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As an English teacher, I was fascinated by the grammar questions: much to love and much to hate. On the one hand, diagramming a sentence is a powerful skill, w
by Pitarou 13y ago
As an English teacher, I was fascinated by the grammar questions: much to love and much to hate.
On the one hand, diagramming a sentence is a powerful skill, which I wish was taught today.
On the other, this one made me chuckle:
> How many parts of speech are there?
If you put any two modern linguists in a room, you'd get about 5 different answers to that question.
The model of English grammar that students were expected to parrot at the time had only a passing resemblance to grammar as it is actually used. The sad part is that, even today, there are still pedants who go around correcting others' grammar on the basis of those outdated grammatical ideas.
- dalke 13y ago"diagramming a sentence is a powerful skill, which I wish was taught today" We learned the Reed-Kellogg system in 9th grade. I was horrible at it, so I guess I should say we were taught it. It wasn't until I studied grammar theory for my CS degree that I finally understood the concept, and the symbolism of Reed-Kellogg is still nonsensical to me. Most linguists use tree diagrams instead. As you imply, few English teachers actually know linguistics, or the problems of diagramming Chomsky's "John is easy to please"/"John is eager to please", where John is the object of the verb in the first and the subject of the verb in the second. It looks though that diagramming was introduced in large part because the previous system required more rote memorization of abstract grammar rules, and applied them only to the analysis of individual words, and not phrases. http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=olddiagrams/beforediagrams http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=olddiagrams/beforediagrams "there are still pedants who go around correcting others' grammar on the basis of those outdated grammatical ideas." -- hear hear!