Craig,

 

Something digitally strange is happening with this thread.  Bob got my posting in scrambled form, and I got yours without any wordwrap.  When I hit reply, what you wrote got formatted with wordwrap, but what Bob and I had written still wasn't.  I don't know how this happens, but Max Morenberg occasionally emails me that a posting of mine has come through scrambled.  But these things are intermittent and probably in the domain of the list manager.

 

Now to your comments.

 

I'll be brief. As a linguist doing linguistics, my interest is in solving problems of language not of language teaching.  If my linguistic writing and study has direct application to the teaching of language or of writing it is purely fortuitous, not by intent.  We work in different domains.  I ask and explore questions about linguistic structure and you work on questions of rhetoric and teaching.  That said, I'm also interested in teaching, and I agree with Bob and Bill and others on this list that linguistics offers important insights into how language can be taught and what can be taught about it. Bob was entirely right in pointing out that it was linguistic work that provided the basis of arguments in the 60s and since that non-standard dialects are not inferior forms of English but are thoroughly rule-governed systems.  Even the notion "rule-governed" is a linguistic notion.  The way auxiliary verbs are used in discourse to distinguish background information from foreground is another insight from linguistics that can be turned into a useful teaching module for students of writing.  On the other hand, it didn't take a linguist to realize or demonstrate that the injunction to avoid passive voice is taken to wrong-headed extremes by a lot of teachers.  Good writers and teachers of writing have known that for a long time.  

 

There are clearly linguistic insights that have relevance for language teachers and writing teachers.  But that is not a function of their importance to linguistics.  Rather it's a consequence of the fact linguists research the medium that language teachers and writing teachers teach.  There is inevitably some transfer.  For most linguists, however, once something is know well enough for that transfer to take place it's no longer of much interest to linguists and they've gone on to something else.  No judgment of relative value here; just recognition of the fact that we have very different, but linked, areas of endeavor.

 

I think this relationship is part of the reason why it's useful to have linguists on this list.  Sure, our arguments seem to some to take several tours around the barn at times, but you guys tolerate that pretty well, usually, just as the linguists sometimes sit back in bemusement when pedagogical questions arise.  For example, I don't get involved a whole lot in Ed's discussions because I'm not involved in grammar teaching to the grade levels he's interested in, and his grammar, which I suspect works well for that population, is too blunt an instrument for linguistic purposes.  This isn't a criticism of his work.  We address different problems.  

 

Of course, sometimes people from both groups jump into the other sort of discussion.

 

Herb



	

	

	 

	Bob, Bill, Herb,

	   I have enjoyed the discussion very much, though I'm sure I'm not alone on the list in having the feeling I'm overhearing a conversation by insiders (rather than being included.)  But that's the nature of the beast (ATEG),  both our weakness and our strength.

	     I'm certainly  glad that people feel free to explore the nature of language without having to find direct teaching application, and I'm glad other people are interested in these applications.  Like Bill (I hope I'm not misreading you), I can't help feeling that anyone who looks at language as if it is not interactive will simply misunderstand what they are seeing, much as classical biology would miss so much without an ecological  orientation.  We can look at life in the lab, but it helps to remember that life does not exist in a laboratory, and the forms of life are part of a dynamic world.

	    Since my primary interest has been reading and writing, I am interested in grammar in context (and by that, I don't mean finding student error in their actual work, which is what context has come to mean in my field, but looking at how grammar participates in the making of a public meaning.) To me, a grammar that does not accommodate this is a bit like a human biology that has no connection to medicine or health.  (Grammar, of course, need not be reduced to a theory of disease.)  We need disinterested study, but we also give colossal grants and colossal resources to issues of great public weight, like finding a cure for cancer.  What we have in linguistics seems often to me to be the equivalent of saying that human health has nothing to do with biology.  And the fact that people are sick is not our concern.

	    We do, in fact, have a present day crisis in my field (English) deeply exacerbated because so many specialists are at work asking questions that they themselves say are irrelevant to real world practice. The material I quoted from Diane Hacker on pronouns and antecedents is a case in point.  The deep disconnection between the work of linguistics and public understanding (Hacker's book is generally thought of as among the most current of handbooks) is absolutely staggering. 

	    I'm probably reducing the argument to the absurd, but it's a little like saying that much grammar has nothing to do with what people write, read, say, or hear in their everyday lives.  If you can't bring the knowledge back to that world, what use is it?

	    Using a tag question, I see as a functional test.  It is made possible because a sentence (in traditional practice) requires a grammatical subject and finite verb (though they don't fully understand what they are asking for), and the tag question is a test for those elements.  (The finite verb auxiliary acts almost like a pronoun would, as a stand in for the predicate.)  SFG pays considerable attention to this.  This "mood element" is often what gets bandied about in conversation when we agree or disagree with a statement or even answer a question.  "Did your son ever graduate from college?" "He did."  "He" stands in for "your son" and "did" stands in for the predicate ("graduated from college.") The tag question also has the function within conversation of inviting a response from the listener, perhaps softening a statement from time to time. "You will be on time on Friday, won't you?" We wouldn't be able to use it as a trick for identifying the subject if it weren't already part of our functional repertoire. 

	    Subject and predicate are functional terms, not simply formal ones.  The sense I get of their meaning (again, traditional grammar is not all that reflective about what it is asking for) is that something has been isolated (the subject) and something has been predicated about it.  There are, indeed, formal ways in which this is realized, and I don't know of a functional grammar that would ever imply that function is not realized through forms.  SFG presents this as one of three subject functions, and it gives us the kind of framework that helps us understand why we produce sentences that do not conform to the prescriptive norms. Predicating statements are not the only kind of meaning language allows us, but traditional grammar tends to overemphasize their value by insisting on them in all formal contexts. It's hard to conform to (or amend) a practice without understanding what is being asked for.

	    Rather than seeing the tag question trick as a great boon from linguistics, I would see it as  one more attempt to stave off the real teaching of grammar.  These minimalist approaches (avoiding error in context or what is sometimes called "grammar at the point of need") are simply stopgap solutions for writing teachers who are trying to help students who know little or no grammar to start with.  Since knowledge of grammar is considered either irrelevant (descriptive) or harmful (prescriptive), we use these tricks to get by with as little knowledge as we can.  It seems easier than saying that this isn't an independent clause, or whatever would be relevant, simply because we know that the student doesn't know what a clause is and somewhere along the line we have decided that it is not important or helpful to take the time to teach what a clause is or how subordination contributes to the creation of meaning.    

	    We won't begin to solve this problem until we admit that a deep separation exists and admit that it is not necessarily everyone else's fault.

	

	Craig  

	       

	



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