Approaches to explaining word order: your opinion

[Uncle Roger]

Hello!

I have been working for a while on material that can be used to teach Norwegian. A lot of work has gone into the topic of word order.

I started learning about the things that influence word order and I realised each rule can potentially apply to 4 situations
1 - an affirmative sentence
2 - a negative sentence
3 - a question
4 - a negative question

Thus, I started to create examples that contained one or more of the elements that influence word order and see how they would behave in the four different situations.
These elements are
- whether a verb is "single" or whether it has an auxiliary/modal (e.g. "was" vs "has been" or "can be")
- whether the subject is a pronoun or just a noun
- whether direct and/or indirect objects are pronouns or just nouns
- whether there is a subordinate clause and, if so, whether it is placed before or after the main clause

The idea was to then present the material by "element" and then by the 4 aforementioned situations. I liked the approach, it was "mutually exclusive and competely exhaustive", I felt like no more could be done.

Recently, though, I started to think that it would be better to do it by situation and then by element. I think it might be better to contrast a negative question through the various elements. If anything, because the "affirmative" sentence in many cases bears no strangeness to be learned... And at the same time, negative questions are probably lower priority as they are not very common, so I would put them all at the end...

What do you guys think?

I can give some examples if that can help.

[reineke]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order

[Iversen]

Have you read about Paul Diderichsen's field model? It was made for Danish, but the slot mechanism works in almost the same way in Norwegian as in Danish.

[aokoye]

As reineke more or less implied, reading and learning syntax from a linguistic point of view is going to be your friend.

[Uncle Roger]

Hi,

I fear this approach would be a bit too technical for my intended audience... But I'll check the pages, there is probably something I can take away from it.

Thanks

[Cainntear]

Everything really depends on the language, I reckon.

In English, for example, we tend to start with positive declarative in present simple, present continuous, and/or past simple. This seems logical to begin with, but I've witnessed lots of learners who have incorrectly learned "don't" or "isn't" as a negative particle rather than an inflected verb, and try to use it as "not" for sentences in other tenses.

I've always thought that if we start teaching English using auxiliary verbs (can/can't, would/wouldn't, will/won't) then we give the students less opportunity to misinterpret the meaning of isn't and of the intrusive auxiliaries in the negative of the so-called* simple tenses (don't, didn't).

I would say you have to look at what the most important and the most difficult distinctions are, and make sure they are learned as well as possible.

* I say "so-called" because a simple tense is technically one with a single-word verb, which is incorrect if you're talking about negatives and/or interrogatives.