> Bob,

    I think the only awkwardness in moving these structures is with the
pronouns.
     "Deborah Tannen claims in her book "You Just Don't Understand" that....

    The "it" in the second sentence is a problem in either form.
    "It is stated in the book "You Just Don't Understand" that..."
I think the metaphor of a book stating something is what seems awkward.
Perhaps it would work in one context or another, especially if we have a
text with an impersonal author. (The rules of golf state... Or It states 
in "The Rules of Golf" that...)   But I have no problem with a sentence
using a book source or speaker source as a stepping off point for a
statement.
  "In Bush's last speech, he claimed FEMA's problems have been resolved."
Is that fundamentally different? Isn't the timing of the statement and
context of the statement potentially highly important? Is there something
about it that's inherently wrong?
   Notice that we wouldn't reword it without changing the pronouns.  "He
claimed in Bush's last speech that..."  With pronoun changes, it's
natural and easy. "Bush claimed in his last speech..."


    I don't necessarily want to defend all marked sentence openings any
more than I would defend all uses of the passive (or any other
structure for that matter.)  I'm just worried about saying that they
are more typical of speech and tend to be overused by beginning
writers. If that's not what was intended, I have no problem.

   I also had no intention of using radically different statements to make
my point.  It's hard to judge these outside of context.

Craig



Discussions advance when we are discussing the same kind of structures.
>
> Unfortunately, Craig did not consider the structures which Johanna (and
> I) find frequently in our student writing.
>
> Here are the two structures Johanna presented.
>
> 1) In Deborah Tannen's book 'You Just Don't Understand', she claims that
> ... "     or, even worse,
> 2) In the book 'You Just Don't Understand', it states that ..."
>
> The point I made is that those don't move as adverbials in mature
> writing do.
>
> 3) *She claims in Deborah Tannen's book 'You Just Don't Understand' that
>  . . .
> 4) *It states in the book 'You Just Don't Understand', that ..."
>
> Here is Craig's analysis:
>
>  "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth" is to some extent a
> comment about what happened in the beginning."  Or consider "After
> lunch, we will tackle the big problems", which seems to me a logical
> answer to the question "What will we do after lunch?"  I don't see a big
> difference between that and "In You Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen
> claims...."  To me, that's also highly movable.  Deborah Tannen claims
> in You don't Understand that... It's an adverbial of place, telling us
> where the claim has been made.
>
> It would have helped if he had considered the ACTUAL structures Johanna
> presented.  Perhaps, he has very different intuitions about (3) and (4)
> than Johanna and I do.
>
> Therefore, I could not agree more with this observation from Craig:
>
>   I think you [me] may be absolutely right, that Johanna and I are
> coming from a different frame of reference.
>
> There is no question that Johanna presented very different constructions
> than the constructions Craig presented in his reply.
>
> Finally, It is always possible that Johanna and I are wrong about the
> structures we are concerned with in her student writing.  We may just be
> silly prescriptivists about them.  I have NEVER seen them in the kind of
> careful writing I read.  If I am wrong on this point, then someone with
> access to data base can provide relevant examples that my reading
> experiences are just too limited.
>
> Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University
>
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