More than

[Luckysquirty]

More than twenty eggs are in the basket.

Could you kindly tell me what parts of speech are "more" and "than" in the sentence? Are they both adverbs? Are they joined and function as a compound adverb? Thank you.

 

[emsr2d2]

Did you write that sentence yourself or take it from somewhere else? It uses an unusual word order.

 

[jutfrank]

More is a determiner, I suppose.

than seems to me to be a preposition (at least, preposition-like).

Why are you asking these questions about parts of speech?

 

[Luckysquirty]

They are confusing to me. Just trying to get a better grip on English grammar. In school, I sat in the back of the classroom and never raised my hand to ask a question. The teachers scolded me for not participating. Now, on grammar site, I ask questions about parts of speech and get questioned. It seems as if I'm back to square one. I'm just seeking to improve my understanding of the mechanics of a sentence. Thank you.

 

[jutfrank]

They are confusing to me. Just trying to get a better grip on English grammar. In school, I sat in the back of the classroom and never raised my hand to ask a question. The teachers scolded me for not participating. Now, on grammar site, I ask questions about parts of speech and get questioned. It seems as if I'm back to square one. I'm just seeking to improve my understanding of the mechanics of a sentence. Thank you.

I didn't mean to deter you, Luckysquirty. It's just that the more we know about why someone asks the questions they do, the easier it is to give more useful answers.

Personally, I don't know a great deal about grammar, (I'm much more interested in the meaning and use of language), but what I have learnt over the years is that trying to label individual words as belonging to a particular part of speech is a fruitless task. I'd strongly advise looking at the syntactics and semantics of the components of sentences instead. Don't think on the word level.

(Just some friendly advice. )

 

[Tarheel]

Personally, I don't know a great deal about grammar.

Jutfrank, that's what I should be saying. (When it comes to grammar, you're my teacher.) I guess everything is relative.

I have frequently been tempted to tell learners to copy me. (My posts tend to be fairly short with short, easy to understand sentences.) I don't think I have ever done that though.

Native speakers tend to know grammar intuitively. We often don't know as many grammar terms as ESL learners do.

 

[jutfrank]

Personally, I don't know a great deal about grammar.

Jutfrank, that's what I should be saying. (When it comes to grammar, you're my teacher.) I guess everything is relative.

An often conflicting element on this forum, I believe, is that ESL teachers have a very different way of looking at grammar from that of academic grammarians, who are not interested in teaching. You could make a rough distinction between 'practical' and 'theoretical' grammar, I suppose.

Nearly everything that I know about grammar comes from my experience of teaching it to learners, and noticing what kind of explanations are most useful (even if that means not entirely accurate) with respect to ESL pedagogy. This is in contrast to our members PaulMatthews and Phaedrus, both of whom have studied it in its own right as an academic subject. I've learnt a great deal from them, and always look forward to their posts.

 

[TheParser]

I'm just seeking to improve my understanding of the mechanics of a sentence.

NOT A TEACHER


I commend you for wanting to parse sentences. It's a great pastime -- and educational, too.

When you get extra time, you might want to look into the Reed-Kellogg diagramming system, which forces you to account for every single word in a sentence. A website entitled German - Latin - English.com will introduce you to it.

An American poet named Gertrude Stein wrote: "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

. . . When you get extra time, you might want to look into the Reed-Kellogg diagramming system, which forces you to account for every single word in a sentence. A website entitled German - Latin - English.com will introduce you to it.

An American poet named Gertrude Stein wrote: "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

Yes! Diagramming is the most useful way to understand sentences.

Brainerd Kellogg invented diagramming because was frustrated teaching his students to memorize a lot of parts of speech. Knowing the parts of speech didn't help them see how sentences are built, so it was useless for teaching them how to write good sentences.

It made grammar easier in the same way that the invention of the zero and the other nine digits made arithmetic easier than Roman numerals.

 

[emsr2d2]

Please note that I have moved all your threads to the "Analysing and Diagramming Sentences" sub-forum.

 

[Luckysquirty]

NOT A TEACHER


I commend you for wanting to parse sentences. It's a great pastime -- and educational, too.

When you get extra time, you might want to look into the Reed-Kellogg diagramming system, which forces you to account for every single word in a sentence. A website entitled German - Latin - English.com will introduce you to it.

An American poet named Gertrude Stein wrote: "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

Thank you for information. Will check.

 

[PaulMatthews]

More than twenty eggs are in the basket.

Could you kindly tell me what parts of speech are "more" and "than" in the sentence? Are they both adverbs? Are they joined and function as a compound adverb? Thank you.

No, they are not adverbs.

"More" is a determinative, and "than" is a preposition.

I'd say that "more than twenty" is a constituent, a determinative phrase functioning as determiner in the noun phrase "more than twenty eggs", the subject of the sentence.

 

[TheParser]

More than twenty eggs are in the basket.

