I want to thank everyone for these very rich and interesting perspectives. I'll just add a few things from the perspective of a writing teacher and hope they're worth the time.
   First of all, I think what Bob is doing is something very useful and valuable--he is primarily interested in what the student is trying to say, is drawing that out in conversation, and, in that process, is helping the student adjust her knowledge about the English language. I would also point out that he and the student share a meta-language (adjective and verb) that serves as a common understanding between them and helps scaffold an understanding of "agree" and how it functions. This would fit my use of the term "mentoring". We need more of that.
   From a cognitive perspective (construction grammar) I would point out that "in agreement" and "in agreement with" are both constructions, a very common way to express/construe this experience. "I am in agreement with Bob."  "Bob and I are in agreement." Construction grammar pays more attention to these in-between structures.  We also talk about "coming to agreement", as though agreement were out there waiting for us to "arrive."  (We do "arrive" at an understanding. We also "find" agreement.) None of this is easily explained in terms of words put into set slots. Is it vocabulary? Syntax? A little of both? Certainly acquiring full fluency with a word involves picking up these constructions.
   It's a little harder to talk about functional approaches to this problem because the sentence is given in isolation and the difficulty is more related to a word. The meaning of a word certainly depends on the grammar that comes with it, which is why the dictionary gives us grammatical information along with definitions.  I don't think anything Bob has done in responding to this student is incompatible with a functional or cognitive approach to language. every serious grammar I know of recognizes "verb" and "adjective" as categories.
   Systemic functional grammar looks at different kinds of meaning as they are built into the language. Language represents the world (and construes it as it does), establishes interactions with reader or readers (or listeners), and builds text. It is hard to talk about that in relation to a single sentence taken out of context. This sentence is pretty straightforward, with "they" (presumably clear in context) as grammatical subject, a very unmarked choice. In this form, there is no qualification of the finite assertion. (Just straightforward true.) "The input hypothesis" is in clause ending prominence. Is that effective? There's no way to tell without putting the sentence into the context of the sentences before and after and into the context of the whole text.
   As Herb implies, not all examples lend themselves to discussing the value of every approach.

Craig

STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
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I've been following this debate from the sidelines, partly because it sounds too much like too many arguments about ideology or religion and partly because I'm not entirely sure of my own position on competence and performance, what they define, and what their relevance is to pedagogy.  Craig, Bill, and Bob have carried on a thoughtful and stimulating discussion on these matters that I have enjoyed and that I appreciate for the thought, expertise, and passion that has gone into it.

When I was in grad school in the late 60s, one piece of required reading in syntax classes was Paul Postal's Constituent Structure, a stern polemic against all non-generative theories of grammar.  Postal's rhetorical technique was to restate a particular model, Pike's Tagmemics or Lamb's Stratificational Grammar or any of several others, strictly in the terms of the then current transformational-generative model.  Stated in those terms, of course, the other models lost a good bit of their subtlety, and anything they had to offer that could not be stated in terms of Postal's model was simply left out.  The fact, for example, that tagmemics grew out of and encoded some of the most powerful heuristics ever developed for linguistic field work and analysis was not to be valued.  Collecting and classifying data was not what linguistics was about.

I don't want to suggest that anyone is doing in this discussion what Postal did in his book, certainly not in the same brutal tone, but the treatment of competence and performance reflects of similar tendency to define others' positions in terms of one's own.  Generative linguistics, for want of a better term, uses its competence/performance distinction as a theoretical prime allowing a clear partitioning of linguistic data into that which represents native speaker competence and that which reflects behavioral and social interference with the production and comprehension of sentences so that sentences may be produced or interpreted in ways that competence would not allow. Competence gets operationalized in reliance on native speaker intuition as primary data.  There are good reasons for doing linguistics this way.  One of the traps that extreme pre-generative structuralists fell into was treating all native speaker production as grist for linguistic description, with no judg
ment of grammaticality.  The reliance on native speaker competence provided a reasonably principled way to partition data into what the grammar should deal with and what should be left to behavior and social scientists.

Competence has a hard time, however, in dealing with subjects like a native speaker's sense of degree of variation.  One of the early findings in Labov's work and that of his students was that members of a speech community could tell where a person fit in that community of the basis of frequency of use of certain linguistic markers, whether final consonant deletion, copula deletion, or, in Canadian French, deletion of que.  The ability to distinguish and control ranges of variation were part of the speaker's knowledge of his or her language.  Labov proposed variable rules to account for this, but the generative model never became comfortable with such variation, and variable rules rarely make it into generative accounts of linguistic phenomena.

While most linguists, whatever their theoretical orientation, recognize that there are things that native speakers know and things that they do that don't conform to this knowledge, not all theories find that distinguishing these as competence and performance has much yield for doing linguistics.  When Bob suggests that functionalists, which I think he acknowledges is too broad a category to be useful, deal only with performance or ignore competence or can't distinguish properly between them, he imposes his competence/ performance distinction on the discourse of the broader field.  This is where I find Bob's argumentation similar to Postal's:  he recasts other theories in the terms and categories of his own.  The phenomena, like native speaker judgment, that the distinction helps him to define are addressed by other theories as well but not with the same sort of categorization.

It has to be possible to use more neutral terms, like native speaker knowledge perhaps and recognize that some part of this is what generative grammar calls competence but that it might not be useful in another model to categorize native speaker knowledge in just this way.

I haven't discussed any data or specific examples in this bit of rhetorical analysis because I'm attempting a sort of metadiscussion of the conversation that's been going on, not always a satisfying thing for a linguist to do who loves data-mongering.

Herb
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