What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
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What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
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Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#2I thought that I was the only one who was never taught this.
Go public school system!
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#3Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification.
The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#4"The deeper problem is the school tradition itself. It's a TRADITION, after all"
Interesting point and I agree. Why are we identifying metalinguistics with words anyway? Why not just use symbols so we can actually compare them across languages?
Is the tradition so inherently rigid and stuck to the written/spoken languages - rather than moving beyond words and use a system of symbols?
The tradition obsufcates the universality of grammar and semantics by adding words atop words rather than simple symbolism.
Doesn't this make internalization harder? You don't teach math just by numbers but also with symbols and real-world references.
As for internalization and understanding what and where 'the' belongs...There has been astounding success in identification and understanding when metalinguistics is entirely removed and replaced with simple symbols like grmmr (http://green-bridge.org). I've seen results upfront and it seems a non-word approach eases and solidifies linguistic understanding in ways far more profoundly than metalinguistics ever can. Teachers and students alike have said this system has taken away all the cloud of uncertainty in language grammar and semantics.
If you are a linguist and you are interested in helping grmmr become a standard in the studies of metalinguistics, please do let me know! I'm the design partner of the company. We are eager to open source this knowledge into a simple but reliable notation.
This system has been in use for over 20 years in classrooms, colleges, and adult education programs. It has been redesigned from bottom up in order to be as accessible and consistent as you would expect from a grammar categorizing system.
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#5Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#6Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification. The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.
Reading this, I have no idea if you're saying it because you know how modern syntactic theories work and how they're developed or if you're just saying it because you thought it sounded good.
Don't leave us hanging!
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#7I thought that I was the only one who was never taught this. Go public school system!
You never covered articles?
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#8Part of the problem of course if the naive notion that you can fit words into a single grammatical category, like species in a taxonomy, while word usage ends up defying this simplification. The real problem is that taxonomic classification is rarely correct in nature.
That's true.
Ask a simple group of 5 linguists and they all will give you different answers. This literally happened in a workshop we gave at a college months ago. Quite funny.
While working on grmmr (green-bridge.org) we recognized that so many of us are densely confused when it comes to these metalinguistics. So we just stopped using knives that dissected (metalinguistics) words into words and went for friendlier marker (symbols and colors).
We need to be reminded that a lot of it is just pretend and educated guesses, no absolutes. Markers seem to work better here than knives do when teaching and categorizing language grammar.
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#9Linguistics is the only field I can think of where the general public does not take seriously the knowledge of the experts (linguists).
Climate science, evolutionary biology, ...
Re: What part of speech is “the”? (2006)
#10These days, in Quebec, French (as a first language) is taught using a more-or-less linguistically correct approach, with articles called determiners, dividing sentences into groups and using transformations to understand interrogative sentences. In my days we used a more traditional system, and the time we spent doing grammar analysis was very tedious; we only approached the subject in secondary school. These days they are taught to analyse sentences in 3rd-4th grade and up.