Judy asked me to write up a bit on the topics I deal with in
summer workshops on rhetoric and grammar.  Here are notes on three
topics illustrating the sorts of things I've done that have worked
reasonably well.  BTW, I have used Martha Kolln's excellent book
_Rhetorical Grammar_ in some of these workshops.

1.  What's new and what's old

A not commonly observed generalization about the functional
dynamics of sentence structure is the fact that constituents get
longer the farther into a sentence you go.  This fits nicely with
the fact that English, like many languages, tends to put newer
information later in a sentence than older information, and newer
information, being stuff we don't know, takes more words and is
therefore longer.  One obvious correlate of these facts is that we
extrapose subject noun clauses:

That it will snow tonight seems likely.
becomes
It seems likely that it will snow tonight.

But we can do the same thing with relative clauses:

Some guy who had been waiting by the curb came up to talk to me.
becomes
Some guy came up to talk to me who had been waiting by the curb.

This also accounts for many uses of the passive, where the agent
is either unimportant and not mentioned or new information and put
at the end in a by phrase.

A cloud scudding overhead presaged the tornado.
becomes
The tornado was presaged by a cloud scudding overhead.

And it accounts for the preposition phrase indirect object, for
the choice of moving a verb particle beyond the direct object or
not, and for the use of existential sentences vs. BE sentences
with indefinite subjects, indefinites usually representing new
information.

In other words, a single, broad, functional principle involving
sentence perspective provides a cohesive unifying theme for a
variety of grammatical structures that then take on some
rhetorical significance.

By the way, I posted a teaching tip on ATEG describing an
exercise I use to teach the role of voice in discourse.

2.  What do we agree on and what might we argue about?

This is, of course, a heading for talking about presupposition
and assertion.  Roughly speaking, main clauses assert and
subordinate clauses presuppose, except, of course, when they both
do the opposite.  I try to pick politically loaded sentences to
illustrate this.  For example,

The President, whose sexual morals have been unfairly impugned,
will soon leave office and move to New York.

I then ask students to disagree with the sentence, and, of
course, they want to disagree with the relative clause, but to do
so, they have to, in effect, restate the relative clause, whereas
if they want to disagree with the main clause all they have to do
is say, "No, he won't."  We then discuss why burying a
controversial statement in a relative clause makes it hard to
attack and how such discourse gets used.  That gives them a reason
to listen to political statements, usually ones that make their
blood boil, but they learn from this some of the tricks that
skilled propagandists may use.

One direction I've taken this in is to look next at comma
splices, and students frequently discover that one of the spliced
clauses isn't really functioning as an independent clause but
rather as a presupposed clause that they would mark in speech with
lowered intonation.  This has helped to make sense of what they're
marking when they mark comma splices and how to help students
avoid doing this in writing.

And, of course, not all main clauses assert and not all
subordinate clauses presuppose, so this lets us look at
indefinites, gnomic sayings, conditionals, questions, negatives,
etc. from a functional perspective.  I never cover all of these in
a single workshop, but we usually touch on one or two of them.

3.  What's background and what's foreground?

I like to take 100-word passages from a variety of sources and
ask students to decide what's foreground information and what's
background in the passage.  The terms are generally clear enough
intuitively that they are able to do this without much coaching.
Then we start looking at how we identify or mark something as
background, and they frequently observe that background sentences
and clauses tend to have auxiliary verbs in them and foreground
clauses don't.  This allows us to discuss the syntax and semantics
of Tense, Aspect, and Modality and to do so in a context that
makes the details relevant.  There's also a strong tendency for
foreground clauses to be main clauses and background subordinate,
and so this topic dovetails nicely with the Given/New discussion.
Using real published text also provides enough exceptions to these
generalizations to prompt some good discussion of why these
correlations don't always work and what other devices are
available.

***************

That's content enough for a two-week halfday summer workshop, and
it represents the sorts of things I've done.  I sometimes get into
other topics, depending on the audience, like Givon's irrealis
scale, sequence of tenses, discourse cohesion and sentence
combining, etc.  Typically, after we've gone through some
presentation and analysis of both my examples and examples they've
found, we then develop lesson plans appropriate for the levels
they teach.  At the end of the term we all leave with binders of
lesson plans, all of which have been tried out in groups and have
been critiqued by the participants and by me.

I hope that provides a sense of ways that one can use discourse
and rhetorical function to organize and teach grammatical topics.
I know from comments others have made that there is a lot of this
going on, and this seems like a great site for sharing this sort
of information.  Thanks to all of you who are involved in keeping
ATEG and the site going strong.

Herb Stahlke

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
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