Doctor Heal Thyself
You know, sometimes you just have to talk to a doctor about something embarrassing and there’s no way around it, so here I go.
To Dr. Karen: A Review of Your “30 Tier 2 Words for Language Therapy”
This freely available, online, language education resource is written by Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan, my fellow scholar from Illinois State University, one of the nation’s oldest public universities, and one of the largest producers of educators in the U.S. Whether those claims to fame are good things or bad things depends on your opinion, I guess.
Here’s something that doesn’t depend on opinion, however: facts. Not alternative facts; the real kind. Like, for example, linguistic facts. So I’d like to offer you my opinion on the facts — and the fictions — in your work. In the free sample you offer visitors to your website, you offer 30 words for study, and more than a third of them are misidentified. Oops! That’s a 63%. At ISU, I’m pretty sure that’s a D.
Since you took the time to check out my work, Dr. Karen, I thought I’d do the same, so I ordered the free resource you offer on your web page, and I watched your video to learn all about the “magic bullet for treating language disorders.”
Just curious. Have you read any of the research on the effects of morphological study on vocabulary? I don’t give a toot, myself, but I know how much you like research. And vocabulary. I did not realize that vocabulary was a magic bullet at all! Imagine my surprise in learning that if you study what words mean with your students, they do better with language tasks! Clearly magic is the only reasonable explanation for such an improvement.
As far as bullets go, I admit that I have not yet tried shooting my students to see if that helps. But then again, I’m not a doctor, and if you google me, you can verify that fact.
I thought about asking the people on SpellTalk what they thought of your work, Doctor Karen, but since the administrators kicked me out of their club for truth-telling like five years ago, I couldn’t. So I decided to just write in my own space, publicly, instead of to other people in secret, to alert you directly to the following conceptual errors in your resource:
1. You identify as nouns the following words: route and trance. Of course, they can both be nouns, but they can also be verbs. You don’t know what they are until they’re in an actual phrase, but they’re not. They’re disembodied on flash cards, with no explanation or investigation. Just as you can’t tell how a morpheme will be pronounced until it surfaces in a word, you also can’t tell what part of speech something is until it surfaces in a phrase or clause.
a. They will route the new bus line though my old neighborhood.
b. She’s tranced and won’t be roused.
The other nouns on the list have reliably nominal suffixes or suffixion constructions: recreation, compassion, location, assortment, disability, gratitude. Masterpiece is a compound noun, and memory, like history and category, is a noun too, and linking it to memorial (historical, categorical) makes better sense of its meaning, structure, and pronunciation.
I’d like to see the empirical research evidence that flashcards are a better mechanism for teaching vocabulary than actually studying the a word’s structure and relatives, upon which you undoubtedly based your materials.
2. On your list of verbs to memorize, you offer ramble, embraced, challenge, underestimate, and collapse. Again, while these can be verbs, they also have other possibilities:
a. Let’s go for a ramble through the woods, shall we? (Noun. If a clown is asking, say no.)
b. Embraced by visual artists, the new technology has made a big splash. (Adjective.)
c. Well that’s a challenge, isn’t it? (Noun.)
d. The adjustor’s underestimate was rejected by the contractor. (Noun.)
e. Did you ever study the collapse of the Roman Empire? (Nounity noun noun. Et tu, Brute?)
So, fully half of the words that the Doctor prescribes for verbosis, with no phrasal context to establish them as verbs, can also be, well, not verbs.
Have you got any good peer-reviewed research to support calling nouns “verbs,” I wonder?
Well hey, third time’s the charm, right?
3. Wrong. Of your ten “adjectives,” three can be other word classes, (leisurely, tender, and cunning) and one is patently not adjectival (rehearse):
a. The governess pushed the pram leisurely along. Pip pip and cheerio. (That’s an adverb.)
b. I’m gonna be a happy idiot, and struggle for the legal tender. (A noun.)
c. Please tender my regards to your kindly mother. (Verb.)
d. The garden’s tender had passed away, and the garden grew weedy. (Noun again!)
e. Her cunning is unmatched. No, really, it’s unmatched I tell you! (Noun.)
f. You should really rehearse your parts of speech before you make false claims. (Verb? Word.)
The words that are correctly pegged as adjectives? Glorious, adorable, flawless: those suffixes, <ous>, <able>, and <less>, and are reliably adjectival. The reason those words are adjectival is because that syntax is carried in their final morphemes (compare glory, adore, and flaw).
Can you please point me to the empirical research studies that prove it’s better to memorize three adjectives off of flash cards than it is to study the facts of the writing system?
I’m asking for a friend.
8 Comments
Always enjoy your pieces Gina. I am always thrilled when you remind others to use evidence-based investigations, not oft-repeated citations, to explain spelling. Thanks for the education on holorimes. Here is my favourite, a local one. The people of Gascoyne Junction, a remote outback settlement in Western Australia, were very honoured to host a royal visit from Prince Charles but surprised to see that, regardless of the heat, he wore a magnificent fur hat – fox fur, tail and all. Eventually some one worked up the courage to ask about it. Charles said, ‘When I told Mummy I was going to Gascoyne Junction she said, “Wear the fox hat.”’ Paquita Boston B.Sc.
