it functions
as a noun and is a subject. Or consider the sentence:
They went to the store to buy some bread.
Here again, "buy" fits the typical explanation of a verb, but in this case,
it functions as an adverb. Or consider still another:
The way to win a man's heart is through his stomach.
"Win" fits the typical definition of a verb, but in this case "to win"
functions as an adjective to "way."
As you will learn if you stay with KISS, verbs
can function as nouns, adverbs, or adjectives. When they do so, they are
called "verbals." Those verbs that students are really expected to underline
twice are called "finite." Defining a "finite verb" for beginners is extremely
difficult--the definitions require an understanding of other grammatical
terms. But the ability to recognize finite verbs can be gained relatively
easily by studying examples, or, in KISS practice, short exercises.
The details of verbals are the focus of KISS
Level Four, but some exercises (starting in KISS Level 1.2) do attempt
to help students recognize verbals just so the students do not underline
them twice. Here in KISS Level 1.1, our objective is to enable students
to identify verbs in the first place. This is one of the most difficult
parts of studying grammar, for two reasons. First, there are thousands
of verbs in the language; and second, the same group of letters can be
either a noun or a verb -- or something else. Just think of words like
"look," "feel," "smile," "xerox," and even "like" itself.
Thus, in KISS Level 1.1 our objective is to
help students develop a basic "sentence sense" by giving them relatively
short sentences (in short exercises) until they can almost automatically
underline finite verbs and their subjects. Remember, however, that students
are expected to make certain types of mistakes--such as underlining a verbal.
On the other hand, once they have been taught that "am," "is," "are," "was,"
and "were" are always finite verbs, students should NEVER fail to underline
them twice.
Most textbooks provide a wide array of suggestions
for identifying nouns and pronouns (for subjects) and for identifying verbs.
There is, however, little if any evidence that any of these explanations
are effective. See “Methods
for Identifying Subjects and Finite Verbs,” below. If they help, use
them. You may find, however, that the sheer number of suggestions (and
exceptions within them) can be overwhelming. The objective of instruction
(the “game,” so to speak) ought to be the analysis of sentences. In many
cases, however, far too much time is spent on explanations of how to identify
nouns, verbs, etc. There is a better way.
Start instruction, not with the parts of speech,
but with the analysis of sentences. If you are beginning in primary grades,
you and your students have lots of time, so you can begin with very simple
sentences. You can limit instruction to just two or three of these exercises
every week until all (or at least almost all) of the students can do them
almost without thinking. In the process, you can teach students to identify
nouns and verbs. The verbs, of course, they will be underlining twice.
But, instead of all those gimmicks for identifying nouns, students need
simply learn that nouns (and pronouns) are the words that function as subjects
(or, when you get to them, as objects of prepositions, etc.).
As always in grammar, terminology causes problems.
At this point in their work, students do not need to know terms such as
"tense," "helping verbs," or "auxiliary" (another word for "helping").
They should, however, learn the term "phrase." A "phrase" is simply a group
of words that work together as a unit, but do not include a subject and
(finite) verb pattern. At this KISS Level, for example, students should
learn to underline all the words in a verb phrase (such as "would have
been walking"). Exercises three through six focus on the various
types of helping verbs. But the purpose of the category names is to make
sure that students are at least exposed to the verbs that create various
verb phrases. How often, for example, will students run across "ought"?
On the other hand, young writers will use "was going to…" and "kept on…"
fairly often. Thus, if we want students to be able to analyze their own
writing, we need to pay some attention to these verbs.
One of the problems in the grammar books is
that they do not all agree on what is (and what is not) a "helping" verb.
Some books, for example, include "need" and "dare" among "helping" verbs--for
reasons that are not given. But if "need" is a helping verb, why isn't
"want"? The KISS Approach to this is, of course, alternative explanations.
In sentences such as
He needed to go to the store.
He wanted to go to the store.
KISS allows students to consider "needed to go" or "wanted to go" as the
finite verb phrase, especially in this KISS Level 1.1. (Exercise five,
"Other Helping Verbs," focuses on this question. In it, you should probably
accept either explanation as correct. If a student underlined "wanted"
twice and does nothing with "to go," that is fine. It is, of course, also
fine if they underline "wanted to go" twice.)
You may or may not want to use the instructional
material for Exercise # 5. It describes "start," "continue," "stop,"
"like," "love," "hate," "want," and "try" as "helping verbs." Instead,
you might want to have them use the instructional material for exercise
seven, "Verbs as Subjects or
Complements," in KISS Level 1.3 "Adding Complements." The question
here is, how much new information can you give your students without overwhelming
them? You will almost certainly find that what students need here is practice.
