Johanna, Judy, Bob, and William

     I was going to bring up Biber's work in response to William
McCLeary (Lenses that use grammar) because it seems to verify what he is
talking about, that the nature of a text (what Bill calls its aims and
its mode) will in many ways influence its grammar.  Perhaps someone with
more recent familiarity with Biber's work could sum it up for the rest
of us.  As I remember it, he has used computers and a huge text base to
search for the mutual occurrence of various syntactic forms.  Finding
rich use of past perfect in narrative texts is a fine example, as are
(again from memory) third person pronouns, speech act verbs (does he say
public verbs?) ,and present participle clauses  in the same kinds of
texts.  Professional letters (like this one) and editorials, on the
other hand, tend to give us a high incidence of modal auxiliaries
(predictive or judgmental or persuasive: will, should, may, can't, must,
must not, etc.)  I'm sure I'm adapting his categories a bit. If I'm
reading all of you correctly, we seem to have a consensus that different
kinds of texts are likely to have different kinds of grammar.
     Judy, I thought your warnings about not getting prescriptive with
this are right on. As with all insights,  we cannot and should not over
generalize.  Notes From The Underground is not The Old Man and the Sea.
We can have first person narrators with judgmental attitudes and
editorials that are largely anecdotal.  What Biber is pointing to is a
statistical tendency, a sort of pressure that the grammar responds to.
It's certainly not a mechanical formula for success.
    Johanna, I want to thank for presenting a strong case for the need
for the kind of work I'm doing, trying to produce a grammar text
compatible with writing (whole text) concerns. The best answer to those
who say it can't or shouldn't be done is and will be the book itself,
but you seem deeply aware of the niche it is trying to fill and the
deep,.deep need for it.  You said something about the teaching of
punctuation in an earlier message that I will try to respond to down the
road; remind me if I seem to have forgotten about it. I was surprised
with your statement that written grammar is more complex than the
grammar of speech.  I tend to follow Halliday on this one.  He points
out that speech is grammatically more complex, but that writing is
lexically more dense.  That is to say, there are fewer clauses in
writing, but more meaning built into the clauses.  Speech, by its very
nature, seems a dance of clause structures by comparison.  (Thus we have
the given and new played out, with a clause typically hoisting a new
meaning into the clause ending role of tonic prominence.)  In writing,
we can build more meaning into the clause because we have more time to
do so and because our readers can slow it down to whatever speed they
are most comfortable with. (Or so we have the rosiest picture. Lexically
dense can become opaque.) The pressure seems to come onto the noun
phrases.  I like to bring this point across to my grammar students by
giving them a statement my youngest son made when he was five: I wish I
was a fairy so I could put a spell on you and you would live forever.
Even with a full semester of grammar, my best students find it a
challenge to analyze.  That it isn't a problem in interpretation should
be one indication of how deeply unconscious this grammar has become. If
I ask them to come up with an example of a sentence they have trouble
understanding, almost always it is a sentence that is lexically dense.
Their textbooks are full of them. Here's an example from a letter I'm
writing this week: I am writing in enthusiastic support of your
nomination of Paul Cummings for an award for Excellence in Academic
Service.   Whether or not the piling up of prepositional phrases
produces an effective sentence is a reasonable question, but it's
clearly the kind of editing problem often generated by writing, a single
clause with considerable meaning packed into it.
     Bob, as someone who has conducted about forty writing conferences
in the past two weeks (and thousands over the years), I would like to
take issue with your statement that students know what they want to say
(coherence) but don't know how to get that across to a reader.  It comes
much too close to the naive notions of writing most students start with,
that writing is just a way to sit down and put into words what they
already know and what keeps them from being good writers is that they
lack the fancy language to do so.  What we find from studying the work
of real writers is that writing is exploration and discovery, an
evolving understanding.  Most of my students seem content to bring
themselves halfway there (at best) and abandon a text before the thought
process has been productive or complete.  Correcting the text (rewriting
the sentences to conform with standard practices) or adding mechanical
transitions or improving the style doesn't help solve that dilemma. I
find that the ends of their drafts are often a place where they are
beginning to write with some confidence, and that the most productive
way to spend conference time is often finding the few places where a
possible unifying perspective is being presented.  Once they begin to
decide WHAT THEIR PAPER IS ABOUT they can often come up with more
cohesive versions on their own, though they may benefit enormously from
the offer of appropriate tools, by attention to leads and paragraphing
and  transitions.  That these are not in themselves a grammar is perhaps
the point you have been making all along, but I submit that the lines
are not that easy to draw in practical experience.  A coherent
understanding is at heart a clear one. I'm not sure I have thought
something  if I cannot find a way to say it. Language is not just
communicative.  Purposefulness at the level of whole text can extend
down to the smallest sentence level choice.  A wonderful sentence in one
text is a terrible sentence in another precisely because it is at cross
purposes, because it doesn't belong.  There are, of course, arbitrary
elements of language that need to be attended to -- a spell check is
more audience friendly than thought constructing -- but these seem
incidental to the heart of revision, which is as much the construction
of understanding as it is a conveyance.
     I hope this is as much fun for all of you as it is for me.  It
seems to me that deeply important work needs to be done, and that we are
in a unique position to do it.  If I don't get the urge to write before
then, have a wonderful holiday.

Craig