9.
M.A.K. Halliday1
9.1
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday was a pupil of Firth's, and, with greater
elaboration, has pursued similar precepts, above all that ‘linguistics' should
`deal with meaning' `at all levels of analysis' and should study ‘texts' ‘in
contexts of situation' (cf. 8.46f vs. 9.8, 22f, 38, 49, 107). Halliday finds
‘the question “what is language?”‘ unduly ‘diffuse’ and
‘disingenuous’, because ‘no one account of language will be appropriate
for all purposes’ (IF xxix, EF 9) (13.22). ‘A theory being a means of
action’, we must consider what ‘action’ we ‘want to take’
‘involving’ ‘language’, so we know what is ‘relevant’ and
‘interesting’ for ‘the investigation or the task at hand’ -- ‘the
nature and functions of language’, its ‘formal properties’, its ‘role’
‘in the community and the individual’, its ‘relation’ to ‘culture’,
and so on (EF 9, IF xixf) (cf. 9.111; 11.6; 13.58). We may inquire ‘what all
languages have in common’ or how they ‘differ’, and how they ‘vary
according to user’ and ‘function’ or ‘evolve through time’; or ‘how
a child develops language, and how language may have evolved in human
species’. Or, we may explore ‘the quality of texts’ such as ‘written and
spoken’ or ‘literary and poetic’ (IF xxx). Or, we may seek ways to
‘help’ people ‘learning their mother tongue’ or a ‘foreign
language’, or ‘training translators and interpreters’, or composing
‘reference works (dictionaries, grammars)’ or ‘computer software’ to
‘produce and understand’ ‘text’ and ‘speech’. Or, we may focus on
‘language and the brain’ to help in ‘the diagnosis and treatment of
language pathologies’ (‘tumours’, ‘autism’, ‘Down's syndrome’), or
in the ‘design of appliances’ for ‘the hard of hearing’.
9.2
Halliday compares two ‘depths of focus’ in ‘linguistics': ‘the more
immediate’ ‘intrinsic’ aim to ‘explain the nature of language’,
‘implying an “autonomous” view’; versus ‘the further, extrinsic
aim to explain features of the social structure’ through ‘language’,
‘implying an instrumental’ view (EF 69). He ‘stresses the
instrumentality of linguistics’ (EF 96), but the two views are not really
separable. ‘Autonomy’ can be only ‘conditional and temporary’ along the
way to a ‘general account of language’ (EF 53). The ‘linguist’ who
‘insists on autonomy’ studies ‘grammar and phonology’ as ‘the
“inner” strata of the linguistic system, the core of language’, but these
are ‘contingent upon other systems’ depending on ‘extra-linguistic
phenomena’ (EF 96; cf. EF 105) (cf. 13.40). ‘Grammatical phenomena’ are
‘related’ ‘to features of a culture’ in ‘extremely complex and
abstract’ ways; ‘linguists’ who ‘avoid the language/culture issue’
blot out ‘an important area of research’ (IF xxxi).2 Moreover,
‘criteria’ of ‘well-formedness’ are ‘not easy to find’ ‘within
language’; ‘in “autonomous” linguistics’, ‘orthography’, ‘a
codified form of idealization’, ‘usually’ ‘decides’ (EF 68) (cf. 9.43,
82, 941). But in ‘a theory’ of ‘social structure’, ‘what is
well-formed’ is ‘interpretable as a possible selection within a set of
options based on some motivated hypothesis about language behaviour’ (EF 69).
9.3
Halliday draws a different ‘basic opposition in grammars of the second half of
the 20th century’ than the one featured in ‘the public debates of the
1960s’ between ‘“structuralist”‘ and ‘“generative”‘ approaches
(IF xxviii). On one side he places ‘paradigmatic’
or ‘“choice” grammars’ -- ‘the functional
ones, with their roots in rhetoric and ethnography’ -- ‘interpreting
language as a network of relations with structures’ that ‘realize3
these relationships’, ‘emphasizing variables among different languages’,
and ‘taking semantics as foundation; hence grammar is natural and organized
around the text or discourse’ (IF xxviii, xiii, xix). On the other side he
places ‘syntagmatic’ or
‘“chain” grammars'-- ‘the formal
ones with their roots in logic and philosophy’ -- ‘interpreting language as
a list of structures’ connected by ‘regular relations’ (shown as
‘transformations’), ‘emphasizing universal features of language, and
taking grammar (which they call “syntax”) as the foundation of language;
hence the grammar is arbitrary’ and ‘organized around the sentence’.
Despite some ‘cross currents’ and ‘borrowing’ of ‘insights’, the two
sides have found it ‘difficult to maintain a dialogue’ or ‘exchange
ideas’ (IF xviii).
9.4
Chomsky ‘called his own syntagmatic formal grammar “generative”‘ to
‘distinguish’ it from the ‘“structuralists”‘, on whom he was
‘building’ despite his ‘polemics’ , and to suggest that his was
‘written in a way which did not depend on unconscious assumptions of the
reader’ but ‘operated as a formal system’ (IF xxviii) (cf. 7.91). In
return, ‘the language has to be so idealized that it bears little relation to
what people actually write, and still less to what they actually say’. The
so-called ‘Chomskyan revolution’ was more ‘a shift of emphasis’ ‘from
the anthropological to the philosophical standpoint’ (cf. 7.1ff). ‘The
return’ to ‘discourse in the 1970s’, however, ‘restored the balance’
and reinstated ‘the ethnographic tradition’ (Malinowski, Whorf, Pike), of
which ‘Chomsky seems to have been unaware’ (IF xxviiif).
9.5
In its ‘extreme form’, ‘the philosopher's approach to language’
encourages ‘linguistics’ to ‘idealize out all natural language as
irrelevant and unsystematic, and to treat only constructed logical languages’
(EF 53) (cf. 13.50). ‘A lesser extreme’ ‘reduces’ ‘all sentences of
natural language’ ‘to a “deep structure”‘ of ‘logical relations’
(7.62-66). Chomsky's ‘idealization’, by ‘reducing them to the same level
as stutterings, false starts, clearings of the throat’, ‘irons out’
‘behaviourally significant variations in language’, e.g., ‘features of
assertion and doubt’ (cf. 7.12; 9.51f). ‘In a sociological context’,
‘the image of language having a “pure” form (“langue”) that becomes
contaminated in the process of being translated into speech (“parole”) is of
little value’ (EF 67) (13.47). So Halliday discards the ‘boundary between
language and speech’, ‘“langue” and “parole”, or competence and
performance’ (cf. 2.20; 5.7; 6.33, 46; 7.12; 8.30; 11.69; 12.12, 26, 47, 55,
67; 13.36).
9.6
Against ‘the Chomskyan notion of competence’, Halliday's notion of
‘meaning potential ‘is defined’ ‘in terms of culture’, not ‘mind':
‘what speakers can do’ and ‘can mean’, not what they ‘know’ (EF 52f,
25, 55, 57, 72, 110). We ‘force a distinction between meaning and function’
if we ‘characterize language subjectively as the ability or competence of the
speaker, instead of objectively as a potential or set of alternatives’ (EF 25)
(cf. 12.45). ‘“Can do”‘ is ‘related’ to ‘“does”‘ ‘as
potential to actual’, whereas ‘the relation between ‘“knows”‘ and
‘“does”‘ ‘is complex and oblique’ (EF 52f) (cf. 9.12; 13.39). ‘A
hypothesis about what the speaker can do in a social context’ ‘makes sense
of what he does’, which might otherwise ‘appear merely as a random
selection’ (EF 67). We must ‘pay attention to what is said’ and ‘relate
it systematically to what might have been said but was not’ (cf. 9.21; 13.43).