For justification for this approach, see the essay on Jerome
Bruner's "spiral curriculum" in the "Background Essays."
Exercise seven ("Fill-in-the-blanks
with Verbs") is as much an exercise in vocabulary as it is an exercise
in learning to identify verbs. It probably works best as an in-class activity.
Give the students time to work alone to fill in the blanks, and then have
them share their choices with the rest of the class. You might want to
write the verbs on the board as the students give their suggestions. That
way, you can have students discuss which words are most effective. Exercise
eight is a short passage for analysis, and exercise nine is
just for fun.
The most important things:
1. Focus students' attention on how much they are learning.
2. Grammar should be meaningful and make sense. Students should understand
why they are learning it. (See the KISS
psycholinguistic model.) And as students are learning it, the definitions
and exercises we give them should be sensible and useful.
3. Have fun! You may be surprised by the enjoyment that many students
get out of simply seeing how much they have learned.
| Exercises in KISS
Level 1.1 |
| Texts |
From Bunny Rabbit’s Diary
by Mary Frances Blaisdell |
ToC |
|
| Recognizing Subjects and Single-Word Verbs (From "A
Christmas Tree")
|
| Ex
# 6 - More Practice with Helping Verbs |
| Ex
# 7 - Fill in the blanks with interesting verbs. |
| For similar exercises in Level 1.8 and in the P/A books,
see Level 1.8. |
| Ex
# 8 - A Passage for Analysis |
Additional
Methods for Identifying Subjects and Finite Verbs
Find the Verb First
Different people's minds work differently,
and some people seem to find it easiest to identify subjects first and
then the verb that goes with them. If you are stumped, try that, but it
may be easier to identify verbs first. Several methods for identifying
verbs have been proposed. Individually, none of them seem to be successful,
but each may help.
The first is the
definition of verbs as words that "show action or state of being."
The definition is basically true, but it is probably too vague — what is
meant by "show," and by the even vaguer "state of being"? In
She plays baseball.
"plays" shows action, but in
She made three excellent plays.
it names what she made. The difference is that in the first example, "plays"
predicates action, whereas in the second it answers the question "She made
what?" But this means that one must understand the concept of predication,
and be able to apply it to a particular sentence, before one can use this
part of the definition.
As for "state of being," I never knew what
that meant, and still don't. (And I love philosophy.) Fortunately, the
verbs that show state of being are limited in number and almost always
used as finite verbs. They can simply be remembered:
am, is, are, was, were
Note that these words are extremely common. Students
will do themselves a favor by memorizing the small list. A little practice
and some common sense should help students recognize a few other common
finite verbs:
can (when it does not mean the thing)
may (when it does not mean the month)
might (when it does not mean strength)
must (when it does not mean "necessity)
will (when it does not mean desire, or the legal document)
Suffixes such as "ing"
and "ed" help to identify many words as verbs, but not every word that
ends in "ing"is a verb.
Another simple way to check to see if
a word CAN BE a verb is to use it to fill in simple
blanks to make acceptable sentences:
She/They ______.
She/They ______ it.
Generally speaking, only words that can function as verbs will make sense
in the blanks, but that does not mean that the word functions as a verb
in the sentence you are analyzing.
Another way of telling if a word can function
as a verb is to test whether or not it can have number and tense. Grammatically,
"number" refers to the difference between one (singular) and more than
one (plural):
He walks. They walk.
Tense refers to the expression of time relationships:
Past: He walked.
He was walking. He did walk.
Present: He walks. He is
walking. He does walk.
Future: He will walk. He
will be walking.
Suppose, for example, that you were attempting to decide if "time" is a
verb in the following sentence:
They time the contest.
In this sentence, you could change "time" to "timed" and still have a meaningful
sentence. Thus "time" here functions as a verb. But in the sentence "Do
you have the time?" "time" does not function as a verb because you cannot
sensibly substitute "timed."
Perhaps a more helpful guideline is that words
that can be verbs do not function as verbs when they are directly preceded
by "a," "an," or "the," or by possessives (his, their, Mary's):
They made the play.
She opened a can.
It is Mary's can.
The lawyer read the will.
His will was short.
Verb Phrases
A verb phrase, in the simplest sense, is a
group of verbs that work as a unit:
They were working on the
road.
They would be working on the road
for a long time.
She is going to go to the store.
He ought to read this book.
Bill has to do his homework.
