Friendly Grammar

Jamie Keddie

Jamie Keddie is an English teacher and writer. He is based in Barcelona and is currently working to complete his first book, Imperfect Tomatoes, which he describes as a self help book for all Spanish learners of English.
E-mail: jamiekeddie@hotmail.com

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FIRST __________ LAST

The above is an incomplete adage/cliché. Can you identify the missing word? Don't continue reading until you have tried to do so.

Clue - it is a piece of advice that you would almost certainly find in the following (invented) self-help books: -

Get that job - interview secrets

Dress for success

How to meet and be successful with members of the opposite (or same) sex

Hopefully, you have been able to work out that the missing word is "impressions". The confusing factor is the word "last", which we are led to believe is functioning as an adjective rather than a verb.

If your learners have a good standard of English, you can try this same puzzle with them. Alternatively, give them the whole phrase to start with ("first impressions last") and ask them to translate it into their own language. Will they too be fooled? Very possibly. One of my Spanish speaking learners , for example, mistranslated the phrase as "Las primeras impresiones son las ultimas".

At this stage, there a few things you could do:

1) Focus in on the word "last" and ask/establish what type of word it is - noun, verb, adjective, etc.
2) Give them the bogus book list.
3) Once the true semantics of the saying have been realised, find out if a similar one exists in your students' language (for example Spanish speakers say "la primera impresión es la que cuenta").
4) Do a Google search of the phrase. Type in first-impressions-last (hyphens important) and have a look at some of the hits that will be brought up.
5) Create an activity in which students reflect back on and compare their first impressions of politicians / world leaders with their current thoughts and feelings about them. Reinforce this activity with images obtained from newspapers, magazines or the Google image search engine.
6) Ask your students if they agree with the idea that first impressions last. Perhaps they are advocates of the idea that we shouldn't judge a book by its cover.
7) Have a Google fight (www.googlefight.com) between the two contradicting expressions.
NB: If you don't know about Google fights, have a look at Hania's Corpora Ideas article from two issues ago (old.hltmag.co.uk/may06/idea.htm).

Here are the results I obtained on Sunday 31st September 2006: -

first-impressions-last 49,000 hits don't-judge-a-book-by-its-cover 172,000 hits

Before the fight, have students make bets on which saying they think will win the fight. Get them to estimate the number of hits that they think will result in each case.

One naturally-occurring learner thought that may arise from the first impressions last puzzle is: -

If the word "last" can be an adjective or a verb, both with different meanings, how do we know which meaning the speaker is referring to?

Although our standard response to such learner queries is usually "context", in this particular case, a better answer would be "grammar".

At times I feel that some of my learners see grammar as nothing more than a set of rules which must be blindly obeyed. In this way, they can be forgiven for regarding it as a hindrance rather than a help. At other times, grammar is what you have to know in order to pass exams and grammatical accuracy is what your level of linguistic competence will be judged on.

Of course, this is not fair. Surely this is never what grammar was supposed to be about. So what is grammar? Well, since many people have dedicated their lives to answering this question, I am not going to attempt to do so here. But one important aspect of grammar is quite simply the order of the words.

order? happen what was would word if there And no

Linguistic anarchy - that's what. Understanding meaning would be very difficult and at most times impossible. In order to express ourselves, the words need to come out our mouths in the correct order.

One of the mental processes involved in deciphering the code of language is parsing. Parsing is the process in which the listener/reader determines the lexical categories (subject, object, verb, etc) of the words that are coming from the speaker/writer.

As we have seen in the case of the phrase "First impressions last", failure to correctly identify the lexical category of a word can result in failure to understand the utterance.

As native speakers (or non-native speakers with a high level) of English, our parsers don't usually let us down. Consider the following examples. In each case, is the highlighted word an adjective of a verb?

1) And West Ham were relegated last season while the footballer they wrote off won Coventry's Player of the Year award.

2) Yet it was a dream and I knew that dreams never last.

3) Last week in London the Cookie Monster met Norma Major, who was lunching at Piccadilly's Hard Rock Cafe.

4) 134a Princes Street Sale started mid-December, and continues while stocks last.

5) It would be the last straw if her husband tried to get romantic at the wrong time of the month.

6) In the vegetable garden, both sweetcorn and outdoor tomatoes were an amazing success in many parts of the country last year due to the hot summer.

7) The Last Supper was not meant to be a Take-Away.

8) Hard disks last a long time but they don't last for ever.

9) It's less dangerous than the often-fatal Hepatitis B, but it can last up to four weeks, while full recovery may take three months.

10) Look, Mr Cohen,'; he appealed, `;I'll give you onelast chance to sign that cheque.

11) Older buses are often more reliable than newer models for the simple reason that workmanship meant they were built to last,'; said Mr Stuart Hyslop, director of Darlington Transport Company.

12) Friendships in Japan take more time to form, are deeper and last longer than those in the West and often these obligations extend to business

13) Perhaps you'd be kind enough to describe your own movements last night, including the substance of any conversations you had.

