Nouns Verbs and Modifiers

Nouns, verbs, and modifiers are at the heart of sentence creation. The previous post suggested exercises in which students formed three-word sentences, but without a Direct Object, such as Mary yawned loudly, The cat sat quietly, John ran away, and further suggested that the students change the adverbs (loudly, quietly, and away) to prepositional phrases. This gives students a good idea of how adverbs work, and how adverbs can be either single words, often -ly words, or prepositional phrases.

As I suggested in my last post, students of writing, or general language students, should be encouraged to view language as a jungle gym, not an operating table.  There are explanations and comparisons for each of these phenomena, but the goal is to have the students notice. You may want to make the additional point that so many of these phenomena are arbitrary. When it comes to syntax, very little is “right” or “wrong,” across all languages, only within a single language.

Exercise: Have the students take the same sentences they created in the last class and try to add prepositional phrases describing the nouns occurring at the head of the sentence, which, since this is English, will be the Subject of the sentence. They will discover that prepositional phrases don’t work with proper names — John of the forest ran away, Mary in the red dress yawned loudly — but they work beautifully with other nouns — The cat with long whiskers sat quietly. Replace Mary with The woman, and it works — The woman in the red dress yawned loudly.

grammar exercises, linguistics, linguistics in the classroom, modifiers, Syntax, teaching grammar, teaching writing

Syntax, Teaching Writing