At 07:04 PM 2/6/99 -0600, you wrote:
>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.)

But SFG was in fact developed in part to answer that question -- see
Halliday & Martin, 1993. _Writing Science: Literacy & Discursive Power_
I believe that the answer would concern SUBJECT as THEME in the sentence --
it's a matter of what gets talked about -- in this case, a world turned
into the sort of thing that CAN be talked about, the world of
science, of the academy, etc. -- a constructed world that is the
cumulative product of a disciplinary conversation over time.

>
>> >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.)

Lock is someone I'm not familiar with. Is his functional
approach SFG?


>Thompson, G. (1996). Introduction functional grammar. Arnold.
>        (See chapter 2, especially figure 2.1.)

Now I understand what you mean by "flat" --- by treating
grammatical functions instead of word-classes, the rank ordering
is not WITHIN lexicogrammar but within a 'meaning-making system' --
both "below" and "above" lexicogrammar.

>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.)

At the beginning of that chapter, we also see the SFG logo, concentric
circles --- not my favorite figure, but a way of rendering "levels"
in a system.


>> 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?

No, they don't. But they don't use first position in their sentences
strategically to achieve cohesion in the text.


>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

I like Linda Flower's work -- especially her more recent work; Mina
Shaughnessy may be read as a way of "unpacking" the expectations of
an audience. But I still find theme/rheme to be one important resource
for writing academic texts. There certainly are others.

Judy


Judith Diamondstone  (732) 932-7496  Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183

Eternity is in love with the productions of time - Wm Blake