I hope to add more to this reply later, but for now let me give one
example of how 'distribution' helps with 'explanation'. In a grad course
for MA in Teaching Writing students that I taught two years ago, I
discussed the interaction of passive voice and choice of subject in
texts. I wrote up (admittedly not real data, but it's hard to find this
kind of stuff on the fly) two paragraphs, pretend-newspaper reports, on
the theft of a pickup truck. In one text, I deliberately chose the agent
as subject in all sentences (where possible, in this case in most
sentences). In the other text, I did what I believe experienced writers
naturally do; I chose things close to the theft in topicality value as
subject. This resulted in numerous passive sentences in the text.
I then let the students read the two and choose which one they
thought worked better. They all chose the second text. Then we examined
subject choice and found that the topicality of a referent sometimes
dictated passive as the optimal choice, in spite of the fact that writing
teachers often preach against the use of the passive voice, and a lot of
students take this to mean that they must avoid the use of passive at all
costs. The students really liked this exercise, and reported that it
taught them a lot about how texts are structured and that, on occasion,
passive really is the optimal choice for reasons of coherence, not
formality or agent-hiding.
 
My students were native speakers, but I see no obstacle to using an
exercise like this in an advanced comp course for students with English
as L2, in your typical academic writing for foreign students class, for
example.
 
As an ancillary exercise, I had the students find a brief newspaper
article, preferably about a person to keep the referents relatively
straightforward (articles with event as topic get complicated, because
there are so many referents that are topical with respect to the event).
They counted the number of times the main topic (the person) was also
subject, and found it to be the majority of the time. In paragraphs where
something or someone else was subject, the 'graph was centered around a
related subtopic. (And when it wasn't subject, the main-topic person was
often direct object, also a high-topicality position in an
active-voice sentence).
 
So you see, 'corpus' work is not inaccessible to students; it _does_
provide regular results, and it _is_ explanatory, in terms of what
governs the choice of subject in coherent writing. Students come to
understand notions like 'subject' much better when they look at how they
interact with discourse -- 'subject' is probably more important as a
text-level notion than as a sentence-level notion, in spite of the
sentence-level facts, like control of verb agreement, that are relevant
to subjects.
 
More later. Perhaps we should change this topic from 'Bill Murdick
syllabus' to 'functional explanations'?
 
The LSA was GREAT!! In another message, I am circulating the LSA position
statement on the Ebonics issue. Watch this space!
 
Johanna
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Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics              ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University   ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407                                     ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184  E-mail: [log in to unmask]      ~
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