9.7
‘Language is the primary means of cultural transmission’ whereby
‘behavioural options’ are ‘typically realized’, ‘social groups are
integrated, and the individual is identified and reinforced’ (EF 45, 107, 8,
48, 69f) (cf. 3.1; 4.10; 8.28). Therefore, Halliday concurs with Firth (who
‘introduced the term “sociological linguistics”‘ ‘in 1935’ [in
‘The Techniques of Semantics’, P1 7-33] that ‘language as social behaviour’
is ‘an acknowledged concern of modern linguistics’ (EF 48f) (cf. 8.50;
Halliday & Hasan 1985:8). His own ‘orientation is to language as social
rather than individual’ and is ‘aligned’ with ‘sociological rather than
psychological’ research’ (IF xxx, EF 53f) (cf. 8.17, 28; 947;
13.15).4 Studying ‘social man’ ‘shifts the emphasis from the
physical to the human environment’ (EF 48) (cf. 8.23). ‘The individual is
seen as the focus of a complex of human relations which collectively define the
content of his social’ and ‘linguistic’ ‘behaviour’ (EF 48, 52).
9.8
Whereas the ‘“context of culture”‘ ‘defines’ ‘the potential’, i.e., ‘the range of possibilities’, the
‘“context of situation”‘ determines ‘the actual’,
i.e., the ‘choice’ that ‘takes place’ (EF 49) (cf. 6.11; 12.55f).
Firth's ‘interest’ was ‘in the actual, the text and its relation to its
surroundings’ -- not however, ‘in the accidental but the typical':
‘repetitive, significant, and systematizable patterns of social behaviour’ (EF
49, 26, 40, 43) (cf. 8.26f). Hence, the ‘actual’ is not ‘unique’ or a
‘chance product of random observation’; and ‘the analysis of language
comes within the range of a social theory’ and leads toward ‘an account of
semantic options deriving from the social structure’ (EF 49ff, 64; cf. EF 62)
(13.14).
9.9
Research therefore demands a ‘theory of social meanings’ -- a
‘socio-semantics’, a ‘meeting ground of two ideologies, the social and the
linguistic’ (EF 44, 56, 64). Moreover, ‘a behavioural semantics’ is needed
to map out the ‘intermediate levels’ which ‘relate behavioural options’
‘to the grammar’ (EF 55, 83). In this view, ‘the meaning potential’ of
‘language’ ‘realizes behaviour potential’ and is ‘in turn realized in
the language system as lexicogrammatical5 potential’ (‘what the
speaker “can say”’) (EF 51, 55, 69). ‘Meaning is a form of behaving’,
and ‘“to mean” is a verb of the “doing” class’ (EF 55) (cf. 9.15).
9.10
‘The connection between’ ‘the social functions of language and the
linguistic system’ is ‘clearest in the case of the language of the very
young child’ (EF 34, 31). Those
‘functions’ ‘determine both the options the child creates for himself and
their realizations in structure’ (EF 44, 33, 29). ‘Language development’
is thus ‘the mastery of linguistic functions': learning ‘the meaning
potential associated’ with ‘the uses of language’, i.e., ‘learning how
to mean’ (EF 24, 7) (cf. Halliday 1975). ‘Insights into how language is
learned’ ought to shed light on ‘the internal organization of language’
(IF 45) (cf. 7.24). We already have ‘important work’ in the ‘theory of
social meanings’ based on ‘the socialization of the child’, e.g. that of
Basil Bernstein (EF 44f, 63; cf. EF 8, 18f, 48, 52, 64, 68ff, 73).6
9.11
In ‘learning his mother tongue, a child’ ‘is, in effect, learning new
modes and conditions of being’ (EF 7). He ‘first tends to use language in
just one function at a time’; ‘structure’ and ‘internal form reflect’
a given ‘function’ ‘rather directly’, and ‘the utterance has just one
structure’ (EF 7f, 34, 27, 97, 44) (cf. 5.32; 1116). The
‘two-level system with meanings coded directly into expressions (sounds and
gestures)’ gets ‘replaced, in the second year of life, by a three-level
system’ with a ‘grammar’, whereby ‘meanings are first coded into
wordings and these then recoded into expressions’ (IF xviif) (cf. 9.36f).
‘This step’ ‘opens up’ ‘the potential for dialogue, the dynamic
exchange of meanings with other people’, and ‘for combining different kinds
of meaning in one utterance -- using language to think with and to act with at
the same time’. ‘Later’ ‘in the evolution’ ‘of the system’, the
‘child’ ‘learns the principle of “grammatical metaphor”‘, ‘whereby
meanings may be cross-coded, and phenomena represented by categories other than
those evolved to represent them’ (cf. 9.97ff). Eventually, in ‘adult
language’, ‘utterances are functionally complex': almost ‘every linguistic
act’ ‘serves several functions’ that ‘interact’ in ‘subtle and
complex’ ways (EF 34, 8) (cf. 9.14, 25).
9.12
Following Malinowski in aligning ‘ontogeny’ with ‘phylogeny’, Halliday
speculates that ‘the developing language system of the child traverses, or at
least provides an analogy for, the stages through which language itself has
evolved’, and thus ‘opens up’ ‘a discussion about the nature and social
origins of language’ (EF 34, IF xviii) (cf. 13.38). Having ‘no living
specimens of its ancestral types’, we can gather ‘evidence’ ‘from
studying the language and how it is learnt by a child’ (EF 23f) (cf. 535;
7.24ff, 87). ‘To judge from children's “protolanguage”‘, ‘language
evolved in the human species’ from ‘an early stage’ ‘without any
grammar’, the ‘meanings’ being ‘expressed through rather simple
structures whose elements derive directly from the functions’ (IF xvii, EF 97)
(cf. 9.39, 72).
9.13
By this line of argument, ‘the lexicogrammar is a natural symbolic system’ (IF xviii) (cf. 9.3, 32). ‘Both the
general kinds of grammatical pattern that have evolved in language and the
specific manifestations of each’ ‘bear a natural relation to the meanings
they have evolved to express’ (IF xvii). The early stage has a ‘relatively
small range of meanings for which natural symbols can be devised’ (IF xviii).
‘In the later protolinguistic stage’, the ‘interface’ between
‘meaning’ and ‘sound’ ‘develops’ a ‘frontier of arbitrariness’
to make ‘communication’ less ‘restricted’; but the ‘interface’
between ‘meaning and wording’ ‘should not’ ‘become arbitrary’, since
‘such a system, by the time it got rich enough to be useful, would also have
become impossible to learn’ (cf. 13.27). This account goes against ‘the
psycholinguistic movement of 1960s’, ‘concerned primarily with the mechanism
of language rather than with its meaning and function’, and focused on ‘the
acquisition7 of sounds’ (‘articulation’, ‘phonology’) or of
‘linguistic forms (‘vocabulary’, ‘grammar’) (EF 24). Research measured
‘the size of the child's vocabulary’, ‘the relative frequency of different
parts of speech’, plus ‘the control of sentence syntax in the written
medium’. Later, work centred on ‘the acquisition of linguistic structures’
according to ‘the “nativist” view’ (cf. 7.22-28, 31f).