NOT A TEACHER

Hi,

I thought that you might like to know the opinion of my most admired grammarian, Dr. George Oliver Curme. Here are some ideas from his two-volume masterpiece A Grammar of the English Language (1931). He uses the names of the traditional parts of speech.


Volume I, page 175

1. He says that "more than" (as used in your kind of sentence) is an adverb. His examples: "More than one has found it" and "There is more than one reason."
2. But he feels that "more" is a plural indefinite pronoun in "There are more than one."


Volume II, page 59

3. Dr. Curme says that the adverb "more than" = "not merely."
4. He points out, however, that some grammarians consider the word "more" as a plural indefinite pronoun, so they use the plural verb: "More than one have found it so" instead of "More than one has found it so."
a. He reminds us that "Of course, the plural is used when the words are separated" as in "More have found it so than just he."


P.S. I hope that you continue to post questions in the diagramming sub-forum. When I first become a member some years back, there used to be a few members who regularly posted Reed-Kellogg diagrams. It was such fun! (I am too computer illiterate to do so.)

 

[Luckysquirty]

NOT A TEACHER

Hi,

I thought that you might like to know the opinion of my most admired grammarian, Dr. George Oliver Curme. Here are some ideas from his two-volume masterpiece A Grammar of the English Language (1931). He uses the names of the traditional parts of speech.


Volume I, page 175

1. He says that "more than" (as used in your kind of sentence) is an adverb. His examples: "More than one has found it" and "There is more than one reason."
2. But he feels that "more" is a plural indefinite pronoun in "There are more than one."


Volume II, page 59

3. Dr. Curme says that the adverb "more than" = "not merely."
4. He points out, however, that some grammarians consider the word "more" as a plural indefinite pronoun, so they use the plural verb: "More than one have found it so" instead of "More than one has found it so."
a. He reminds us that "Of course, the plural is used when the words are separated" as in "More have found it so than just he."


P.S. I hope that you continue to post questions in the diagramming sub-forum. When I first become a member some years back, there used to be a few members who regularly posted Reed-Kellogg diagrams. It was such fun! (I am too computer illiterate to do so.)

Thanks for posting the information, TheParser. I could tell you are an open-minded, hard-working person. I will try to post examples that cause me to scratch my head. Thanks, again.

 

[Luckysquirty]

Those two quotes illustrate part of the problem you face when dealing with categories of word classes, Luckysquirty. 'Determiner' was a class unknown when I first studied grammar seriously many decades ago (many was an adjective in those antediluvian days). 'Determiner' soon became generally accepted as a word class, as it still is by many people. However, for some time now, 'determiner' is used by some grammarians for a function, 'determinative' being used for the word class.

Both jutfrank and Paul also mentioned 'preposition' in their posts. That is a word class that, for some grammarians, has many more members than it used to have. It now includes words that others still class as adverbs or conjunctions.

Change and evolution. Each generation brings in a different set of people with newer ideas. What was once unpopular may now be popular. But, you have to go with he flow. I don't see any problem in learning "word classes" in a sentence. It's like knowing what is underneath the hood of a car, opposed to just putting the key in the ignition and driving off. At least, if the car breaks down, you are prepared to get it running again yourself. Thanks for info. Every little bit helps.

 

[PaulMatthews]

More than twenty eggs are in the basket.

I don't think there's any doubt that "more" is the comparative form of the degree determinative "many", here taking a preposition phrase complement with the form "than" + quantifier (usually, as here, a numeral).

The determinative phrase "more than twenty" then has a quantificational meaning in the underlined noun phrase.

 

[Tarheel]

An American poet named Gertrude Stein wrote: "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."

Not knowing the context, it's hard to tell how sincere that was. It could have been meant sarcastically.

 

[Luckysquirty]

Not knowing the context, it's hard to tell how sincere that was. It could have been meant sarcastically.

Why would you challenge her sincerity? People could do the same to you too. If we play that game, we'd be left with a world looking like a dog constantly chasing its tail.

She also quoted the following: "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

 

[emsr2d2]

Thank you for the information. I will check it out.

Luckysquirty, learners of English read this sub-section of the forum as well. Please make sure you write in complete sentences. We aim to ensure that learners see examples of grammatical English in complete sentences from native speakers.

 

[TheParser]

Not knowing the context, it's hard to tell how sincere that was. It could have been meant sarcastically.

NOT A TEACHER

Hi,

Excuse me for not including more details.

This quotation appears in Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog (2006) by Kitty Burns Florey, who writes: "But Gertrude Stein always meant what she said, and so we have to believe that, for her, those sentences marched along their intersecting lines [she is referring to the lines used in Reed-Kellogg diagramming] like good little soldiers."

Ms. Florey herself learned Reed-Kellogg from her sixth-grade teacher, Sister Bernadette, who told her students: "If you can't diagram it, don't write it."