Directly Indirect

I cancelled my ESOL class for last night because I had to wait for a plumber to come to my house and connect my new kitchen sink. I felt kind of bad about it for a minute, until I remembered that this is a volunteer endeavor. And my students are not refugees who need basic language skills for survival.

Still, I enjoy the interesting turns the class takes, and I felt the slight sting of disappointing someone. This feeling abated when, at 6:30, I experienced the unrivaled joy of water-on-demand in my kitchen sink for the first time in three weeks.

My guilt was also assuaged by the email I received Wednesday from my newest student, Regina. In connection with the presentation Regina gave us last week about an American folk story, she had written a short essay about the story and her analysis of it. She emailed the essay to me, asking me to correct any grammatical mistakes she had made.

I was only too happy to oblige. For one thing, I was delighted that one of my students had reached a little beyond the bare minimum requirements; for another, I absolutely love editing for grammar. There is something infinitely satisfying about grammar: clear rules that are flexible enough for dynamic expression. It is the very definition of making order from chaos. Besides, the challenge of explaining a particularly tricky syntactical error--why it’s wrong and how to fix it--via email is exhilarating for me. 

I know, I know: I am a total grammar geek. And I wear the title proudly.

Regina’s writing was very good. She had a little difficulty with when to use a definite or indefinite article (the vs. a/an), and her verb tense shifted a little, but mostly she expressed herself well. The most difficult error to explain was a syntactical one. In her final paragraph, Regina stated how much she enjoyed reading the story, and that it “gave me to think about a lot.” Now, many of us would correct this by simply saying that Americans wouldn’t say it like that. But that response does nothing to help the student avoid such problems in the future. Whenever possible, I prefer to give my ESOL students a rule they can apply to future writing, rather than the non-answer of “that’s just not how we say it here.” 

I was only able to explain this error because of a grammar book I am reading right now, Doing Grammar, by Max Morenberg. It is the textbook for a linguistics course I had planned to take this semester but dropped because of time constraints. I borrowed the text from a friend and decided to read through it on my own. I’ve only made it through one and a half chapters so far, but they were amazingly edifying.

Because of this slight exposure to Morenberg’s linguistic classifications of verbs, I was able to explain to Regina the difference between her phrasing and the use of other verb+infinitive constructions.

The basic rule--the one most ESOL students cling to--is that when two verbs follow each other in a sentence, the first is conjugated to match the subject, and the other is left in its infinitive “to” state. Some modal verbs, like help or make, allow the “to” to be dropped from the infinitive, especially when they include an indirect object. ( e.g., This book helped me learn grammar. Or: The new law made him drive slower.)

The Morenberg text starts out by categorizing verb types by what kinds of grammatical elements may follow them, elements like direct and indirect objects. As most writers and grammar geeks know, verbs in English are transitive or intransitive, meaning they can or cannot have direct objects. The verb “to talk,” for example, can have an indirect object but not a direct object: you can talk to someone (indirect object), but you cannot talk something (direct object). “To speak,” on the other hand, can have both: you can speak French (d.o.) to your teacher (i.o.). Morenberg calls these elements that can follow verbs “slots” and defines his categories of verbs by what types of slots can follow them. The concept of transitive vs. intransitive verbs is not new to me, obviously. But the idea of defining verbs by not only whether they can take a direct object, but by what kinds of direct and indirect objects can follow them, why they are ordered a certain way, and how to identify the functions of those slots: that is a revelation.

In Regina’s sentence, she used the verb “to give” which can always take both an indirect object (the person or thing receiving what is given) and a direct object (the thing being given). I believe Regina fully understands this. However, the indirect object in Regina’s sentence was not a simple, concrete one-word noun, like paper or the flu. Her indirect object was a noun phrase that contained a verb functioning as an adjective.

So Regina was grappling with several grammar rules at once, all of which seemed conflicting. Following a conjugated verb with an infinitive, ordering the indirect and direct objects, placing an adjective as close as possible to the noun it is describing; all of these rules apply to Regina’s sentence, but they don’t cover everything. 

I can fully understand why she chose the order she did. I wanted my explanation of how to fix the error to help her make a better choice in the future.