9.14
For ‘our conception of language’ to be ‘exhaustive, it must incorporate
all the child's own “models”‘ (EF
17, 10). In ‘the instrumental model’, ‘language’ is ‘a means of
getting things done’, and in ‘the regulatory model’, a means for
‘exercising control over others’ and ‘their behaviour’ (EF 11f, 31). In
‘the interactional model’, ‘language’ serves ‘the interaction
between the self and others’ in ‘complex and rapidly changing’
‘patterns’, and ‘defines and consolidates the group’ (EF 13). In ‘the personal
model’, ‘the child’ becomes ‘aware of language as a form of
individuality’ and of its ‘role’ in ‘the development of personality’ (EF
14). In ‘the heuristic model’, ‘language’ serves ‘to explore
his environment’ and ‘investigate reality’, and in ‘the imaginative
model’, ‘to create his own environment’ (EF 14f). ‘Finally’, in ‘the
representational model’, ‘language is’ ‘a means of communicating
about something, expressing propositions’, and ‘conveying a message’ with
‘specific reference’ to ‘processes, persons, objects, abstractions,
qualities, states, and relations of the real world’ (EF 16) (cf. 13.24).
‘The ritual model’, with ‘language’ as ‘a means for showing how
well one was brought up’, comes much later and ‘plays no part in the child's
experience’ (EF 16f).
9.15
With all these facets, the child's total ‘“model” of language is highly
complex’ (EF 11) ‘Most adult notions of language’, in contrast, even if
‘externalized and consciously formulated’, are ‘much too simple’,
implying that ‘language’ is only for ‘transmission of content’ and that
‘the representational function’ is ‘dominant’ (EF 11, 16) (cf. 3.15;
8.47; 13.24). ‘We tend to underestimate the total extent and functional
diversity of the part played by language in the life of the child’ (EF 11).
Because, ‘for the child’, ‘language’ ‘has meaning in a very broad
sense’ and ‘a range of functions which the adult does not normally think of
as meaningful’, we have here a ‘vital’ domain for ‘redefining our notion
of meaning’ to ‘include’ ‘all functions of language’ as ‘purposive,
non-random, conceptualized activity’ (EF 18). ‘The young child’ ‘can be
internalizing language while listening and talking’, and can ‘constantly ask
questions’ to get ‘not merely facts’, but ‘generalizations about reality
that language makes it possible to explore’ (EF 14f) (cf. 12.60). Also,
‘language in its imaginative function is not necessarily “about”
anything’, not even ‘a make-believe copy of the world’; it may be for
‘pure sound’ and ‘linguistic play’ (EF 15f).
9.16
For effectual ‘language teaching’,
‘the teacher's own model of language’ should ‘encompass all that the child
knows language to be’ and take account of the child's own linguistic
experience’ in its ‘richest potential’ (EF 10, 19) (cf. 8.7). The model
should also be ‘relevant’ to ‘later experiences’ and ‘to the
linguistic demands of society’ -- where we are ‘surrounded’ not by
‘grammars and dictionaries or randomly chosen words and sentences’ but by
‘“text” or language in use’ in a ‘situation’ (EF 20) (cf. 11.86, 91;
13.31). ‘If the teacher's own “received” conception of language’ is
‘less rich’ and ‘diversified, it will be irrelevant to the educational
task’, witness the ‘unhappy experience’ caused by ‘the view of language
as primarily good manners’ (EF 10f, 19) (cf. 8.7). ‘In school’, ‘the
child’ ‘is required to accept a stereotype of language contrary to
insights’ from ‘his own experience’, as in ‘the traditional first
“reading and writing” tasks’ (EF 11). ‘The old “see Spot run”‘
‘reader’ ‘bore little’ ‘relation to any use of language’ (EF 12)
(cf. 4.85).
9.17
Such issues are urgent because ‘educational failure is often’ ‘language
failure’, due to ‘a fundamental mismatch between the child's linguistic
capabilities and the demands’ being ‘made upon them’ (EF 18f) (Bernstein
1971-72) (cf. 4.85; 8.7). The problem lies not in ‘dialect or accent’, nor
in ‘lack of words (vocabulary’ is ‘learnt very easily’ through
‘opportunity’ and ‘motivation’), nor in ‘an impoverishment of
grammar’ or a ‘narrower range of syntactic options’ (EF 18).8
Instead, ‘the child’ ‘suffers some limitation’ in ‘linguistic
models’ and some ‘restriction on the range of uses of language’; the
‘functions’ ‘have developed one-sidedly’, perhaps at the expense of
‘the personal function and the heuristic’, which do ‘not follow
automatically from the acquisition of the grammar and vocabulary’ (EF 18f).
9.18
Halliday's concern for language development and pedagogy lends urgency to his
broad social vision of language. He holds it to be ‘a universal of culture
that all languages are called upon to fulfil a small set of distinct though
related demands’ which, though ‘indefinitely many and varied’, are
‘derived ultimately from a small number of general headings’ (NT 3/207, EF
104f) (cf. 5.26, 84, 52; 8.27). And it is ‘the nature of
language’ to ‘have all these functions built into its total capacity’ such
that ‘the social functioning of language’ is ‘reflected in’ ‘the
internal organization of language as a system’ (cf. Malinowski 1923) (EF 23).9
Thus, ‘functional theories of language’ seek to ‘explain the nature’ and
‘organization’ of ‘the language system’ by asking which ‘functions it
has evolved to serve’ ‘in the life of social man’ and how these are
‘achieved’ ‘through speaking and listening, reading and writing’ (EF 66,
42ff, 7).
9.19
Halliday now proposes a ‘functional
grammar’ that can reveal how ‘the form of language’ is ‘determined
by the functions’, and the ‘grammatical patterns’ by ‘configurations of
functions’ (EF 7, IF x) (but cf. 3.16, 22, 24, 33; 4.47, 49; 7.63; 8.58; 9.28,
33; 12.25, 27, 50, 53-58). ‘Each element in a language is explained by
reference to its function in the total linguistic system’; and most
‘linguistic items are multi-functional’ (IF xiii, 32, xxi) (9.25; cf.
13.43). Among the ‘many grammars that are functional in orientation’ is ‘systemic grammar’ (IF x).10 ‘Systemic theory’
‘interprets’ ‘meaning as choice’ and ‘a language’ or ‘semiotic
system’ ‘as networks of interlocking options’, in line with ‘Firth's
category of the “system”‘ as ‘a functional paradigm'11 and
with his ‘polysystemic principle’ (IF xiv, xxvii, EF 55; cf. 8.30, 32). ‘A
system is a set of features one’ ‘of which must be selected if
the entry condition is satisfied’
(NT 1/37, EF 55). ‘Such a “selection expression” is then realized as a structure,
the structural representation being fully derived from the systemic; each
element of the structure is a point of entry into a further systemic network’
(NT 1/37). ‘Whatever is chosen in one system’ leads to ‘a set of choices
in another’ as we move from ‘the most general features step by step’ to
the ‘specific’ (IF xiv) .
