Chronicle article on sentence diagramming

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat May 16 03:23:28 UTC 2009


I kinda had an iinkling in the back of my thinking cap that a major
part of the context was either missing or was motivated by
me having misunderstood the point. :-)  But you never know.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain





On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 10:55 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Chronicle article on sentence diagramming
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 10:40 PM -0400 5/15/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>"Hypercorrect," you say? According to whose prescription?
>>
>>-Wilson
>
> I don't think the claim is that "my doing the judging" is *always*
> hypercorrect, but that it is in a context like this one, where it
> means "it isn't just me [who is] doing the judging". Â "Me doing" is
> not a constituent here. Â  Cf. "It wasn't just {me/*my} eating the
> cookies, it was all of us" or "It's {me/*my} (here) knocking on your
> door." Â Presumably, the teacher saw the "me doing X" sequence and
> auto-corrected it to "my doing" without noticing the local context.
>
> LH
>
>>
>>On 5/15/09, Matthew Gordon <gordonmj at missouri.edu> wrote:
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>>> Â -----------------------
>>> Â Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Â Poster: Â  Â  Â  Matthew Gordon <gordonmj at MISSOURI.EDU>
>>> Â Subject: Â  Â  Â Chronicle article on sentence diagramming
>>>
>>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>> Â There's a kinda interesting piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (5/15/09)
>>> Â about a sentence diagramming class at Trinity College. The tastefully
>>> Â understated name of the class is "Constructing Thought," and it is/was
>>> Â taught by Lucy Ferriss, a novelist and literary scholar. Of course the
>>> Â diagrams in question are the traditional Reed-Kellogg type. The appeal of
>>> Â the course is attributed to the fact that it offers "finite, ordered
>>> Â solutions" and thus an alternative view on English to what some students
>>> Â have gotten from their prior education, which is some cases allowed them to
>>> Â write with "invented spelling."
>>>
>>> Â Anyway, the article describes a diagramming contest that the class held and
>>> Â the teacher is got help in judging it from the author of the textbook she
>>> Â used. So she notes," it isn't just my doing the judging." I thought this was
>>> Â a nice hypercorrect use of possessive (my) before an -ing form.
>>>
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>>> Â The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>
>>
>>
>>--
>>-Wilson
>>---
>>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>>-----
>>-Mark Twain
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------
>>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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