Some quick explanation: I was recently scheduled to teach noun clauses out of a course book which did not provide any context for the noun clauses. (This was one of those textbooks which simply had the grammar rules in a little box, followed by controlled practice.) Because I always like to teach the grammar point in some sort of context, I went through my archives to see if I could find any sort of story that used a lot of noun clauses, and settled on Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola.
Strega Nona is filled with complex noun phrases, so it seemed perfect.
Although, as I started designing material for this book, it turned out I had some confusion over exactly what a noun clause is. (This is a grammar point that I haven't taught much in the past. I believe it was Dave Willis who said that ESL textbooks focus almost exclusively on verb tenses, and tend to ignore complex noun phrases.)
I designed a noticing worksheet around Strega Nona that gapped out any noun phrases that contained verbs--HERE. But I later decided that a lot of these noun phrases (e.g. "food to eat") were noun phrases with subordinate infinitive clauses, but not noun clauses.
I then revised my definition of noun clauses to mean any noun phrase that contained a subject and a verb, and prepared the feedback slideshow for that--HERE. When I designed this slideshow, I was thinking that relative clauses were a sub-category of noun clauses.
But... then I rethought it, and I decided that relative clauses were something different. (The terminology gets confusing here, but I think that relative clauses are "noun phrases that contain a clause", but they are not "noun clauses". Is that right?)
In the end, I decided that the actual noun clauses in Strega Nona were actually fewer in number than I had thought. Possibly only 6
1. The one thing you must never do is touch the pasta pot. (subject of the sentence)
2. he didn’t see Strega Nona blow three kisses to the magic pasta pot (functioning as the direct object of "see")
3. And this is what happened. ("what happened" functioning as the noun predicate after the copular verb)
4. That day came sooner than even Big Anthony would have thought, (object of comparison)
5. he didn’t notice the pasta pot was still bubbling and boiling (direct object of "notice")
6. She didn’t have to look twice to know what had happened. (direct object of "know")
...or possibly fewer. There are still a couple sentences here I'm not entirely sure about.
Is number 1 a noun clause or a relative clause with an omitted "that"? (ie. perhaps the main noun phrase is "the one thing" and "[that] you must never do" modifies "the one thing")
Is number 4 an object of comparison? Or is it just a subordinate clause?
Maybe I should add this whole thing to my "grammar questions I couldn't answer" project. What are the real noun clauses here? (Comments are welcome from anyone out there who thinks they know.)
Anyway, here are my materials:
Video on Youtube: HERE
1 comment:
Another addendum to this:
I'm beginning to wonder about the sentence: "he didn’t see Strega Nona blow three kisses to the magic pasta pot"
In this lesson, I classified it as a noun clause functioning as the direct object of "see".
But, when teaching this lesson recently, I noticed that "blow" was missing the 3rd person singular s (i.e. it's "Strega blows" not "Strega Nona blows"). And for that matter, it's not in the past tense, like it should be.
This is a different construction altogether, isn't it?
This is "see + object + bare infinitive"
I'm beginning to wonder if this whole lesson isn't misguided. I think possibly the definition of a noun clause is that it must begin with a wh or question word. (In my defense, though, this wasn't clear in any of the references I consulted. Many of them just said something like "a noun clause is a clause which functions in place of a noun--subject, object, ect--in the sentence".)
This whole thing is very confusing.
See also:
https://joelswagman.blogspot.com/2024/03/i-buy-clothes-whenever-my-clothing-gets.html
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