9.20
But the Introduction does not ‘present’ ‘the systemic portion’ of ‘networks and realization statements’,
which ‘is currently stored in a computer’ (IF x, xv) (cf. Mann &
Matthiesen 1984). I would have liked to know more about the ‘semantic
network’, for which extensive claims have been made. For language, it was to
be ‘a statement of potential at that stratum’; ‘a representation’ of
‘paradigmatic relations’; ‘the input to the grammar’; and ‘a
description of each meaning selection and an account of its relationship to all
the others’ (EF 76, 79, 83). For human action, it was ‘the linguistic
realization of patterns of behaviour’; ‘the bridge between behaviour
patterns and linguistic forms’; and an ‘account of how social meanings are
expressed in language’ (EF 79, 83, 65).
9.21
Instead, the Introduction presents ‘the structural portion’, ‘showing how the options are realized’ --
seeking ‘breadth before depth’ and not ‘making explicit all the steps’
(IF xv, x) (cf. 9.111). Though it ‘presents structures which are the output of
networks’, the ‘grammar’ is not ‘“structural”‘ (nor ‘“structuralist”’
‘in the American sense’), i.e. ‘syntagmatic’
(IF xvii) (cf. 8.31). ‘A systemic grammar is paradigmatic’; ‘describing something consists in relating it to
everything else’ (9.7). The resulting ‘theory'12 is ‘not
parsimonious’, but ‘extravagant’, with ‘a wealth of apparatus’ (IF xix)
(cf. 9.109f). The ‘grammar’ has ‘a round of choices and operations (a
“system-structure cycle”) at each rank’; and ‘higher rank choices’ are
‘essentially choices in meaning without the grammar thereby losing contact
with the ground’.
9.22
The Introduction propounds a ‘comprehensive view of grammar’ for
‘interpreting a text in its context of culture’ (IF xxxii, xvii) (cf. 8.91;
13.63). Every ‘interpretation of texts, of the system, and of elements of
linguistic structure’ is based on ‘how the language is used’;
‘the uses’ ‘have shaped the system’ and must be studied, not just the
‘properties of the system as such’ (IF xxi, NT 3/207) (cf. 8.47; 13.36). But
‘whatever the final purpose’ or ‘direction’, the analysis must have ‘a
grammar at the base’ (IF xvi) (cf. 13.54). ‘The study of discourse (“text
linguistics”) cannot properly be separated from the study of the grammar’
(IF 345). Although ‘the text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one’,
‘meanings are realized through wordings’
(i.e. through ‘sequences’ or syntagms’ of ‘lexical’ and ‘grammatical
items’), and only a ‘grammar’ as ‘a theory of wordings’ allows one to
‘make explicit one's interpretation of the meaning of a text’ (IF xvii, xix,
xxxivf, 19f; cf. 9.37f).
9.23
So ‘discourse analysis’
‘provides a context within which grammar has a central place, and points the
way to the kind of grammar required': ‘functional and semantic’, able not
just to ‘characterize text in explicit formal terms’, but to ‘relate it to
the non-linguistic universe of its situational and cultural environment’ (IF
xvii) (cf. 9.109; 11.35). ‘The wheel has come full circle: when the mainstream
of linguistics’ was in its ‘syntactic age’, Halliday ‘argued against
grammar’ being ‘the beginning and ending of all things’; ‘now he insists
on the importance of grammar’ lest ‘discourse analysis or text
linguistics’ ‘be carried on without grammar’ (IF xvif). ‘A discourse
analysis’ ‘not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a
running commentary on a text’, appealing to ‘non-linguistic conventions’
or ‘trivial’ ‘linguistic’ ‘features’ ‘like the number of words per
sentence’, whose ‘objectivity’ ‘is often illusory’.
9.24
Halliday himself proffers only ‘a thumbnail sketch’, ‘a minute fragment of
an account of English grammar’ (IF 339, 286, 88, xiii). He grants that ‘many
aspects of English’ should be ‘much more fundamentally reexamined’;
‘twentieth-century linguistics’ ‘has tended to wrap old descriptions’
inside ‘new theories’, whereas we really need ‘new descriptions’, e.g.,
‘grammars for spoken language’ (IF xxxiv; cf. EF 57; 8.38, 67; 9.43; 13.8).
Of course, no ‘account’ could be ‘“complete”‘ ‘because a language
is inexhaustible’ (IF xiii) (13.22). We have ‘a finite body of text, written
or spoken’, but ‘the language itself, the system’ ‘behind the text, is
of indefinite extent’ (cf. 716; 9.18; 13.43). Besides,
‘distinctions’ can be pursued only up to a certain ‘degree of fineness or
“delicacy”‘ (IF xiii, 124; cf. IF xxvii, 286, EF 55, 58, 61, 75f, 94, IG
9).
9.25
Halliday also leaves it open if his ‘introduction to the functional grammar’
is just for ‘English’, or if it's a ‘general’ one ‘using English as
the language of illustration’ (IF xxxiv; cf. NT 3/209). He admits the
‘danger’ of ‘ethnocentrism': now that ‘more has been written about
English than any other language’, ‘modern linguistics’ ‘tends to foist
the English code on others’ as if they were ‘imperfect copies’, as once
was done with ‘Latin’ (IF xxxiii, xxxi) (cf. 2.5; 3.50; 4.4; 5.24; 6.5; 8.5,
14; 7.79; 12.20f; 13.53). For his own part, ‘those features’ ‘explicitly
claimed as universal are built into the theory’, notably his ‘hypothesis’
that three ‘“metafunctions”‘ ‘organize’ ‘the content systems’
‘in all languages’ (IF xxxiv) (9.47f). ‘But the descriptive categories are
treated as particular’; ‘it is far from clear just how similar a pair of
features in different languages should be in order to justify calling them by
the same name’.
9.26
To ‘attempt’ ‘a “grammar” of English’, we need to ‘treat the
system as a whole’ (IF 372) (13.46). If ‘grammar is not specialized
according to language use’ but applies to ‘all texts’, we could ‘cover
all functional varieties of the language’ (cf. 9.40). ‘The components of the
grammatical system’ thus ‘represent the functions of language in their most
generalized form, as these underlie all the more specific contexts of language
use’ (EF 67). ‘Grammar’ enables us to ‘mean more than one thing at
once’, ‘combines’ ‘functionally distinct meaning selections’ ‘into
integrated structures’, and thus ‘turns meanings into text’ (IF xxxv, EF
67, 42, 92f, 100).
9.27
Such a broad outlook raises substantial ‘problems for a grammatical theory’
when we ‘write about language’ and ‘turn’ it ‘back on itself’ (IF
xxv, xxxiiif; cf. 8.33; 13.48). First, ‘the whole grammatical system hangs
together, and it is difficult to break in without presupposing’ ‘what is
still to come’; ‘the discussion of any one system’ or ‘component’ may
‘require frequent reference to others’ (IF xxxiiif, NT 2/215, 3/180).
