My little trick is to mentally combine the sentences with the word “therefore” separating the statement of fact from the conclusions, with perhaps some slight rewording of the sentences, e.g. “Kathy wasn’t in class, therefore she must have been sick.”
I’m having an issue with the three and four legged dogs too. The first sentence sounds like an actual statistic, whereas the second sentence sounds like a conclusion drawn from that statistic. (“For every dog that has three legs, there are a thousand dogs that have four legs, therefore three-leggedness is very unusual.”) Maybe if you didn’t use hard numbers it would be more evident.
Yeah, like I said I’m going to drop that one in the future. I’m convinced it can almost plausibly be read as giving an explanation rather than an argument, and that confuses the question of which “direction” the inference is supposed to be going–and also whether the thing properly speaking has a conclusion at all.
You could do it pretty simply by telling me what the main clauses are in the two long-ish sentences I discussed. I’m claiming they are what you would call long “subordinate clauses” with no main clause. You’re claiming they have main clauses in them. So… point them out.
That’s an English translation of German prose taken from the context of a numbered list. An item on my grocery list would arguably make a better example of good English prose than that, but you’re right that it’s a complicated dependent clause.
That’s a sentence badly in need of an editor. Without context, I read it as a sentence that opens with a redundant preposition, because that’s the smallest change that turns it into a grammatically correct sentence. In context, which I do not have, does it really mean “For other views of the nature of personal identity, it is easy to give an account of why continuity of brain and memory should be evidence of it?” If so, it reduces to “it is easy.”
But I’m confused about the purpose of this exercise. If you’re arguing that it’s okay to include sentence fragments and other grammatical errors on your test because your students will encounter them in real life, you’re absolutely.
But finding examples of dependent clauses used in sentence fragments in print doesn’t prove anything other than that sentence fragments can be found in print. Something of a fool’s errand in supporting a claim that “For my dog has three legs” is not a sentence fragment.
In that phrase, “for” is exactly synonymous with “because,” right? Because I think. Now did those last two sentences make any sense, or were you left stuck waiting for me to complete my last thought? Seemed a bit fragmented, no?
“Because my dog has three legs.” – fragment? If so, so is “For my dog has three legs.”
Still say not a fragment? I’m willing to bet a considerable sum on the outcome of a poll…
Most of the grammar books available as cites on Google Books are quite old, but there doesn’t seem to be an argument that “For my dog has three legs” is a modern construction. Take a look at this book (A text-book of applied English grammar, by Edwin Herbert Lewis, 1906), at paragraphs 231-233 (pp. 116-120), especially example 42 in paragraph 231 and group 3 in paragraph 232. I think it supports the argument that “For my dog has three legs” is a fragment, although paragraph 233 is tantalizingly uninformative.
“Every dog has three legs. For my dog has three legs.”
I agree with those who say this “for” phrase is not a complete sentence. And using “for” when “because” is more accessible and means exactly the same thing is putting a meaningless obstacle in your student’s path. In this way, it is like a trick.
If you have to go hunting through multiple sources to defend your word choice and syntax, that right there is a good indicaton you are using language in the way counter to its basic purpose: to effectively communicate. There’s a good reason “for” is used throughout the Bible. Because, like the Bible, the usage is antiquainted.
If I understand correctly, the people in this thread who say “for my dog has three legs” is wrong are also saying “Because my dog has three legs” is wrong. See esp. Kyrie Eliason’s post just prior to yours.
What they want is either “All dogs have three legs, for my dog has three legs” or “All dogs have three legs because my dog has three legs.” I broke it up just to make it consistent, for this particular exercise, that they’d be encountering two sentences in each case. Call them “incomplete sentences” if you like. They’re sentences of a sort that are regularly encountered in educated prose.
In half an hour I found several instances of the construction. This isn’t an argument that it’s “correct” so much as it’s an argument that it’s usage educated readers are likely to encounter and should understand. If I’ve let myself phrase it in terms of what’s “correct” and what’s not “correct”, I shouldn’t have.
As I noted, it’s not the best source for examples. I didn’t explicitly note why–that it’s a translation of text which, IIRC, wasn’t meant for publication–but I do acknowledge the point.
That said, it’s important, dialectically speaking, that you acknowledged I’m right that it’s a long dependent clause. Someone else said it isn’t. That person was wrong. Somebody on the Internet is wrong!
But anyway, the person translating, who was an academic writing to be published for reading by other academics, found it appropriate to construct an English sentence that is a long “subordinate clause” headed by “for.” As far as I know, there’s nothing odd about the grammar of the original German. (Better German readers than I can speak up here…) so there’d be no reason to give an English translation with anything grammatically odd in it.
The only thing I had to pause at all about was figuring out what “it” referred to–in this case, it refers to “personal identity.” Other than that I can’t find anything hard to understand in the sentence, so I’m not sure how to clarify it.
Why wouldn’t removing “for” result, in your opinion, in a grammatical sentence?
Call it what you like.
The fragmentation here has nothing to do with using “because” at the beginning of the sentence. (Did you mean it to?) It has rather to do with the fact that you didn’t tell me what you think. This, on the other hand, would be fine in many contexts IMO:
“In that phrase, ‘for’ is exactly synonymous with ‘because,’ right? Because I think it is.”
Yes, yes, call it what you like.
I think the argument that there is any sense to calling this construction a “sentence fragment” is unsound. But we’re working from different conceptual schemes here about how to talk about grammar, so I’m not sure it’s useful to argue any more about whether it’s a “fragment” or not. (Understand, I think “Yes” is a complete sentence. Also, “John.” Anyway, they can be.)
