Embedded/relative clauses ??

[Tessa Olive]

The sentence is 'When I came to Australia the first thing I did was to look for a flat.' How do I explain the 'was' to my post-beginner/intermediate students without getting too bogged down? Thanks in advance.

[woodcutter]

First action ..... = (in past tense) ..... look for a flat

"Be" often represents "=". I would think explaining "to look" would be tougher.

[Heath]

If you wanted to highlight that it is acceptable without getting bogged down, a couple of similar examples but with slightly different structures might help.

...the first thing I did was...
...the one thing I might've done differently is...
...the best thing to do in that situation is...
...what he'll do is...
...what I'd do is...

The use of do + be seems to common enough. It does tend to go with 'the x thing' and in conditionals with 'what', so you could highlight either or both of these uses in particular. 4 or 5 examples should be enough to raise Ss awareness, then let them explore it in more depth in their own time, if they're so inclined.

[fluffyhamster]

If the original example is too difficult for your students, how about rephrasing it? Maybe something like 'When I came to/arrived in Australia, firstly/first of all, (obviously, as it was a priority!) I looked for a flat'? That being said, Woody and Heath's suggestions should help make the original easier to process, and it could be good input.

[woodcutter]

That seems an odd way to look at it Heath. We are using the "do" to make a kind of "noun clause" which represents an action. We often use "be" after that but other verbs are possible:

"The thing I do makes people happy!"

Unless you grasp that I don't see that saying do goes with be is going to mean very much. Fluffy is right, the best option is avoidance.

I can't really explain why we need an untensed verb "to look". In fact anything seems plausible, look, looking, looked, to look.

[woodcutter]

Come to think of it title is probably leading me astray, this is basically a simple sentence, a simple equilibrium much the same as

(The actor) was (a Scot)

(His first mime) was (sitting on a chair)

and the lack of tensing is not because of "relative/embedded clauses" but because you can say

(The first thing I did) was (walk in the park)

or

(The first thing I did) was (I walked in the park)

depending on whether the second part more closely represents "thing" or "the thing I did"

[Heath]

That does make it seem pretty clear Woodcutter (simply enclosing different noun phrases in brackets on either side of the verb)... But I do feel highlighting more closely similar patterns can be a great help to Ss.

Yes, there are other possible verbs, but it's not that much different from teaching students that "Could you pass the ____, please?" is an easy way to make a request. You can replace could with can and not every word that fills the gap is going to take the, but being able to instantly use that pattern can be a really useful start before they go on to explore it more fully.

Highlighting other patterns with do + be can make it clear that it's a possibility (it sounded to me that Tessa's Ss didn't believe it possible in the first place) and can also help them to notice other similar occurrences when they come across them later.

After a bit more exposure they can then move on to recognising the larger and more widely exploitable patterns that you've highlighted (which the more abstract thinkers might be ready to do before those who aren't).



But then, I am the guy who hates the whole 'would = distance' thing, which I think is great for helping linguists (over-?)analyse the English language, but don't think's that great for learners.

[fluffyhamster]

The original example definitely has some sort of embedding (i.e. 'I did' is embedded and functioning as part of something bigger - that is (Tessa!), a noun phrase), but it's good that you're drawing out the presence or absence of a "second" subject as what determines finiteness or non-finiteness (basically, tense) in the verb following the pivot of 'was', Woody.

Now that's been cleared up, Tessa can start thinking of inflicting sentences like 'What Fluffy wrote annoyed me' upon her beginners! But seriously, SVO-type clauses would seem a better basis on which to build than SVC ("SVC"?) clauses when it comes to their subjects being of more complex kinds (if only because the O can so easily be one word - not that examples like 'All we do is apparently argue' can't be found - plus the two lexical verbs in succession might invite the subconscious to crank into action more and earlier in parsing things like that 'What Fluffy wrote annoyed me' into NP (='What Fluffy wrote') V O, from which it is only a small leap into SVC and "SVC": 'The only thing he loves is grammar' and then 'The first thing I did was read the CGEL'*), and should therefore probably have come first, though neither type of complex subject should really be in a beginner to pre-intermediate syllabus.

By the way, what sort of terminological uberlabels should be attached to parsing Woody's example? > '(The first thing I did) was (I walked in the park)'. Sorry if I've missed the obvious!

*These could be spun slightly another way: 'The first thing I read was the CGEL' (a much clearer SVC than the "SVCs" we have been discussing), though obviously there is a difference in meaning/in terms of construal! ~ Actions or steps of action taken ('...read the CGEL') versus emphasis more on the things acted upon, in which the actual action is more incidental ('...was the CGEL'). I've been inspired here by Woody's words, no doubt about it! To which I'd add that having a 'did' obviously pushes the actual action (in the form of a non-finite verb) out to later, after the 'was', so there's sort of a combination going on of 'The first thing was' + (a more or less "emphatic") 'I did(...)read the CGEL' > 'The first thing was' + 'I did(...)buy a flat'. (BUT I am NOT sure that I like these sort of "deep structures" and pseudo-transformations - certainly, I think they could confuse the hell out of students. Teachers need to find ways of selecting, divvying up and grading genuine, as far as possible NON-CONFLICTING exemplars, all with an eye to whatever their functional differences might conceivably be, which of course is never going to be an easy undertaking with something as complex and sprawling as language, and indeed the world and all the representations of it that language can, er, represent ).

[woodcutter]

Yes, I'm sorry, there are obviously embedded clauses, I was thinking of subordination/relatives really.

It seems odd that if you turn the equation about (and thus alter the subject) you seem to have to use the -ing form.

(Walking in the park) was (the first thing I did).

I'm also waiting for Ouyang to give the precise labels.

As to the patterns Heath, surely you have to identify the kind of do/did that you mean and get into the "noun clause" kind of explanation in any case.

[fluffyhamster]

It seems odd that if you turn the equation about (and thus alter the subject) you seem to have to use the -ing form.

Yoda-speak? > 'Reply to Woody (again) was the next thing I did.' (More verby, versus nouny).

[woodcutter]

Only marginally Yoda-ish to my ears.

(and not Yoda-ish if you think of an appropriate context - answering "did you go to the hotel as soon as you were there?" or something)

I suppose I'm being rather dense about relatives too - "The first thing (that) I did" is, er, well, a relative clause, I guess.

Relative clauses can be embedded as subjects and objects as in:

The (first dentist that I saw) took out (the tooth that was hurting)

So I suppose that's what we need to explain in order to see why there is a "was" amongst these clauses.

[fluffyhamster]

I think we've explained the 'was', and pretty much everything else (in the original example at least) - it all basically comes down to that nasty business known as 'parsing'!