Thanks to Herb for the below. Why not add these examples to "teaching
tips"? I think it's especially important for teachers to understand the
power of  linguistic prinicples like "given/new" structuration to
illuminate the semantics of a range of sentence types & dispell canards
like 'don't use passive voice'

It would also be useful to include specific examples where there are none
-- in spare time, of course.:)

judy

 [The ideal would be to build up enough concrete instances for teachers to
'get' the principle at work and so be able to design examples of their
own...=-- an online grammar course?


At 03:05 PM 12/8/00 -0500, you wrote:
>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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