Second, to determine ‘what is systematic and what is irrelevant in
language’, we need to ‘decide what are different’ entities and what are
‘instances of the same’; and this ‘question’ ‘is not determined by the
system’, but ‘by the underlying social theory’ (EF 53, 49f) (cf. 4.26, 31;
5.15, 61, 65). Third, ‘categories of grammar’ are hard to ‘gloss in
exactly equivalent wordings’, because ‘they have evolved to say something
that cannot be said any other way’ and are on ‘a purely abstract level of
coding with no direct input-output link with the outside world’ (IF xxvi, xxxv)
(cf. 3.23). ‘The best one can do is display them at work, in paradigmatic
contexts, so as to highlight the semantic distinctions they enshrine’ (IF xxvi)
(cf. 4.55; 8.82). Fourth, ‘until linguistics begins to meddle’,
‘spontaneous speech’ has an ‘unconscious nature’, ‘performed without
thinking’ (IF xxivf) (cf. 216; 13.49). Our ‘generalizations’
are ‘statements about what actually happens subconsciously in natural
speech’ (IF xxvi, 272). Also, the ‘unconscious’ ‘slices of meaning’
which ‘the categories of our language represent’ may not ‘correspond to
our conscious structuring of the world’ (e.g. ‘the gender system in
English’) (IF xxv) (cf. 3.23; 13.24). And ‘a category only existing in the
unconscious semantic system’ is hard to ‘define succinctly or even
discursively’ -- it may even be ‘threatening’ to bring it to
‘consciousness’ But in ‘a theory’ of ‘social structure’, ‘what is
well-formed’ is ‘interpretable as a possible selection within a set of
options based on some motivated hypothesis about language behaviour’ (EF
69).(IF xxvi). Like ‘“tone deaf”‘, people may be ‘“grammar
deaf”‘ and ‘fail to recognize’ ‘subtle semantic distinctions’ or
‘even deny that they are possible’.
9.28
Accordingly, grammar entails ‘severe’ ‘problems’ in selecting ‘labels’,
which ‘become reified’ when we ‘forget how we arrived at them’ (IF
xxxiif). The ‘two significant ways to label a linguistic unit’ are to
‘assign it to a class’ (e.g.
‘adjective and noun’), or to ‘assign a function to it’ (e.g. ‘Modifier and Head’) (IF 27). ‘If all
the members of a class always had’ ‘only one function, it would not matter
which sets of labels we used’. But ‘class labels’ are ‘part of of the
dictionary’ and ‘indicate potential’; ‘functional labels are an
interpretation of the text’ and ‘indicate the part’ actually ‘played’
in a ‘particular structure’ as well as the ‘relation to the system of
language as a whole’ (IF 29, 31f, i.r.; 13.39) (cf. 9.6, 8f; 13.39).13
Here, ‘description and analysis should not be distinct and unrelated
operations’, but should ‘proceed side by side’, revealing each
‘structure’ as a ‘meaningful’ and ‘viable configuration of
functions’ (IF 32, 37).
9.29
For his own labels, Halliday undertakes to deploy ‘familiar categories’ and
‘terms in general use’, ‘redefined, in part, to fit in with the total
picture’ (IF xxxiv, 28) (cf. 8.40; 13.48). ‘Most of the labels’ he uses
are ‘functional’, signalled by ‘beginning with a capital letter’.14
He does ‘refer to classes’ ‘in the discussion’, but notes that many
‘are defined’ on ‘mixed’ ‘criteria’; he offers ‘generalized
glosses designed to suggest the core meaning of the category’ -- ‘basic
semantic motifs’ rather than ‘definitions’ (IF 27, 31, 202). We must
acknowledge the ‘high degree of indeterminacy’ pervading ‘language in its
categories’, ‘relations’, ‘classes’, ‘types’, and ‘tokens’ (EF
108, IF 31) (cf. 9.19, 35, 932, 38; 13.59). ‘There rarely are any
sharp lines in language, since it is an evolved system, not a designed one’,
witness the many ‘fuzzy lines’ and ‘borderline cases’ in the book (IF
xix, 318, 171; EF 33; cf. IF 163f, 186, 209, 219, 267, 327; EF 32, 112,;
NT2/223, 3/196)(cf. 5.47; 9.73; 11.22).
9.30
Halliday also reconsiders the ‘traditional linguistic’ ‘terms used for the
levels or “strata” of a language
-- the stages in the coding process from meaning to expression’ -- such as
‘phonology’, ‘semantics’, and ‘grammar’ (IF xiv) (cf. 4.71; 5.34f;
7.45; 8.51f; 11.16f, 35, 56; 12.82; 13.29). Though ‘phonological’ is named
alongside ‘grammatical’ and ‘semantic’ as a ‘level’ of ‘options in
natural language’ (cf. 7.56), Halliday's main ‘concern’ is ‘with
grammar’; and as a ‘general principle’, ‘only those distinctions’
shown to be ‘meaningful’ in ‘the grammatical description’ ‘are
represented in the phonological analysis’ (EF 55, IF 17f, IG 47) (9.39f, 53).
As we'd expect, he views ‘phonological structures, such as syllable and
foot’, as ‘configurations of functions’, but the ‘options’ are seldom
‘directly’ specifiable as ‘output’ for ‘options in the grammar’ (EF
94f). So aside from a gloss on the ‘phonometric structures’ of ‘spoken
verse’ (IF 10-16; cf. Note 15), IF is concerned only with tone and key, which
are crucial for signalling prominence in clauses and clause complexes (9.53).
Hence, Halliday's model is among the few that did not treat phonology as the
basic system and work from the smallest units (phonemes) on upward to grammar,
stressing structure and constituency over function and meaning (cf. 13.27).
9.31
‘Formal linguistics’ ‘replaces
“grammar”‘ with ‘“syntax”‘, following ‘the philosophy of
language, where syntax is opposed to semantics’ and ‘pragmatics’ is ‘a
third term’; but in ‘functional
linguistics’, ‘grammar consists of syntax and vocabulary’, plus
‘morphology’ ‘in languages which have word paradigms’ (IF xiv, EF 93)
(cf. 9.4, 6f; 96, 914; 2.55; 13.28). Within the
‘direction’ in ‘Western linguistics’ since ‘ancient Greece’, the
term ‘“syntax”‘ ‘suggests’ that ‘language is interpreted as a
system of forms to which meanings are then attached’ (IF xiv) (cf. 13.54).
‘In functional grammar’, ‘the direction is reversed: a language is
interpreted as system of meanings accompanied by forms through which the
meanings are realized’. ‘The forms’ are a ‘means to an end’, not ‘an
end in themselves’; we ask not ‘what do these forms mean?’ but ‘how are
these meanings expressed?’ (IF xiv, 320).
9.32
Even so, Halliday says ‘grammar is the level of formal organization in
language’ -- a ‘purely internal level’ and ‘the main defining
characteristic of language’ (EF 98) (cf. 13.54). Yet ‘it is not arbitrary’;
it is ‘natural’, having
‘evolved as “content form”‘ on ‘a functional basis’ (cf. 2.28ff;
9.3, 13, 35f, 51; 13.27). As the ‘complexity’ of both ‘linguistic
function’ and ‘language’ increased, ‘the stratal form of organization’
‘emerged’, ‘with a purely formal level of coding at its core’ to
‘integrate’ ‘complex meaning selections’ into ‘structures’ by
‘sorting specific uses of language into a small number of highly general
functions’ (9.11ff, 37).
