Bob,
   I apologize if I assumed too much about your reading. Whatever you have
read about cognitive grammar seems to have left you with the wrong
assumptions. We can leave it at that.
   I assume there is a great deal more to this list than understanding the
developing writer. I am first and foremost a writing teacher, but that
is not my only interest or the only interest on the list. People quite
often ask questions about grammar than don't have direct teaching
applications.
   I think it's uncalled for to say I "teach where the student is
and not where you think this student should be."  I am a hugely successful
teacher working with the neediest of students. I haven't done that for
decades without assessing where a student needs to be. But that, to me, is
part of the hostility you bring to the conversation.
   Rather than ask an open-ended question, you threw a sentence at me and
then challenged me to discuss how cognitive grammar would deal with it.
Otherwise, I would have answered more directly out of my own
experience.
   One assigment I have been working on, and one that worked particularly
well this semester, I call "What's in a word." We take a word with a
long history and more than one part of speech (this time "hand),
explore its history (including the OED), different idioms, different
metaphoric extensions ("give me a nand," "I've got to hand it to you"),
grammatical constructs, compound noun combinations, and so on. Students
seem to like it and get a lot from it. We get to see the
lexico-grammatical system at work in a very playful way.
   In a writing class, I start very early with the idea that a sentence
can be thought of as a construal of an experience, and that comes up
quite a bit with writing decisions. Can we construe that differently?
Obviously, different syntactic options are part of that, but are also
treated as inherent to the system.
   I also treat sentences as discourse sensitive. They should work in
harmony with the sentences around them and with the evolving purposes
of the writer. (see the opening to the 4th chapter in my book.)
   For the 4 C's conference in March, I am working on my part of a
workshop on the grammar/genre connection, "the grammar of narrative."
As part of a panel with Deb Rossen-Knil and Rei Noguchi on alternative
grammars, I will be presenting on "grounding" as a concept in cognitive
grammar (see Langacker, 2008, chapter 9)  From this persepctive, there
are resources within the grammar to ground noun phrases and verb
phrases (finite) within a discourse context. I'm hoping it will open up
possibilities to teachers who tend to think of grammar as merely
formal.
   If we want writers to develop, I find it helpful to think of writing
choices, including syntax, as not merely formal, but highly functional.
We want to develop flexible writers, able to use meaning-making options
with some facility. Cognitive and functional approaches seem more in
harmony with that.
   The current status quo position--and I won't blame that on anyone
here--seems to be that forms are acquired, and there's no need for much
conscious knowledge on the part of the student. We may guide the
acquisition, but we don't build a robust understanding. Perhaps you and
I disagree on how much conscious knowledge about langauge is useful for
a native speaker.
   I sincerely hope we can respect each other's efforts in this important
work, however divergent the paths might be at times.

Craig
 Craig,
>
> You write statements about theories of grammar that you really haven't
> examined yourself.
>
> More seriously, you write things like the following:
>
>    Cognitive grammar may be easy to disdain if you try to reduce it to
> some sort of shallow position. You should learn about it first and then
> measure it later. It is not very likely that will happen because you
> clearly are satisfied with a formal approach and not at all open to
> other possibilities, which you seem poised to attack, not curious about
> understanding. My main concern about that is that it will shut off talk
> on list and deny us the chance to explore alternative approaches.
>    People have taken the time to privately tell me they want me to
> continue. If that's not a widespread view, I'll stop.
>
> You have no idea what I have read and haven't read.  My concern, and I
> assume the concern of everyone on this list,
>  is trying to understand the development of writing.
>
> I have tried to share how my understanding of language helps me to
> understand how developing writers do what they do.
>
> As best as I remember, your claims about cognitive grammar rest on the
> claim it is an alternative to formal approaches.  I would expect someday
> to read how assumptions of cognitive grammar help teachers understand why
> their students do what they do.  So far, your contributions here rest at
> such a high level of generality I have no idea what insights cognitive
> grammar provides to teachers.
>
> Of course, we agree on the following:
>
>    Where you and I agree, I think, (we should do that more, by the way),
> is that language users will use structures awkwardly when they are
> first using them.
>
> But I go further.  Developing writers, either for lack of knowledge or
> constraints on cognitive capacity, not only use "structures awkwardly" but
> create innovative structures.  Mixed constructions, from the writer's
> perspective, are not a "performance error" but the result of various
> principles.  Jim Kenkel and I have several papers describing what those
> principles are to explain various innovative structures in developing
> writer texts.  As I noted in my last post, you teach where the student is
> and not where you think this student should be.
>
> Complex noun phrases in the SUBJECT position show up late for a variety of
> reasons and anything you cite from a cognitive or functional perspective
> would be the same as from an innate perspective.  Jim Kenkel and I have
> tried to use this fact for understanding why a writer produces mixed
> constructions.
>
>    The fact that complex noun phrases don't show up until 11 or 12 may be
> easier to explain from a cognitive or functional position than it would
> from an innatist view. Functional grammar, in fact, makes a great deal
> of that. They are certainly far more prevalent in writing than they are
> in speech, very important in the technical disciplines, and they make
> large cognitive demands on the language user.
> . . .
>    Cognitive grammar is not going to go away, even if I explain it
> awkwardly or if you explain why you have reservations about it.
> ****
>
> Again, please understand my comments here.  If cognitive grammar must  be
> considered, then provide us with specifics on how it is useful in
> understanding what developing writers do.  It is the lack of specificity
> in your claims (and this post is one more example), that leads me to write
> what I do.
>
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
> at:
>      http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/