Bob,

     The connection between whole text concerns and sentence level
concerns is one that has interested me for the last fifteen years, and
my best reply to it is a text now at two hundred plus pages and growing.
(Aimed not at scholars, but as practical application. I will be teaching
its latest incarnation this spring.)  It occurs to me that my quickest
contribution could be a short paper on grammatical analysis, an example
of how this unified attention to whole text and grammar might be put
into practice. That may take me until semester break.  In the meantime,
I have a few quick answers.
     Mechanical tests for adherence to traditional grammar are not the
right way to search for the sentence/whole discourse connection.  First
of all, traditional grammar is sometimes very arbitrary and not at all
reflective. Traditional mandates are sometimes functional, sometimes
not. Since the notion of an ideal sentence has never been framed in
functional terms, it shouldn't seem surprising that a functional test
for it is hard to come by.  We have to be ready to reconsider
traditional
grammar (reconsider, revise, and rewrite it) along more functional
lines.  The mechanical test you refer to (which I don't think will work
in all cases, though that is from memory) is a substitute for a deeper
and more functional understanding of the kinds of meaning being created.
It is merely a crutch to be used when the understanding is fuzzy.
     I believe that traditional grammar overvalues a kind
of propositional meaning, which is by no means the only meaning encoded
within the grammar.  This is parallel to the academic overvaluing of
argument or thesis writing in whole text. I have students, and I'm sure
you do also, who have been led to believe that good writing
has to have a thesis.  That the world is full of wonderful writing that
is not thesis driven seems to have escaped their teachers.  A mechanical
test for ideal text might be the presence of a thesis statement, by
which we could then throw out of the canon of nonfiction countless works
of priceless value.  My reply to such a proposition (and to the parellel
mechanical test you offer) is that the test may have its uses (like
getting a good grade from a particular teacher), but is misleading in
other ways and largely irrelevant and insignificant.  Like well formed
sentence, the idea of a well formed text is not as simple as it may
seem.       When words come together, they don't merely add up their
individual
meanings, but form grammatical relations (meaning relations) with each
other. These meaning relations extend well beyond the boundaries of the
sentence and act in harmony with other meaning making aspects of an
ideal  text.  (If less than ideal, the parts do not harmonize.)  One
notion that distorts our understanding of this is the idea of the
sentence as complete thought.  Another notion is that form at this level
is somehow neutral or that these are mere matters of correctness or of
style.
     We are probably all familiar with the interconnectedness of form
and meaning at the level of whole text.  If I talk to a student about a
paper, I might achieve the same result by talking to him/her about
content (I think this material doesn't fit your narrowed sense of
subject) or about form (why don't you cut the last half of the second
paragraph?)  And surely no one would argue that a poem's meaning is not
intimately connected to its images or that a story's meaning can be
disconnected from its plot structure.  This same interconnectedness is
there at the level of the grammar.  In order to accommodate this, we
need to radically rethink current notions.  We need to ask ourselves
whether it's only our students who are misled by language myths.
     SFG presents three kinds of meaning as encoded in the clause, and
these three kinds of meaning -- expressive, interactive, and
representational -- have been with us as whole text concerns since
classical rhetoric. As literature teacher and as teacher in writing
workshops, I can attest to the usefulness of looking at a whole text
through these lenses.  What is the writer trying to say?  Who seems to
be the intended audience and what relationship to the reader is being
established?  What does this text reveal about independent happenings in
the world?  (All of these are so summarized as to be misleading, but you
get a rough sense.) Without taking too much time here or going off into
side tracks that others might be better equipped for, there are also
schools of literary criticism (or critical approaches) that emphasize
each of these ways of looking at text.  (As interpretive; as Reader
response; as holding a mirror up to life.)
     It seems to me that we started in the same place (looking for the
same connection) but ended up with radically different answers.  This is
an enormously important conversation.  It may be that we're talking
apples and oranges.  Certainly that there is no decent text making the
connections between grammar and whole text discourse is a position worth
taking seriously. My own approach borrows and steals from SFG, but draws
from many other sources as well. I am trying to fill a need.
    I sent a direct request for your paper and then got a computer
message that it didn't get through.  So I'll add that request to this
statement.  If you have a paper or handouts from your ATEG presentation,
I would be most interested in those as well.  I am heartened by your
position that you are not against the idea that a connection exists.

Craig

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