Judy asked me to write up a bit on the topics I deal with in summer workshops on rhetoric and grammar. Here are notes on three topics illustrating the sorts of things I've done that have worked reasonably well. BTW, I have used Martha Kolln's excellent book _Rhetorical Grammar_ in some of these workshops. 1. What's new and what's old A not commonly observed generalization about the functional dynamics of sentence structure is the fact that constituents get longer the farther into a sentence you go. This fits nicely with the fact that English, like many languages, tends to put newer information later in a sentence than older information, and newer information, being stuff we don't know, takes more words and is therefore longer. One obvious correlate of these facts is that we extrapose subject noun clauses: That it will snow tonight seems likely. becomes It seems likely that it will snow tonight. But we can do the same thing with relative clauses: Some guy who had been waiting by the curb came up to talk to me. becomes Some guy came up to talk to me who had been waiting by the curb. This also accounts for many uses of the passive, where the agent is either unimportant and not mentioned or new information and put at the end in a by phrase. A cloud scudding overhead presaged the tornado. becomes The tornado was presaged by a cloud scudding overhead. And it accounts for the preposition phrase indirect object, for the choice of moving a verb particle beyond the direct object or not, and for the use of existential sentences vs. BE sentences with indefinite subjects, indefinites usually representing new information. In other words, a single, broad, functional principle involving sentence perspective provides a cohesive unifying theme for a variety of grammatical structures that then take on some rhetorical significance. By the way, I posted a teaching tip on ATEG describing an exercise I use to teach the role of voice in discourse. 2. What do we agree on and what might we argue about? This is, of course, a heading for talking about presupposition and assertion. Roughly speaking, main clauses assert and subordinate clauses presuppose, except, of course, when they both do the opposite. I try to pick politically loaded sentences to illustrate this. For example, The President, whose sexual morals have been unfairly impugned, will soon leave office and move to New York. I then ask students to disagree with the sentence, and, of course, they want to disagree with the relative clause, but to do so, they have to, in effect, restate the relative clause, whereas if they want to disagree with the main clause all they have to do is say, "No, he won't." We then discuss why burying a controversial statement in a relative clause makes it hard to attack and how such discourse gets used. That gives them a reason to listen to political statements, usually ones that make their blood boil, but they learn from this some of the tricks that skilled propagandists may use. One direction I've taken this in is to look next at comma splices, and students frequently discover that one of the spliced clauses isn't really functioning as an independent clause but rather as a presupposed clause that they would mark in speech with lowered intonation. This has helped to make sense of what they're marking when they mark comma splices and how to help students avoid doing this in writing. And, of course, not all main clauses assert and not all subordinate clauses presuppose, so this lets us look at indefinites, gnomic sayings, conditionals, questions, negatives, etc. from a functional perspective. I never cover all of these in a single workshop, but we usually touch on one or two of them. 3. What's background and what's foreground? I like to take 100-word passages from a variety of sources and ask students to decide what's foreground information and what's background in the passage. The terms are generally clear enough intuitively that they are able to do this without much coaching. Then we start looking at how we identify or mark something as background, and they frequently observe that background sentences and clauses tend to have auxiliary verbs in them and foreground clauses don't. This allows us to discuss the syntax and semantics of Tense, Aspect, and Modality and to do so in a context that makes the details relevant. There's also a strong tendency for foreground clauses to be main clauses and background subordinate, and so this topic dovetails nicely with the Given/New discussion. Using real published text also provides enough exceptions to these generalizations to prompt some good discussion of why these correlations don't always work and what other devices are available. *************** That's content enough for a two-week halfday summer workshop, and it represents the sorts of things I've done. I sometimes get into other topics, depending on the audience, like Givon's irrealis scale, sequence of tenses, discourse cohesion and sentence combining, etc. Typically, after we've gone through some presentation and analysis of both my examples and examples they've found, we then develop lesson plans appropriate for the levels they teach. At the end of the term we all leave with binders of lesson plans, all of which have been tried out in groups and have been critiqued by the participants and by me. I hope that provides a sense of ways that one can use discourse and rhetorical function to organize and teach grammatical topics. I know from comments others have made that there is a lot of this going on, and this seems like a great site for sharing this sort of information. Thanks to all of you who are involved in keeping ATEG and the site going strong. Herb Stahlke Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D. Professor of English Ball State University Muncie, IN 47306 [log in to unmask] To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/