Regina’s sentence was: “It gave me to think about a lot.” The correct sentence is, of course: “It gave me a lot to think about.”

I explained it as: the order goes verb-indirect object-direct object, and the indirect object is the noun phrase “a lot to think about.” What did the story give her? A lot. A lot of what? A lot to think about. In this instance, “to think about” describes and amplifies “a lot.”

Whew. That was a lot to think about. Those linguistic gymnastics helped me feel justified in canceling class this week. Did this post give you a lot to think about?

Wait For It

January feels like a time of waiting. Waiting for spring, waiting for a thaw, waiting for the days to get longer. 

I had a longer than usual break over the holidays, so I’ve also been waiting to get back to a normal routine. And we’ve had some difficulty with a remodeling contractor at our home, so we’re waiting to get our kitchen put back together. 

The worst part about this January waiting syndrome is that eventually there’s a rebound. The equal and opposite reaction to my beginning-of-the-year time warp is a rushing forward, usually in February. That shortest month tends to zip by at breakneck speed, making up for the indulgent lolly-gagging of the first few weeks of the year. Once my time freeze thaws, the days tumble over each other like a snow-fed spring cascading down a mountainside. 

I had given my ESOL students some homework over our winter break. They were to read and listen to a story by an American author from a website (manythings.org), then present that story to the class. I had wondered, during the long radio silence of our hiatus, whether anyone would show up at this first class in January. I imagined I might have scared them off. I don’t often assign homework, and I didn’t include any written requirements. On the one hand, I understand how stressful it is to give a speech or presentation, but on the other hand, a big part of successful conversation is good storytelling. If you can tell a little story--about your life, your day, or something that happened to you--you can engage in good conversation. 

My students did not disappoint. 

Van started us off recounting a Mark Twain tale, “The Jumping Frog of Calavaras County.” As with most of Twain’s work, it has a story within a story, so it can be a little challenging keeping the narration straight. Van did okay, though. She laughed nervously a few times, so I had to ask her to repeat a few things, but she got the basic plot of the man who would bet on anything, his investment in training a frog to jump on command, and his eventual loss to a con-man who feeds the frog bullets to weigh it down. 

Next, Regina regaled us with Ellis Parker Butler’s farcical “Pigs Is Pigs.” She had fewer difficult names to deal with than Van did, and she did a great job of explaining the story to us.

“It’s a story about misunderstandings,” she said to begin.

Then things got a bit more serious when Yuwei recounted a couple of Ambrose Bierce stories: “The Boarded Window” and “A Horseman in the Sky.”

When he was done, he said, “I never realized that Americans like ghost stories. China has a lot of them. China is not a religious country, but we believe that when a person dies, he is a ghost, and can come back as a new person. When someone is born into a family, that person can be the ghost of someone else, from long ago.”

Regina concurred that this view is similar in Korea. “Because our views come from Buddhism, we believe that life is a cycle, that sometimes a person can come back again as someone else.”

“If a person has been bad and he dies,’ Yuwei said, “he can come back as an animal. Then if the animal works hard and is good, it can come again as a person. China is full of ghosts.”

I was struck by an image of China’s hills and valleys and The Great Wall teeming with whispy, white ghosts, and of Chinese women giving birth to their aged ancestors.

Yuwei started to tell us about a third story he had read, but he couldn’t quite remember all of it, so I finished it for him. It was my favorite Ambrose Bierce story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek.”

That one gets me every time. It’s about the seemingly infinite moment between knowing you are dying and facing the reality of your death.

One could look at life as a brief period of time in which we are all simply waiting. Waiting to grow up, waiting to start a family, waiting to get rich, waiting to retire, waiting to die. We wait in lines and for the bus and on hold and on tables and for the world to change. We can hardly wait for spring to arrive.

Stories keep us occupied while we wait. They can help us remember our past, prepare for our future, and navigate the time we have here. Stories help us feel less alone in this cold, expanding universe. They help us make sense of our chaos and make connections with each other. 

The story of my ESOL class is beginning again this year, but it is also continuing from last season, like a TV series that took an extra long break. The stories I hear from my students will help me be patient as I wait for the new season of House of Cards to arrive on Netflix. Which will be just about the time February kicks us all into a higher gear.