Introduction

[James Cornish]

Dear list-subscribers

I am one of the owners of this list at Texas A&M but am writing as a
subscriber.  I am in the graduate program at the PhD level in the
Discourse Studies option.  My MA is in Linguistics with an 'English as a
Second Language' pedagogy option from CSUFresno.

I have been interested in lexical cohesion as a text forming quality of
language for awhile now.  Michael Hoey (1992) has done some interesting
investigations into how these relationships can be tagged and used to
describe texts.  I'm interested in how those relationships influence
raters of student writing.

I've also done some work in what Burkeans would call 'god terms' or I
guess Hart would call 'ultimate terms' and some linguists would call it
saliency of topicalized NPs or something.  I used a concordance program
to find the ultimate terms in Halliday's _Intro to Functinal Grammar_
and one of the formalist grammar textbooks to show that they really do
view the world differently and try to convince novices of the same.

Anyhow, I truly look forward to the evolution of this community we are
forming.  God Bless Texas! (I wish my email program supported the
intonation markers that phrase demands).

--
James Warren Cornish -  Texas A&M University
English Department/ Discourse Studies
213B Blocker Bldg. M/S 4227
College Station
TX  77840-4337
409-845-3542 ex. 40