Glenda

This is the first message I have received from ATEG. I was not sure it 
was an active list.

I have a couple of brief observations:

1. You could interpret the structure either way, but you also need to 
explain to students the pragmatic meaning of the grammar in addition to 
labeling it with a pedagogical grammar structure.

2. One pragmatic meaning of "gonna" is to have an intention and 
subsequently a plan to do something. Intentions entail plans.

3. You might also mention the informal spoken linguistic register of the 
poem.

4. I was just reading yesterday about the progressive tense in the 
British National Corpus which found that overwhelming percentage of its 
use (65%) was what the author described as "repeatedness" or in other 
words, "an ongoing single event." An example of repeatedness from the 
corpus in the article was "You are once again doing it completely and 
utterly wrong." The source for this is a book chapter:

Romer, U. (2010). Using general and specialized corpora in English 
language teaching: Past, present, and future. In M. Compoy-Cubillo, B. 
Belles-Fortuno, and M. Gea-Valor. (Eds.), /Corpus-based approaches to 
English language teaching/ (pp. 18-35). London: Continuum.

Romer conducted a large study of progressive in a 2005 book, 
/Progressives, patterns, pedagogy: A corpus-driven approach to 
progressive forms, functions, contexts, and dialectics./

I do not think repeatedness is the pragmatic function of the line, but 
teaching students about using corpus studies, and pragmatics to inform 
our knowledge of grammar is certainly worth the time.

Mike Busch






> Greetings---
>
> Today, in my Advanced English Grammar class, I showed Langston 
> Hughes's "Daybreak in Alabama" as an example of a poem with two sentences.
>
> I realized while showing the poem that I was not sure how to divide 
> the slots of the first main clause, which is
>
> ...I'm gonna write me some music about
>
> Daybreak in Alabama....
>
> Shall I think of "I'm gonna write" as being equivalent to "I will 
> write," thus considering "[a]m gonna" as an auxiliary to "write"?
>
> Or shall I think of "I'm gonna write" as being equivalent to "I am 
> going to write," thus considering "to write..." an adverbial 
> infinitive phrase?
>
> I would love to read some discussion on this clause and to be able to 
> share it with my students afterward.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Glenda Conway
>
> Professor, English
>
> Coordinator, Harbert Writing Center
>
> Department of English and Foreign Languages
>
> Station 6420
>
> University of Montevallo
>
> Montevallo, AL 35115
>
> 205 665-6425 office
>
> 206 665-6422 fax
>
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>
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