Judy Diamondstone wrote:

> >I know of nothing in systemic functional grammar which explains why
> >students
> >have difficulty building up subject noun phrases.
>
> There's quite a bit in SFG on nominalizations and other (in
> SFG terms) "grammatical metaphors" that make the sorts of
> meanings realized in built-up-noun-phrase-subjects relatively
> strange especially to students whose parents don't talk
> 'school talk'

Nominalizations are not the same as heavy subject NPs.  The point is
that
it is not all NPs, but heavy SUBJECT NPs that are rare in speech but
occur in writing.  Again, what in SFG would explains why heavy subject
NPs have this interesting distribution?

(By the way, I think that is a question which SFG really is not designed
to answer.)


> >Likewise, in the texts I have of SFG, the description of a sentence is
> >very flat: subject; finite verb group; complement.  Given this
> >description, I wonder why subject noun phrases are more problematic than
> >other noun phrases elsewhere.
>
> Which texts do you have? They are not ones that I have seen.

Lock, G. (1996). Functional English grammar.  CUP.
        (See page 6 and 20, the answers to task 1a.)
Thompson, G. (1996). Introduction functional grammar. Arnold.
        (See chapter 2, especially figure 2.1.)
Butt, D et al. (1995). Using functional grammar. National Centre for
English Language Teaching and Research.  Macquarie University.
        (See chapter 3, but almost any sentence is divided into three equal
parts.)



> As I said above, I don't believe that students do... Certainly my
> (college level) students don't come to class knowing in a way that
> they could use the knowing that information ordering in the sentence
> is a resource for making texts.

Really!  I would think that such students should have HUGE problems with
referential pronouns.  Do they?

What kinds of problems are you seeing?

When the students I teach have difficulty with ordering information in a
text, I do not attribute it to ignorance of theme-rheme or whatever.
Rather, it tends to be related to issues of audience awareness.  I like
some of Linda Flower's work here and I think Mina Shaunessey in Errors
and Expectations can be read the same way.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri States University