I want green?
It’s a sample sentence on a grammar test. The fifth-grade
student is asked to parse it. It looks easy: pronoun, verb, ah—green?
“Teacher, I’m having trouble with this sentence.”
“Imagine I held out two shirts, one red, one green and you
said, ‘I want green.’”
That’s all the help she can give.
He goes through his list of definitions. A noun is a person place thing or idea. It’s
not a person or a place. Is green a thing or an idea? He’s never understood
this idea of idea very well. Isn’t everything sort of an idea?
An adjective is a word
or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to
modify or describe it.
Green is an attribute of the shirt. The shirt is the thing.
Green tells you something about the shirt. So it’s really an adjective, green.
But the word “shirt” isn’t in the sentence. But it’s
implied. Like the word “you” isn’t in the sentence “Go to hell!” And “that”
isn’t in the sentence, “It’s the shirt I want.” So green is an adjective.
Or is it a noun?
And is the more intelligent student the one who gets the
answer wrong or the one who gets the answer right? The one we reward or the one
we punish?
If “I want it” is S—V—DO, can anything serve in the DO slot?
ReplyDeleteAnthimeria comes to mind here. In an essay I share with students, a writer gives us this description of a plant (for grazing sheep): “It was salt and bitter.” We expect “salty and bitter,” but she substitutes a noun for its adjectival form. I know that “green” doesn’t substitute for “shirt,” but I don’t reject the teacher’s example. It’s circumscribed by the context of choosing shirts. (Is that how to phrase it—circumscribed?)
Then we can imagine other such contexts that would allow “I want bacon-flavored”; “I want funny”; “I want escapist.” Or is your concern that, lifted from context and placed in the artificial context of a grammar test, a declaration like “I want green” asks for a different analysis than parsing?
No, that's not my concern at all. My concern is about what we don't tell students--and what teachers themselves don't know--that "grammar" describes or models language only. No description of language is complete. When you're learning a grammar, any grammar, you're learning a way of talking about language at the same time that you are learning about and being deceived about language. Why does this matter? Because at the same time that you are learning about language, you are becoming blinded, it's as though you were being told to forget about the poem and accept the paraphrase or forget about painting and accept the color analysis. It starts with the very idea of "is," the copula. "X is a...." We learn implicitly that our categories are metaphysical facts, which is false; they are imperfect but useful inventions. And then we either punish the clever student who has perceived the imperfection in our description, saying "you got number one wrong," rather than, "here our description no longer makes sense," or we reinforce the lie of a true description by leaving such troubling examples off the test. Thus we literally punish insightfulness. If we understood the implications of this, our perceptions of everything would change, our journey through life would be a different, truer journey, because the same thing that's true of grammatical systems is also true of moral systems and philosophical systems and all descriptive systems of being. I'm tempted to return to Hobbes and start over.
DeleteI should subscribe to your blog so I don’t miss your replies. I’d just have to figure out how to do this.
DeleteI’ve noticed something admirable about you: you resist definitions. Maybe that’s the insight, the takeaway here. Grammar, in attempting to describe how a language works, takes on an impossible task. Why bother describing how a language works? I suppose I needed grammar as I was learning Spanish in school; I wouldn’t have needed that grammar if I were living in a Spanish-speaking culture. (Yo no hablo Español. Que lástima.)
I’d never want to knowingly punish insightfulness, but perhaps I’ve done so unknowingly. We teachers often have to cut corners, to end a class because the clock says so, not because the conversation found its conclusion.
What would a grammar lesson look like in an ideal world? How would that “I want green” play out in your class?
I would not say I resist definitions. I try to contextualize the whole idea of definition. Definitions are absolutely essential to knowledge. And they absolutely limit knowledge. They are never correct or adequate in general (though they will often do fine for the moment). The older I get, the more of a nominalist I become. There is only now and there is only this. History exists now, not then. The future does not exist. All definitions are stipulative and meant for the present use. You need to know the definition of "noun" if it helps you understand and use a language not because "noun" encircles an absolute field of things that cannot escape.
ReplyDelete