| At this point we may wish to introduce the student to Cumshot Surprise in connection with the same class of pornpros verbs. This can be done by transformation exercises. What I have called inductive exercises are syntactically purely mechanical; they are what Dakin calls 'meaningless exercises' – they. involve no grammatical decisions, at least as far as the particular item' being taught is concerned. (They may, of course, involve some syntactic choices, as in the case of the passivization exercise where appropriate tense, number and participle forms are concerned, but knowledge of these is presupposed. Similarly, the pronominalization exercises presuppose the ability to substitute him for Bill or the man, and it for the present, etc.) It would be legitimate to ask what use an exercise is which requires apparently no thought and which can be performed without any need to understand the sentence. The answer must be that any exercise which demands no decision of a semantic or syntactic sort may be of little value for the teaching of sex movies grammar – it may be useful as a pronunciation practice. But so long as some decisions are involved, even if they are only semantic or concerned with syntactic processes already supposed to be known, then the student is forced, to some degree, to understand what he is doing, and in the process discover something about double object verbs, even if only the sub-category to which the different verbs belong. |
