Judy Diamondstone wrote:

"Bob, do you ever pay attention to weather reports? Some people don't.
If you were to guess how tall most people are, you would probably guess
close to an average height. You're old enough, been around enough, to have a
pretty good idea of what the average height was. If you were a martian
visiting earth with the mission to build a dwelling, wouldn't you want to
know what the average, maximum, and minimum heights of possible dwellers?
What do you think?"



> >>  These two functions are fulfilled by grammatical choices,
> >> although the patterns are tendencies rather than rigid rules.
> >
> >I wonder how many students want to be told about tendencies.  Exactly,
> >what is the percentage of a tendency?  How much deviation must there be
> >from a tendency for a text to be "ungrammatical"?
>

  Judy,
    I am not sure I follow you. Could you provide a language example that will
make clearer the point of your analogies?  I think that the question is how (or
whether)  these "tendencies" can be formalized into a "grammar" or some
structure that students can use to guage the well formedness of their texts. I
think we all agree that  such tendencies are observable.
                                    Jim Kenkel
                                    Eastern KY Univ