Bob,
   I am not a linguist, and I tend to feel that these turf battles do
more harm than good, and I'm a bit cautious about being pulled into one.
I am a writing teacher first and foremost, and  the fact that you are
not talking about use tends to shortchange the discussion a bit.  It's
hard for me to see pronoun and antecedent, for example, as  having an
existence apart from rhetorical context.  If you want to separate them
out for whatever purposes, I feel it's also important to put them back
somehow, to look at how they work in practice and not leave that up to
the prescriptive grammarians or pass it off to some other aspect of
language study, like pragmatics, that students may never get around to
in their studies.
    If I look at my "Writer's Reference" (Diana Hacker, 1999 edition),
she says "The antecedent of a pronoun is the word the pronoun refers
to."   She also says that "A pronoun must refer to a specific
antecedent, not to a word that is implied but not present in the
sentence." I would disagree with her on both statements.  The first
treats a word as separate from the phrase it heads and doesn't at all do
justice to the way meaning tends to snowball up within context.  She
gives the example of  "he" standing in for "Andrew" and "it" standing in
for "ball" in a sample sentence, but doesn't at all deal with pronouns
standing in for more complex meanings, like "the guy who just moved in
down the hall and who has been giving me lustful looks in the elevator."
And her second rule doesn't account or allow for passages like the
opening to James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues": "I read about it in the
paper, in the subway, on my way to work.  Then perhaps I just stared at
it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story...."
 In these two sentences, both "it" and "he" are anticipating a meaning
to come, choices which I think work enormously well within the context
of the story,  perhaps helping us to build some sympathy for the
narrator before we learn that his brother has just been arrested for
heroin possession.  At any rate, a theory of pronoun and antecedent
shouldn't be totally disconnected from how they build meaning in actual
practice, including use by our most successful and effective writers.
    The point I was trying to make, partly out of irritation at trying
to help a student decode the comments of a teacher about a paper, is
that the whole world suffers when the specialists feel their discipline
has nothing to do with real world reading and writing.  This was a
caring teacher who was saying "all the right things", like "Say it out
loud to see if it makes sense", and "Don't repeat yourself", and "A
paragraph has to have one point," and despite the good intentions of the
teacher and the seriousness of the student, nothing good was coming out
of it.
    We are probably arguing apples and oranges.  Though it's hard me to
look at modal auxiliaries as separate from their role as attitudinal
markers, or subordinating conjunctions outside the kinds of context
based decisions that would make one clause more emphatic than another,
I'm not against doing so.  It's important to put them back.  And once we
do, we may notice things that would otherwise pass us by.  The choice to
subordinate is not a meaning neutral or context neutral decision.

Craig


kaboyates wrote:

> Johanna's suggestion that syntax is not independent from social context
> identifies an important distinction in linguistics.  A decision on
> whether
> is true or not has important consequences for how grammar should be
> taught.
>
> Johanna Rubba wrote:
>
>>
>> Decontextualizing syntactic structures makes perfect sense if one
>> believes that that part of language processing is sequestered in
>> specialized parts of the brain operating according to their own
>> particular algorithms. Hence the desire to explain syntax on its own
>> terms. But that's not the school of linguistics I subscribe to.
>>
> I think in this case what makes "perfectly good sense" is, in fact,
> perfectly good sense.
>
> The following are some English structures (I am not talking about USE)
> which have the same properties
> regardless of social context:
>
> Properties of various types of pronouns to their antecedents;
> The property of count and non-count nouns;
> The syntactic properties of the tense - aspect system of the English (I
> recognize that some dialects of American English have a more elaborate
> tense-aspect system but the basic properites of this more eleborate
> system are strikingly similar to those dialects without such
> elaboration);
> Verbal negation (the placement of not);
> The structure of noun phrase, prepositional phrases, adjective phrases,
> etc.;
> The syntactic properties of co-ordinating and subordinating conjunctions
> and conjunctive adverbs;
> The grammatical properties of modals;
> The grammatical structure of the passive;
> The grammatical properties of dependent and main clauses.
>
>       I am confident others can add more.
>
> Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University
>
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