14) Those were the last words he said to me, apart from when he woke up and said he had to go to the toilet but you don't count that, do you. ';

Did your parser do its job? Were you able to identify whether the target word was an adjective or a verb in each case? Of course you were. In identifying the specific meaning/lexical category of each of the above fifteen cases of the word "last", your brain had to bring into play its vast wealth of grammatical knowledge. Within this giant database of information, we will find some of the simpler grammar rules that we attempt to raise our learners' awareness of. For example: -

- "Last" must be a verb if it follows a modal auxiliary (can last up to four weeks, etc) or a do auxiliary (don't last forever, etc).

- "Last" must be an adjective if it is proceeded by a determiner and followed by a noun (the last straw, the last supper, one last chance, the last words, etc).

Of course, there are other mental processes at work during the code breaking process - recognition of collocations for example (last week, while stocks last, the last straw, last year, the last supper, last chance, built to last, last night, last words, etc).

It is important to make one thing clear. From what I am saying, it sounds as if the parser exists solely in order to differentiate between words like last, watch, cold, camp, fine, like, still, close, rose, fall, can, flat, mean, sink, stick, trip, duck, found, ground, etc whose meanings shift dramatically depending on the lexical group to which they belong: -

Watch: something that you do to the telly (verb)
Watch: a clock that you wear (noun)
Cold: not hot (adjective)
Cold: a snotty nose and a day off work (noun)

Etc.

But this particular problem is just a small part of the parser's job description. Sorting words into lexical categories (objects, subjects, verbs, etc) is a process that is necessary for all words and is constantly taking place during listening/reading. Doing so is as fundamental to language comprehension as post sorting is in a mailing office where all letters and packages have to be dealt with (not just the ones with obscure, ambiguous or illegibly written addresses).

Despite this, the aforementioned words will often be the ones that take our learners by surprise and catch them out. I like to prepare activities for my students like the one above. I have found that such activities can help them to:
- learn and become aware of the different meanings and thus potential pitfalls of words such as last, cold, watch, etc.
- practice their parsing.
- come to realise that grammar is their friend.

The 14 examples which were used in the activity were obtained from a corpus search of the word "last". The British National Corpus (BNC) allows non-subscribers to carry out free "simple searches". Here is how to do it: -
1. Go to http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html
2. Enter a word or item of your choice (in my case "last")
3. Click "Solve it!"
4. The search will tell you the frequency of your item in the corpus. This is followed by up to 50 random examples of your item in context.
5. Select examples from these search results and copy and paste them onto a separate Word document.
6. Create a document that that looks like the one that we saw above, print it off, make photocopies and give them out to your students. Alternatively, cut out the small individual texts and stick them at various places around the room.
7. Get students to identify the lexical category (and thus meaning) of the target word in each example.
8. You could follow this on with a discussion on how they managed to carry out the task successfully. For example, what knowledge of English grammar did they use?
In order to simplify the situation, I selected examples in which the word "last" appeared as either an adjective or verb. But "last" can also be a noun (The last of the Mohicans/Free at last) and an adverb (When did you last see your father?). I also tried to select examples with the least obscure language. For beginners, you may even consider altering and simplifying the texts.

Variation 1: Look the same, sound different
As well as using words that have different meanings in different lexical groups, we could use words whose pronunciations also change (record, object, minute, close, separate, divers, etc).

He even opened a cafe in Tangier to hear them play every day, and took Rolling Stone Brain Jones up into the mountains to record them.
The floods of 1947 were the worst on record, when 2,000 homes were flooded.

After giving students time to prepare, have them read out the texts aloud and concentrate on pronunciation of the target word.

Variation 2: Sound the same, look different We can also exploit word pairs such as wait/weight, week/weak, way/weigh, etc. In each case, replace the target word with its phonemic transcription.

Slimming drugs do help to suppress appetite and can be quite successful in assisting short-term /weIt/ loss.
Can you /weIt/ long enough for the organism to perform its duties?

Students have to decide on the correct spelling for the target word in each example.

This activity was created in a direct response to the type of learner question that was considered earlier: -

If the word "last" can be an adjective or a verb, both with different meanings, how do we know which meaning the speaker is referring to?

I feel that rather than telling our students that they will be able to deduce meaning from context, etc, this phenomenon can and should be demonstrated. Corpora searches are perfect for this purpose.

The main activity in this article has two aims: - 1. To demonstrate to learners that in order to decipher meaning, it is often necessary for the brain to categorise words lexically (the "first impressions last" puzzle). 2. To demonstrate that one of grammar's many jobs is to make this categorisation step possible.

Kryszewska, H. Lexical Chunks Offer Insight Into Culture. HLT magazine (the Google fight article) old.hltmag.co.uk/may06/idea.htm

Pinker, S. 1995. The Language Instinct. Penguin Books

The British National Corpus (quick search)
http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html

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