9.33
Halliday rejects ‘immediate constituent
analysis’ by ‘maximal bracketing’, which ‘never allows more than two
elements in a bracket’, in favour of ‘ranked
constituent analysis’ by ‘minimal bracketing’, which takes as
‘constituents only those sequences that actually function as structural units
in the item’ (NT 1/37, IF 22, 24, 26, 30) (cf. 4.59; 5.21, 50, 62; 7.37f, 63,
86; 13.26). In ‘trying to explain as much of grammar as possible in terms of
constituent structure’, the ‘maximal’ way suggests an ‘order in which
elements of a string are combined’, with some being ‘more closely bonded’;
‘it says nothing about the function’ of ‘any of the pieces’ (IF 30, 25,
22, 26f). ‘Function’ must be shown by ‘labelling parts’ and ‘nodes’
(in ‘the tree metaphor’) to ‘indicate’ the ‘configuration’ and
‘explain the value in relation to the whole’ (IF 27).
9.34
‘A scale of rank for grammar’ can
be ‘defined’ by ‘adopting’ ‘sentence, clause, group, word, and
morpheme as a strict hierarchy of constituents’ (IF 25) (13.29).15
But ‘language’ ‘embodies a multiplicity of constituent hierarchies,
coexisting in different parts of the system’ (IF 18) (cf. 5.36f, 39f).16
‘Units of different rank tend to carry patterns of different kinds’; and
‘the functional specification of units of different functions is of
fundamental significance in determining grammatical structure’. Almost every
‘constituent enters into more than one structural configuration’ ‘at a
number of levels simultaneously’, and ‘has more than one function at a
time’ (IF 32, 271, EF 44) (9.19, 59; cf. 13.57). ‘The choice of a word may
express one type of meaning, its morphology another, and its position’ yet
‘another’ (EF 42) (cf. 9.37; 12.43, 72). The upshot is ‘infinite
possibilities of matching them up in meaningful ways’ (IF 18) (cf. 9.18, 24).
9.35
Moreover, ‘since the relation of grammar to semantics’ is ‘natural, not
arbitrary, and both are purely abstract systems of coding’, ‘there is no
clear line between’ them; ‘functional grammar’ is ‘pushed in the
direction of semantics’ (IF xix, xvii). ‘In principle, a grammatical system
is as abstract (is as “semantic”) as possible given only that it can
generate integrated structures’, i.e., ‘its output can be expressed in terms
of functions mapped directly onto others’ to yield ‘a single structural
“shape”‘ that is ‘multiply labelled’ (EF 95) (cf. 9.44). In this
manner, ‘the combination of system and structure with rank leads’ to a
‘grammar’ whose ‘abstractness’ (‘“depth” in the Chomskyan
sense’) we can ‘specify fairly accurately in theoretical terms’.
9.36
Although we cannot ‘spell out all the steps from meaning to wording’, we
should recognize the ‘principle’ ‘that all categories employed must be
clearly “there” in the grammar of the language’, ‘not set up simply to
label differences in meaning’ (IF xx) (cf. 9.62). Without some
‘lexicogrammatical reflex’, such ‘differences’ are not ‘systemically
distinct in the grammar’. However firmly ‘based on meaning’, ‘a
functional grammar’ is ‘an interpretation of linguistic forms': ‘every
distinction’ -- ‘every set of options, or “system”‘ -- must ‘make
some contribution to the form of the wording’ (IF xx, xvii) (cf. 9.22; 13.54).
So ‘grammar’ is ‘a theory of wordings’, which ‘are purely abstract
pieces of code’ to be ‘recoded in sound or writing’ before you can ‘see
or hear them’ (IF xx, xvii, xix). This ‘recoding’, and not ‘the relation
between the meaning and the wording’, is the domain of ‘arbitrariness’ (IF
xviif).17
9.37
In the ‘grammar’, ‘meanings are accepted from different metafunctional
inputs and spliced together to form integrated outputs or wordings’ (IF xxxivf)
(cf. 9.32, 35). ‘The wording “realizes” or encodes the meaning’ and is
‘in turn “realized by” sound or writing’ (IF xx). We needn't ask
‘which determines which’ or what ‘each symbol as an isolate’
‘means’; ‘the meaning is encoded in the wording as an integrated whole’.
But in ‘a theory’ of ‘social structure’, ‘what is well-formed’ is
‘interpretable as a possible selection within a set of options based on some
motivated hypothesis about language behaviour’ (EF 69).(IF xxvi). Like
‘“tone deaf”‘, people may be ‘“grammar deaf”‘ and ‘fail to
recognize’ ‘subtle semantic distinctions’ or ‘even deny that they are
possible’. ‘The choice’ of an ‘item’, its ‘place in the syntagm’,
‘its combination’ with another, and its ‘internal organization’ may each
have a ‘meaning’; ‘the grammar’ ‘sorts out these possible variables
and assigns them to their specific semantic functions’ (cf. 9.34).
9.38
Therefore, ‘a language’ ‘is a system for making meanings: a semantic
system with other systems for encoding the meanings it produces’ (IF xvii)
(cf. 8.46f). Halliday warns that ‘everyday terminology’ and ‘“meaning”
in its lay use’ may ‘imply’ that many ‘areas of syntactic choice are not
meaningful’; and he discards the term ‘content’ because it ‘calls to
mind’ the ‘irrelevant’ ‘form/content opposition’ (NT 3/209).18
‘“Semantics” does not simply refer to the meanings of words’ but to
‘the entire system of meanings’ ‘expressed by grammar’ and
‘vocabulary’ (IF xvii). And ‘semantics’ is ‘a stratum’
‘intermediate between the social system’ (‘wholly outside language’) and
‘the grammatical system’ (‘wholly inside language’) (EF 96). . But
though, we cannot give ‘a general account of English semantics’, but only
for ‘a particular register’ or ‘body of text’ (IF 372, xx) (cf. 9.105;
13.31).
9.39
‘Semantic systems’ ‘relate’ to ‘grammatical systems’ through the
‘pre-selection’ of ‘options’ (EF 98). Due to ‘indeterminacy between
the strata’, we usually find not ‘one-to-one correspondences’ between
‘grammar’, ‘semantics’ and ‘phonology’, but rather ‘neutralization
and diversification’ -- ‘many-to-many’ (cf. Lamb 1970) (EF 82, 93, 56f)
(cf. 3.32; 5.48, 64; 13.54). ‘In some instances’, however, we can go from
‘semantics’ ‘directly to the “formal items”: to the actual words,
phrases, and clauses of the language’, with ‘no need’ for ‘grammatical
systems and structures’ (EF 83ff) (cf. 9.11f). True, this ‘happens only’
with ‘a closed set of options in a clearly circumscribed social context’,
e.g., ‘a greeting system in middle-class British English’ or in a ‘closed
transaction such as buying a train or bus ticket’ (EF 83f). In such cases,
‘the formal items’ ‘are rather like non-linguistic semiotic systems’,
e.g., ‘traffic signs and care labels on clothing, where the meanings are
directly encoded into patterns in the visual medium, with a minimum of stratal
organization’. In genuine ‘language, such systems are marginal’, ‘a
small fraction of the total phenomena’ among ‘much more open’ and
‘general settings’.
