Johanna,

     Thanks for your delightful and comprehensive defense of the need
for freedom in linguistic inquiry.  I worry about the situation we poor
front line teachers find ourselves in -- the old grammar long ago
obsolete, and the new grammar building complexity at an alarming rate.
We're damned if we teach it and damned if we don't.  It's hard to make
it user friendly without finding out almost daily there's so much more
work in the field to get to know.
    I'm a writing teacher by trade & training, working primarily (these
past sixteen years) with Educational Opportunity Program students,
charged with helping them adjust to the demands of the university as
readers and writers.  A high percentage are ESL.  The competing schools
of influence on me coming in -- one that tells me to largely ignore
grammar and one that tells me to insist on rigorous prescriptive
standards -- have proven totally impractical.  So I have gone to school
as best I can.  In addition to courses aimed at bringing nontraditional
freshmen up to university speed (our students have been outperforming
other students, by the way, for the last few years), I have been
teaching a one semester introduction to grammar (sophomore level.)
Because the texts were inadequate, I have been writing my own.  It is, I
hope, a successful synthesis of composition theory, traditional grammar,
and the linguistic grammars I have been able to draw from -- structural
grammar, generative (transformational) grammar, and functional grammar
in particular.  It differs from traditional grammars in being knowledge
based (not an attempt to directly change behavior, but to deepen
understanding.)  It differs from most linguistic approaches by including
a chapter on writing (including the punctuation system) and reading (the
grammatical analysis of text.)  The goal, I guess, is to build an
understanding of language and begin putting it to practical use.  I have
taught it twice and a colleague has graciously and heroically taught it
once, and various revisions have been focused on making it more
teachable, the biggest enemy being the arbitrary length of the college
semester system.  I will teach the newest version this spring. It's a
very difficult and demanding approach, but students seem to like it.  I
would love to market it, though I worry about whether there's an editor
out there who would have the slightest idea what I am talking about and
don't know if there are potential teachers who would take the time to
learn enough to teach it.
     The functional grammar I am asking about comes to me by way of
M.A.K. Halliday.  Quite specifically, An Introduction to Functional
Grammar, second edition. (He also has a delightful short book on the
grammar of speech.)  I don't have it right in front of me, but I think
Oxford University Press with a very recent copyright.  Since I have been
learning it on my own, I am probably not the best person to try a
definitive description, but he describes it himself as a natural,
sytemic, semantically leaning grammar.  He tends to see the grammar as
a  system of functions rather than forms (though it is decisively a
grammar.)  More than any other grammar I have been exposed to, it seems
deeply cognitive in its approach. Since attention is paid to message
structure and exchange functions (as well as representation), it is
highly rhetorical as well. I find it very useful as an interpretive
grammar, and in practical application for writing.  It seems highly
compatible with a writer's sensibility, the feeling that form responds
to the pressure of meaning (and that meaning is interactive and
contextual).  As a natural grammar, of course, it tries to describe the
grammar that is there (rather than impose one), and as a sytemic
grammar, it tries to account for all aspects of language and to see
those aspects as part of an interacting system. Am I right in thinking
that American linguistics tends to separate syntax from semantics and
from pragmatics?  Halliday seems to see and present them as integrated.
     And am I also right in thinking now that we have three separate
grammars competing under the rubric of functional?  I like the idea that
we should feel free (and all be enriched) to develop unique approaches.
Will we be able to talk to each other during the process?  Could ATEG be
that forum?

Craig