Re: Grammar in HS (Was: Re: Argument Structures)

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> This is not at all my experience of learning English grammar all the way
> from elementary through highschool.  We may not have learned about
> English phonetics or phonology, but we did go through quite rigorous
> courses about syntax.  Not to the level of college courses, certainly,
> but we had to learn all about restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, phrases
> compound, complex, etc.  In other words, what everyone *should* learn.
That was my experience as well.  I can even remember taking sentences
and marking "Subject" "Direct Objet", "Verb", "Auxiliary", etc.
Phonetics certainly was almost never even mentioned, which is a shame,
because a detailed description could probably have made it easier to
learn to spell.  I'm picking up some patterns that I'd never been taught
that help spelling, like which words use -tch and which have -ch.  I can
even remember arguing that the double s's and double p in Mississippi
were useless - I now, of course, see that they are necessary.  My
limited memory of learning to spell was by rote, they made us memorize
lists of words, and I guess expected us to intuitively pick up the
patterns.

> > (This, IMNSHO, is
> > probably why the schwa sound is becoming increasingly prevalent in spoken
> > English.
>
> Phonological developments have most often nothing to do with institutional
> education systems.  The schwa has been there for a long, long time.
Indeed, IS the schwa becoming more common?

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