9.40
For similar reasons, it is not clear how far ‘grammatical and lexical
properties of sentences used by the speaker in the speech situation’ ‘can be
“predicted” from a semantics of behaviour based on social context’ (EF 90)
(cf. 13.40). We will ‘find’ ‘a direct link’ between ‘features of the
social structure’ and ‘forms of the language’ only ‘in odd cases’,
e.g., ‘phonological variables’ of ‘dialect’ and ‘“accent”‘ (EF
65) (cf. Labov 1968). We can ‘specify’ ‘general’ or ‘principal
grammatical features’ and ‘narrow down’ the ‘lexical set’ by
‘exploring areas of behaviour where the meanings are expressed through very
general features’ ‘involved in nearly all uses of language’ (EF 91, 84)
(cf. 9.26). But we might ‘not go very far in delicacy’, and might have to
use ‘favourable instances’ and ‘restricted types of situation’, not
‘the whole of an individual's language behaviour’ (EF 92, 62). We would
cover ‘only a small proportion’ ‘of the total’ ‘speech by educated
adults in a complex society’ (EF 92).
9.41
Along another dimension of language versus context, ‘grammar is at once
both’ ‘of the system’ and ‘of
the text’ (IF xxii) (cf. 6.34;
13.39). Halliday follows Saussure's view of ‘the relationship between the
system of language and instantiation in acts of speaking’, but not his
‘conclusion’ that ‘the texts can be dispensed with’ after ‘being used
as evidence for the system’ (IF xxii) (2.19f; 13.36). ‘This mistake’
‘haunted linguistics for much of the twentieth century’, ‘obsessed with
system at the expense of text’, up to ‘the present swing’ ‘in the
opposite direction’ (9.4).19 ‘An elegant theory of the system’
has ‘little use’ ‘if it cannot account for how the system engenders
text’. So ‘discourse analysis must be founded on the study of the system’,
which in turn ‘throws light on discourse’ and shows ‘the text’ ‘as
process’.
9.42
‘The ‘experience’ of a ‘process’ with ‘a continuous flow, without
clear segments or boundaries’ -- ‘as text
(mass noun) rather than as a text/texts (count noun)’ -- is best found
in ‘speech’ (IF xxiii).
‘Speech’ is ‘important’ not just because ‘it comes first in the
history of the race and the individual’, but because in it ‘the potential of
the system is more richly developed’ and ‘fully revealed’, ‘its semantic
frontiers are expanded, and its potential for meaning is enhanced’ (IF xxiiif,
201) (13.33). ‘Speech’ ‘responds continually’ to ‘subtle changes in
the environment, both verbal and nonverbal’, and ‘exhibits a rich pattern of
semantic’ and ‘grammatical variation’ not ‘explored in writing’ (IF
xxiv). ‘Spoken language’ can ‘“choreograph” very long and intricate
patterns of semantic movement while maintaining a continuous flow of discourse
that is coherent without being constructional’ (IF 201f). These ‘systems
that vary the form of the message’ get ‘neglected in grammars of English’
‘because they are much less richly exploited in written language’. What
‘writing’ ‘achieves’ by ‘packing together lexical content’ in a
‘static and dense’ way, ‘speech’ ‘achieves’ through ‘grammatical
frames’ in a ‘mobile and intricate’ way. That ‘spoken language is
disorganized and featureless’ is a ‘folk belief’, sustained by
‘transcriptions’ in which ‘speech’ ‘looks silly’ ‘written down’,
due to ‘the disorder and fragmentation’ in ‘the way it is transcribed’
without ‘intonation or rhythm or variation in tempo and loudness’ (IF xxiv).
9.43
Besides, ‘it being much harder to represent a process than’ ‘a product’,
‘the text’ is easily viewed as a ‘perceptible’ ‘object’, made most
tangible ‘as a piece of writing’ (IF xxiif, 290) (cf. 9.2). And
‘traditionally, grammar’ has been ‘product grammar’ for ‘written
language’ (IF xxiii). ‘In its earliest origins, classical Greek grammar’,
‘tied to rhetoric’, was for ‘speech’; ‘but Aristotle took grammar’
‘into logic’, and focus shifted to ‘written discourse’ through
‘medieval and renaissance syntax’ up to the ‘received “traditional
grammar”‘ of ‘today’ (8.17; 13.33). The latter is ‘unsuited to spoken
language, which needs a more dynamic and less constructional form of
representation’ (cf. 9.24). Yet ‘constructing’ a new ‘grammar for
speech’ ‘from the beginning’ might ‘force an artificial polarization of
speech versus writing’, deny ‘mixed categories’ (like ‘dramatic
dialogue’), and make it ‘difficult to compare spoken and written texts’.
9.44
So Halliday calls for ‘a much more dynamic model of grammar’ he does not
‘offer here’, but hopes his treatment of ‘the clause
complex’ may go ‘a little way in that direction’ (IF xxiii). He
designates the ‘clause’ ‘the most significant grammatical unit’ and
‘the best example’ of ‘linguistic structure’ as ‘a means for the
integrated expression of all the functionally distinct components of meaning in
language’ (IF 101, EF 42) (cf. 5.55; 9.46ff, 50f). ‘The grammar of the
clause’ ‘expresses’ ‘the semantic system of the language’, which in
turn ‘sorts out’ the ‘“goings-on”‘ of ‘reality’ (IF 101)
(13.24).
9.45
This process involves variations in ‘markedness’.
‘Within a systematic framework’ of ‘options’, the ‘typical form’ is
‘unmarked “with respect to”
some other option’ (EF 58f, 79). Though ‘usually less frequent than an
unmarked one’, ‘a marked
option’ need not be ‘rare’; its ‘effectiveness’ comes from
‘contrasting with unmarked’, which is ‘less motivated than others in the
same system and therefore selected unless there is specification to the
contrary’ (NT 2/219, 213) (13.43). Halliday ‘invokes the “good reason”
principle': ‘the “unmarked” one’ ‘is chosen unless there is good
reason to choose otherwise’ (EF 57, IF 45, 287).
9.46
We can get some flavour of his approach from his treatment of the ‘Subject’,
which so far lacks ‘a definitive account’ despite being a ‘basic’
‘concept’ ‘in the Western tradition of grammatical analysis’ (IF 32f)
(cf. 4.69; 5.55; 6.49; 7.63; 9.70; 11.34; 12.70, 79).20 He sees
‘three broad definitions’ of ‘Subject': ‘the concern of message’,
‘the doer of the action’, and ‘that of which something is predicated’
(IF 33f, 102). Though these ‘definitions are obviously not synonymous’, they
were usually treated as ‘aspects of one and the same general notion’ by
sticking to ‘idealized clause patterns’ wherein they ‘coincide’ --
namely, in ‘the typical unmarked form’ of ‘the English declarative
(statement-type) clause’ (IF 33f, 36, 77, NT 2/213) (cf. 4.68; 9.75, 109;
11.68; 13.50). But a full ‘account of natural living language’ requires that
they be ‘interpreted’ as ‘three’ ‘distinct functions’, ‘subtly but
significantly different in meaning’, which Halliday calls ‘Theme’,
‘Actor’, and ‘Subject’, respectively (IF 35f).
