A Grammatical Matter

There is something to be said when a teacher, any teacher, tells a student "you're wrong" on the very first day she's in class and can't even explain why. There's something else to be said when you can prove you're correct, and have several other opinions to back you up, and still the issue remains. Finally, words fail when the teacher puts a question on the first test of the class, asking you to explain why it's wrong, when you know it's not.

This happened to me today. My grammar professor, on the first day of class, had assigned us a worksheet with sets of sentences. Some sentences in the sets were correct, others weren't. The set in question is "The child cried." vs "The child cried the story." She marked the second sentence as being grammatically incorrect, saying that the verb cried (referencing tears) is intransitive, meaning it cannot take an object. Therefore, by her standards, the second sentence violates the intransitiveness of the verb cried.

However, that's not entirely true, and I can provide evidence in support of my argument. The first issue with her claims is that cried CAN be a transitive verb, in two ways. If you're talking about crying tears, you could say "The child cried tears of joy." This sentence is both grammatically correct AND uses cried in a transitive way. The second relates to the sentence "The child cried the story." In that sentence cried as in tears would be grammatically incorrect; "the story" cannot fall from a child's eyes. However, if the verb is used to mean "shouted" or "exclaimed", it is entirely correct, if a bit awkward to say.

My first instance of support for "The child cried the story," is that you can add details to the sentence which make it sound better, without changing the initial grammar. Examples of this could be "The child cried the story from the rooftop," or "The child cried the story, and I listened." When I explained the first proof to my professor, she told me that the verb "cried" is different from "cried from". However, the word from does not change the verb cried, nor is "cried from" an entirely separate verb. When she insisted on not listening to my explanations, I gave up trying to explain, but knowing I was more correct.

Another way of looking at this grammar, still using the verb cried to mean shouted, is by changing the subject and object of the sentence. If we change "the child" to "the boy" and "the story" to "wolf", we suddenly have a well known sentence: "The boy who cried 'Wolf!'" Here, we don't assume that wolves are climbing out of the boy's tearducts. Readers know that the boy shouted the word "Wolf!" While "the story" is not a set of words being shouted, we know that a story must have words, each of which can be shouted.

So, having evaluated the sentence, her unsupported claim that I'm flat out wrong, and my supported reasoning for being correct, I decided to forget about the whole thing. That is, until the two sentences appeared on our first grammar test this afternoon. In this question, we were given two sentence pairs, the one listed above, and another. Our task was to identify why "The child cried" was correct, while "The child cried the story" was incorrect, and why both "Julio and I were down by the school yard" and "Me and Julio down by the school yard" were correct.

The answer she wanted for the first set was what I've explained about her reasoning. So I gave it to her, although it made me cringe. I need the points in that class, not to pick a fight and be failed. However, proving what she wanted for the second set (that both sentences are accurate) was even more painful, although slightly easier to deal with. Take a look at the second sentence. The first thing which should pop out is that "me and Julio" should be "Julio and I", but I recognize that in some dialects (an important part of this class) the first is considered correct as well. However, look more closely. There is NO VERB in that sentence. By any definition of a sentence, that's grammatically incorrect. Without a verb, it becomes a sentence fragment. However, she wanted us to say that it WAS correct because the pattern of dropping the word "were" is repeated in this dialect.

I accepted this because I don't have much experience listening to "Black English Vernacular" as she calls it (technically it's called Ebonics).

I don't like it.

I don't agree with it.

But I know, in this case, I could be wrong.

I'm writing this blog to get all this off of my chest. To prove to the world, with evidence, that I know what I'm talking about in this case. I must put up with this teacher because I need this class for my major. I must give her the answers she's looking for to earn the points required to pass the class. But I don't have to like it.