What I do insist on is that the use of the construction is not problematic on the quiz.
Got it. I misunderstood you to be saying the “because” sentence would be complete when you mentioned how it was more accessible etc.
I haven’t found “for” to be a particularly difficult word for my students to understand. I haven’t found any difficulty whatsoever about it, in fact, that I didn’t also find about “because”.
Sentence initial non-prepositional “for,” and sentence initial “because,” are both perfectly understandable and consistently used constructions that every educated reader and listener will encounter with some frequency. You can’t “think critically” about a sentence that begins with non-prepositional “for” unless you know what it means. And it does mean something. It’s not like just a random word people throw in sometimes (well, unless they’re doing Biblical translation…)
That’s one tool I give my students–but it’s actually not so clear to many of them, especially at the outset, how to apply this tool. Those slight rewordings can be trickier than you think, for someone not schooled in this stuff already.
Like for example, a lot of students will want to reword that to “Kathy was sick, therefore she wasn’t in class” which makes enough sense to mislead them into thinking “she wasn’t in class” is the conclusion.
I just read it as a turn of phrase. I’m envisioning someone talking playfully and bombastically while enjoying his awesome pizza.
No, the statement “The walls are blue” is asserted based on the observation that the walls are indeed blue (my hypothetical statement, my choice :p). That’s not an inference, no matter what I say next.
For all of the cases in your quiz, you need to assume a context. For most of them, a single context is implied by the sentences, and there’s no ambiguity.
The difficulty arises when more than one context is consistent with the sentences. You’re assuming I’m basing the statement “the walls are blue” upon my having painted them. Instead, I’m basing the statement “The walls are blue” upon my observing that the are blue. From just those two sentences, you can’t really say one asumption is correct and not the other. If your assumption were correct, then it would be an inference. Under my assumption, it isn’t an inference, it is a factual observation.
Since the assumed context can affect whether a sentence is an inference or not, you need to make sure that only a single interpretation is reasonable. For the pizza case, you could replace “For you see,” with “I’ve never had pizza, but”, and then it would be clear that “Pizza is awesome” is an inference.
It would. But either rendering turns the the opening clause into a prepositional phrase instead of turning the whole construction into a dependent clause containing a prepositional phrase, which I thought was the ambiguity in the original expression.
On retrospect, I can see where calling it a “fool’s errand” was slightly offensive, but I did not mean to imply that you were a fool. You were challenged to come up with examples, and you did. I would likely have done the same. I just meant that it wasn’t a particularly useful endeavor.
For those examples to be meaningful, they’re both dependent on some sort of preceding communication. If, never having met you before, I walk up to you and say “John,” you are likely to be completely befuddled. If I walk up to you and say, “John died yesterday,” you will likely wonder why the heck I told you that and who John is, but I will have expressed a complete thought to you. Your examples are fragments, under my understanding of the word, because they cannot be understood without other context.
So we’re now discussing semantics. You’re operating under a different definition of what “sentence” means than I, and I believe you’re in disagreement with the majority of the English speaking population. I even believe that I can demonstrate this. To most, the term “sentence fragment” has meaning. Can you offer me an example of a sentence fragment?
I could argue with that, but it would make me a nitpicking asshole. I found your quiz readily understandable.
If we’re going by “cannot be understood without other context” then “It is small” is a sentence fragment.
If we’re going by “doesn’t express a complete thought” then, in the right context, “John” is a complete sentence, since, in the right context, “John” expresses a complete thought.
“Expresses a complete thought” and “cannot be understood without other context” both turn out to be not very good ways to delineate types of sentences at all.
To most of the population, ask them what a sentence fragment is and they’ll say one of the two things you said as discussed above. And as I said, neither of those ends up being a good definition.
I don’t have a concept of “sentence fragment.” I have a concept of “piss-poor attempt at communicating, which could have been much improved by adding more information to the utterance,” and the extension of that concept often overlaps the supposed extension of the more public pseudo-concept “sentence fragment”.
Which is exactly my point. You’re choosing to use words and phrases in ways that the majority of the population doesn’t agree with. You can argue that everyone ought to use your better definitions, but until they do, your insistence on using your preferred definitions doesn’t really make you an effective communicator with the rest of us.
Which is why I said that it’s probably not a good idea to continue discussing the question whether we’re talking about a sentence fragment or not–because, as I said, we’re working from different conceptual schemes when it comes to understanding the meaning (or lack thereof) of that phrase.
I started out by saying there were no sentence fragments in the quiz. Even though I still think that’s true (because I’ve never seen a coherent definition of the concept and so I don’t think they exist) I really shouldn’t have said that, for exactly the pragmatic reasons you and I have just given in summary. What I should have said is “There’s nothing wrong with using that construction on a quiz like this, fragment or no. For not all acts of writing down what you’d call a sentence fragment are errors, and anyway, not all writing errors are to be avoided in all contexts.”
It only matters whether or not it’s a fragment because your directions say “which sentence…” and many of us (MANY of us) don’t consider the dog thing a sentence.
Those types of errors do get in the way of communication and clarity. On your quiz, they have the potential of getting in the way of your students’ learning rather than enhancing it, especially if they’ve been struggling students in previous classes.
In the title you ask if the quiz was tricky and in the OP you ask if you’re missing something. I don’t think the quiz is as straightforward as it may have been intended to be. The phrases, clauses, and sentences you’ve chosen are neither as clear nor as standard as you seem to think they are, probably because you work from a different conceptual scheme. I can see how using that scheme could result in piss-poor attempts at communicating which could have been much improved by using different construction.
And while it is utterly beside the point,
astounds me, especially if you’re teaching English composition.