As you will see in Level Four, verb phrases can be analyzed into smaller
pieces, but at Level Two, the students' primary objective should be to
identify all the verbs in a phrase as a part of the phrase. Sometimes the
words in a phrase are separated from each other:
Would they like
to come to supper?
She has often said
that they would.
They do, in this case, have
to go to court.
Finding Subjects
Always work one pattern at a time — find the verb,
find its subject(s), and then find its complement(s). I have seen many
students who underline a verb here, another one there, then perhaps a subject
from a different pattern somewhere else. Such students never know when
they are done, and they almost never do a good job. Work systematically,
sentence-by-sentence, one pattern at a time.
If you find the finite verb first, you can
use what they teach in middle and high school to help you find its subject.
Unfortunately, most textbooks don't give students everything they need.
The books say, "Find the subject by making a question with 'who' or 'what.'"
If the sentence is
Sharon likes hamburgers.
students are supposed to ask the question "Who likes hamburgers?" which
will give them the subject — "Sharon." This works fine for baby sentences,
and even for some sophisticated ones.
But what happens with:
Some of these concepts are difficult.
We ask the question -- "Who or what are difficult?" And we get the answer
— "concepts." We tell that to the teacher, and we're told that we're wrong.
(Thanks a lot.) Actually, this scenario does not happen very often, because
most teachers use exercises in grammar books, and the grammar books avoid
such sentences in their exercises.
And there is another problem:
It was the manager who caught the thief.
We ask "Who was the manager?" and we get the correct, if meaningless, "it."
We then ask "Who caught the thief?" Obviously it was the manager — but
that's the wrong answer! "Manager" is the meaningful answer, but the grammatical
subject of "caught" is "who."
Because of these problems, in addition to the
"who or what + verb" question, we need two additional rules:
1 If a verb is outside
a prepositional phrase, its subject cannot be inside one.
In our first example ("Some of these concepts
are difficult.") this rule eliminates "concepts" from consideration, and
in effect forces students to the only word left, "some," which is the subject.
Prepositional phrases between subjects and their verbs are fairly common,
so students' ability to identify prepositional phrases — KISS Level 1.5
— will make Level Two easier.
For practical purposes, if students are working
at Level Two, they can ignore anything and everything in prepositional
phrases as they look for subjects and verbs. Only one prepositional phrase
in two hundred involves subjects and verbs, a percentage so low that it
is not worth worrying about until students get to clauses — where the construction
will become clear. (Again, one thing at a time!)
2. The complement
of one verb can NEVER function as the subject of another. There are NO
exceptions.
This rule, firmly based on our psycholinguistic
model of how the human brain processes language, resolves the second problem.
In our example ("It was the manager who caught the thief.") "manager" is
a predicate noun after "was," so it cannot be the subject of "caught."
In most cases, as in this one, students will be left with only one word,
usually "who," "which," or "that" which functions as the subject.
A Psycholinguistic Approach to Finding Subjects
The basic sentence pattern of any sentence
is subject / verb / optional complement. We each figured this out for ourselves,
as babies, and to this day our brains still expect the same basic pattern.
Generally speaking, our brains will take the first noun phrase as the subject
of a sentence. As we grew older, however, we mastered a few exceptions.
An important one involves words that denote time:
Sunday, we will watch the ballgame.
Sunday is my favorite day of the week.
English uses nouns that denote time as adverbs to indicate when the action
of the verb will take place. (This is one of the additional constructions
explored in Level Five.) As a result, readers/hearers have to wait until
further into the sentence before deciding whether or not the time-word
is the subject. In the first example, as soon as a reader/hearer perceives
"we," "we" is taken as the subject, and "Sunday" is processed as an adverb.
But in the second example, the "is" after "Sunday" confirms that "Sunday"
is the subject of the sentence.
As explained in KISS Level One, prepositions
never function as nouns. As a result, when readers/hearers perceive a preposition
at the beginning of a sentence, they expect the object of that preposition
before the subject of the sentence:
{In the winter}, they go sledding.
The initial preposition, in this case "in," devours "winter" such that
"winter" is not eligible to be the subject of the sentence. So the next
thing named, in this case "they," is. We will learn about a few other grammatical
constructions that have this effect. But even without a conscious awareness
of those constructions, students may be able to use this rule and their
knowledge of English to help them identify subjects. With the exception
of nouns that denote time, the brain will tend to take the first "free"
noun or pronoun as the subject of a finite verb. Questions (Whom do you
want?) are an exception to this rule. Other exceptions are explored in
KISS
Lev el 2.1.2 - Varied Positions in the S/V/C Pattern. |