Oh Paquita thank you for that! Your holorime took me a few seconds but I roared with laughter. A colleague of mine wrote his entire dissertation in homophonic verse — basically one long holorime. It’s a homophonic translation of portions of the U.S. patriot act. I have no examples to cite, but every year on the anniversary of his entry into the world, I wish him a Hat Peep Earth Day. He and I once howled over this:
Hype legibly, gents,
Tooth of leg,
Often you knight estates oven Erica…
Which may be more transparent to Americans than to Aussies.
I enjoyed this, thanks. I’ve been called terrible names for pointing out the errors of ‘educators’ who try to instruct others on grammar, but them done it rong they selfs.
“Just as you can’t tell how a morpheme will be pronounced until it surfaces in a word, you also can’t tell what part of speech something is until it surfaces in a phrase or clause.” Glad to hear you say this. Many linguists and brain scientists focus so much on bits of words, that they forget phrases and sentences. It must be very hard to study the minutiae of brainwaves sparked off by whole sentences. God forbid a teacher gets his head around what a child learning to read and write might be able do with words in a sentence!
I had to look up leisurely as an adverb, as it doesn’t sound right to me. (I expect you to say here that the facts don’t care what sounds right to me, and rightly so.)
I would have to say ‘in a leisurely manner’ or ‘leisurelily’ or ‘all leisurely like’. In looking it up, I learned a new word – ‘haplology’. There’s no end to this stuff, is there?!
Thanks for your comments, Pat. I appreciate your reading. Leisurely also doesn’t strike me as an adverb, but I did my homework, of course, and it’s well attested. The key to understanding language is understanding structure and function — structures both larger and smaller than the word. Language is so modular: every word in a sentence operates in a phrase. Teachers get stuck on non-specific structures like “word” or “sentence” or “sound” or “syllable” — but the real structures are things like graphemes and morphemes and phrases and clauses, much more so than words. Clauses : sentences : : morphemes : words. Clauses and morphemes may be free or bound; they may form compound or complex structures; they may be coordinate or subordinate. That’s not magical or anything. It’s like saying that a right angle has 90 degrees and a rectangle has 4 straight angles. Not controversial.
People suck at grammar, not least teachers, on the whole. People think “candy” is an adjective in “candy dish” but it’s not. That’s a compound noun. Any adjective can be made comparative or superlative, but “This dish is *candier than that dish” is clearly baloney.
Hello,
Interesting post. But perhaps you can help me out; I have a couple of queries.
Firstly:
“b. She’s tranced and won’t be roused.” — I don’t think tranced is a verb here. It’s an adverb isn’t it?
Secondly:
“b. Embraced by visual artists, the new technology has made a big splash. (Adjective.)” —- Here, I don’t think “embraced” is an adjective. It’s a verb within an adjective phrase.
Be grateful for your thoughts.
Hi Sputnik Steve,
Thanks for your comments.
In the sentence “She’s tranced and won’t be roused,” tranced cannot be adverbial. An -ed form cannot be adverbial, only verbal or adjectival (participial). The contraction “she’s” leaves open two possibilities: she is tranced, in which case “tranced” is adjectival in function, a subject complement, modifying the pronominal subject. If it’s she has tranced then we’re looking at a perfect verbal construction, with has as the auxiliary and tranced as the past participle of the verb. In this case, it’s the lexical verb in the verb phrase.
It cannot be adverbial in either case. You can’t follow a copula or an auxiliary verb with an adverb alone.
Embraced is also participial, but a participle without an auxiliary is a noun modifier, not a verb per se. A participle only functions verbally when it’s the head of the predicate’s verb phrase, and in this case, it is not. Again, it’s part of the phrase that modifies the sentence’s subject. can have a verbal structure, but not a verbal function, in a noun-modifying phrase. Structurally, you can call this a verb phrase, but its function is uncontroversially adjectival.
People — not least teachers — are often really tangled up about grammar. Looking for a verb in an adjective phrase? Tangled. Following a copula with an adverb? Tangled.
Read up on participles, verb phrases, and the difference between lexical form and syntactic function. Or take my grammar LEXinar.
To wit: ’embraced’ attested as an adjective:
From HuffingtonPost: “I’m a maverick, he’s a maverick, wouldn’t you like to be a maverick, too?” offered Michael Burke of Silver Spring, Md., in his entry for the label embraced by unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
From IBN Top Headlines: Uh-huh, if you haven’t figured it out, and just in case you thought the pic above to be sexist as it takes shots at “big girls,” a term embraced by overweight women I might add, you’re dead ass wrong.
From Love, the Fiddler: Noble and Biddle aren’t entirely off in the ether: they identify Perl as “the first postmodern programming language” – a label embraced by Perl creator Larry Wall.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
In the case of “tranced”, I think I was thinking of it as a subject complement. So yes, as adjective not adverb. My apologies for that.