Language Lessons

One of the biggest tricks to teaching grammar is the terminology. Because everything else so far in Grammar Alive! has been at least reasonable if not pretty darn good, I figured that Chapter 3: Teaching the Language of Grammar was going to be enlightening. Was it? You be the judge.

Though more concepts were covered, the two main ones (that I'm struggling a little bit with, frankly) are that it's easier to talk about words based on their classes rather than whatever part of speech it might be and to talk about sentences based on phrases and clauses.

The three classes are form, frame, and function. FORM is recognizing a word based on its endings, like nouns becoming plural or possessive by adding s's and apostrophes. FRAME is recognizing a word based on what comes before it or after it, like a noun having an article, like, well, "AN article." The "an" is a frame for the noun "article." FUNCTION is how a word acts in a sentence, like a noun acts like a subject or can even sound descriptive, like "the kitty cat purse."

With me so far?

Okay, then, it's also useful to break sentences down based on their phrases and clauses. A PHRASE is a word or group of words that is a unit in a sentence but is NOT a clause (like "The kitty cat purse" is a noun phrase). This is helpful, I think, when discussing how to figure out when a sentence begins and ends. A CLAUSE has a subject and predicate, and I'm sure you already know that there are independent (The dog barked.) and dependent (Because the dog barked...) clauses.

Phew.

Finally, the authors claim that there are only about seven available sentence patterns in English, but those are broken down in Chapter 8, and I'm not quite there yet.

On first blush, the phrase/clause distinction is most useful. I'm not sure (yet) how discussing words based on form/frame/function is helpful, but I'm open to reading about it. Stay tuned for ideas from Chapter 8.