Bruce,
     I would think that composition is ALWAYS involved with making 
meaningful choices. That said, I think you are raising interesting 
questions about what level students need to be before they can profit 
from attention to these issues. Since I'm teaching at the college level, 
I'm curious as well.
    Apparently, there are languages in the world (I think Turkish is 
one) in which evidentiality is grammatically marked. Herb made that 
point in an earlier post and I ran into it again in my reading of Talmy 
Givon. We might be able to say that it is universally useful to be able 
to judge the possibility of truth for something asserted. This would 
include judicious use of the modals as well, one of the major ways in 
which assertions are qualified in English. If my memory is correct, 
social meaning comes early, epistemic meaning quite a bit later.
    Are there people on this list involved in teaching journalism at the 
K-12 level? Part of the discipline of being a journalist is to make 
these distinctions very carefully. A good news story has considerable 
attributed meaning (sources), and sources are generally characterized in 
ways that would help us judge their credibility. This should also be 
part of what we learn to do in history and in the sciences as we 
evaluate the relative reliability of evidence.
    I think it helps to know what a mature writer should be able to do 
with language. Our question might be how attention to language can help 
us get there.  It's not just FORMS, but putting language to work in 
productive ways. Unfortunately, grammar is too often thought of as 
merely formal. (I am not a disinterested commentator on this one.)

Craig


On 3/11/2011 9:56 AM, Bruce Despain wrote:
> Are all of Craig's choices appropriate for all grade levels?  It seems 
> that the description of the patterns is graded.  Maybe ATEGers can 
> suggest the grade levels where a functional descriptions can or should 
> be brought into the lessons on composition.
> The comic strip cartouches are very attractive devices for depicting 
> the projection of thoughts and direct quotes, that students at most 
> grade levels can relate to.  But this leaves a gap as there is no way 
> to depict reports, ie, indirect quotation, however.  This and the fact 
> that there is often backshifting of tense, aspect, and mode, is 
> indication that the grammatical item is delayed till high school, but 
> how does functionalism fit here?  The creation of "meaningful" writing 
> and making "meaningful" choices, can only go so far.
> At which grade levels do the grammatical descriptions belong?  Is the 
> functional description ("evidentiality") delayed till high school, 
> when these patterns can all be compared and contrasted?  Are there 
> other functional concepts beyond meaningful and evidential that belong 
> at these various stages?
> 1) (Spot dropped dead.) "drop dead" as an idiom derived from the 
> subjective complement pattern
> 2) (I saw Spot drop dead.) the verbs "see" and "hear" as verbs that 
> select an infinitive phrase as object
> 3) (Paul said "Spot dropped dead.") the quoted assertion in a sentence
> 4) (I believe Spot dropped dead.) the content clause as an object of 
> thought (factive)
> 5) (I heard Paul say that Spot dropped dead.) the sensation verbs of 
> (2) allowing embedding of (4) in a recursive projection
> 6) (According to a source close to the owner, Spot dropped dead.) the 
> adverbial phrase of justification
> 7) (A source close to the owner alleges that Spot dropped dead from 
> poor nutrition.) selecting partial propositional content of an 
> assertion as object
> Bruce
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