Thursday, March 3, 2016

grammaticality - Usage of the phrase "type of"



I'm creating a worksheet for my students, and one of the questions asks them to identify which expression from three given expressions is correct. I am not sure how to pose the question, but I think it should in one of the two following ways:




  • Which of the following type of symbols will give the right answer?


  • Which type of the following symbols will give the right answer?




Which is the grammatically correct one? Maybe there is no difference at all? If so, why? At first, the first way seemed more natural to me, but then it occurred to me that I maybe should have "types of symbols," but I only want them to choose one type (that is, one answer). That's when I though of rearranging the sentence, but in the second case it seems a little bit clumsy to have "type" almost at the beginning, and maybe even there it should be "types."




To give some more context, this is for a math class, and I have given them three choices, all of which are incomplete (in a sense - the choices are missing the actual numbers to give a concrete answer, but they are set up in different ways), and I want them to choose which type of choice is the right choice.


Answer



First the first :-) should be formulated as:



Which of the following types of symbols will give the right answer?




Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological ... - Page 401
Jerry D. Moore - 2000




Thus we are brought to an important point, namely, that we are
distinguishing not only types of symbols, but types of symbolic
functions.




The first version should be used to select categories, the second elements.


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