9.47
This trinity brings us to the centrepiece of Halliday's approach. He sees ‘the
basis of the grammatical system’, and a ‘universal’ ‘feature’ of
‘language’, in a triad of ‘metafunctions’
-- ‘tendencies worked out differently in every language but clearly
discernible in all’ (EF 66, IF xxxiv, 169, NT 2/243) (cf. 9.25). These
contribute ‘three distinct principles of organization in the structure of
grammatical units’ (‘as described by’ ‘the Prague school’, e.g. Danes
1964) ‘expressing three rather distinct and independent sets of underlying
options’ (EF 66, IF 158). ‘Intersecting’ in ‘the clause’, these sets
express ‘experiential meaning, speech function, and discourse organization’
(NT 2/243). Halliday's ‘grammar’ is extensively organized around this triad
and the threes related to it (cf. IF xiii, xviif, 33, 35, 37f, 53, 78, 101, 128,
158ff, 321; NT 2/199 243, EF 66, 99, 105f) (and a photo of Henry Moore's
sculpture of ‘Three Points’ appears on the cover of IF). Indeed, he
expressly warns us when some aspect or structure is not seen these three
ways (IF 158, 169, 176) (cf. 9.74, 78).
9.48
The three ‘metafunctions’ are ‘the textual’,
‘the ideational’, and ‘the interpersonal’
(EF 66, 99, 101, 105ff, IF xiii, xxxiv, 53, 158, NT 3/209).21 Through
them, ‘three distinct structures are mapped onto one another to produce a
single wording’, such that ‘the clause’ is ‘the simultaneous
realization’ of three ‘meanings': a ‘message’ (‘meaning’ as
‘relevance to the context’), a ‘representation’ (‘meaning in the sense
of “content”’), and an ‘exchange’ (‘meaning as a form of action’)
(EF 42, IF 36f, 158, 53, xiii). The three aspects are not ‘discrete’
‘components’ ‘expressed’ by ‘segments’ ‘we can point to’ (EF
42). They tend to be ‘embodied’ or ‘scattered’ throughout an ‘entire
structure’, wherein they are ‘mapped onto one another’ in a
`simultaneous’ ‘complex of structural roles’; a certain ‘alignment of
roles’ may ‘represent a favourite clause type’ (IF 169f, 365; NT 2/215f,
243, 224).22 In terms of ‘the triad first proposed by Pike’
(5.31ff), Halliday envisions ‘textual meaning’ as ‘a wave-like pattern of
periodicity’, with ‘peaks of prominence and boundary markers’;
‘experiential’ (i.e. ideational) ‘meaning’ as a ‘particle-like’
pattern of ‘building blocks’; and ‘interpersonal meaning’ as a
‘field-like’ ‘prosodic’ ‘pattern’ (IF 169).
9.49
‘The textual’ metafunction
enables ‘language’ to be ‘operationally relevant’ and ‘have texture in
real contexts of situation’ (EF 42) (cf. 8.41). Here, ‘language becomes
text, is related to itself and to its contexts of use’, including ‘the
preceding and following text, and the context of situation’ (EF 44, IF 53).
One division under the ‘textual’ heading is ‘information':
‘a process of interaction between what is already known or predictable and
what is new or unpredictable’ (IF 274f).23 ‘The information unit
is a structure made up of two functions, the New
and the Given’. The ‘“New”‘
is either ‘not previously mentioned’ or is ‘presented’ by ‘the
speaker’ as ‘not being recoverable from the preceding discourse’ and thus
as ‘textually and situationally non-derivable’; the ‘“Given”‘ is
‘what is not “New”‘ (NT 2/204f, 211; IF 277). ‘The idealized form’
of the ‘information unit’ has ‘a Given’ and ‘a New element’, but
does not apply when ‘a discourse’ ‘starts’ nor when ‘the Given’
‘refers to something already present in the verbal or non-verbal context’
(IF 275). So only the ‘New element’ is ‘obligatory’, while the
‘Given’ is ‘optional’ (IF 275, NT 2/204).
9.50
‘The structure of the information unit contributes in large measure to the
organization of discourse’, and ‘frequently defines’ ‘the domain of
constituents’ more than does their ‘status in sentence structure’ (NT
2/210f). ‘The distribution of information specifies a distinct constituent
structure’ on one ‘plane’, which is ‘then mapped onto the constituent
structure’ of ‘clauses’ (NT 2/200, 242). This ‘distribution’
‘determines’ the number of ‘points of information focus’
and ‘represents the speaker's blocking out of the message into quanta of
information, or message blocks’, and deciding ‘where the main burden of the
message lies’ (NT 2/202, 204). A ‘discourse’ with ‘much factually new
material’ tends to have many ‘short information units, each with its
focus’ (NT 2/205).
9.51
‘Within each’ ‘unit’, ‘elements’ are selected as ‘points of
prominence': ‘one primary point of information focus’, and possibly a
‘secondary’ one for ‘dependent’, ‘incomplete, contingent, or
confirmatory’ ‘information’ (NT 2/203, 209). The ‘structure’ is
‘realized’ in a ‘“natural” (non-arbitrary)’ way, with ‘the New
marked by prominence’ and ‘typically’ placed after ‘the Given’ (IF
275) (11.85). In ‘the unmarked or default condition’, ‘the information
unit’ ‘corresponds to a clause’, but may be ‘more’ or ‘less’ in
‘marked’ cases (NT 2/201, 203, IF 59, 274, 287, 315, IG 19f).24
Any ‘unit’ ‘less’ or ‘more’ than this is ‘marked’; ‘in
continuous informal discourse’, ‘the average number of information units per
clause lies between 1 and 2’ (NT 2/201).
9.52
‘In any utterance in English, three distinct meaningful choices’ are made,
which ‘usually are subsumed under’ ‘“intonation”':
‘“tonality”, “tonicity”, and “tone”‘ (IG 18, 30, 38). Such
options suggest that a ‘notation’ is needed for ‘showing intonational and
rhythmic structure’ which ‘has to be accounted for in a functional
grammar’ (IF 286) (cf. 8.71; 9.42). ‘Discourse consists of a linear
succession’ of ‘information units, realized by tonality,
that is, as a sequence of tone groups’
(NT 2/211; IG 30; cf. IF 8, 59, 271, 273f). Within ‘each information unit’,
the ‘choice’ of ‘focus’ is ‘realized by tonicity,
the structuring of the tone group into a tonic’ (for ‘the general
meaning’) ‘optionally preceded by a pretonic’ (for ‘more delicate
distinctions’) but with ‘no separate post-tonic’ (NT 2/211, 205, 243, IF
283, IG 12f, 30).
9.53
‘Tone’ concerns ‘phonological
prominence’ allotted by ‘pitch movement’ and to a lesser degree by
‘duration’ and ‘intensity’ (NT 2/203, IG 14). In each ‘tone group’,
‘prominence’, and thus ‘information focus’, is given to ‘the
element’ that ‘carries the main pitch movement: the main fall, or rise, or
change of direction’ (IF 275). ‘The English tone system is based on an
opposition’ between ‘falling’ and rising pitch’, and ‘the choice of
tone’ yields the ‘semantic values of key’
(IF 281, IG 16f, 30).25 This ‘opposition’ is so ‘fundamental’
that it ‘probably plays a part in the system of every language’ (IF 281). In
English, ‘falling pitch’ means ‘certain’, while ‘rising pitch’ means
‘uncertain’ (IF 281f). Correspondingly, ‘falling-rising means “seems
certain, but turns out not to be”‘; and ‘rising-falling means “seems
uncertain, but turns out to be certain”‘. The ‘neutralized’ ‘level
tone’ means ‘“not (yet) decided whether known or unknown”‘. ‘In
normal conversational English’, ‘falling tone’ ‘is most frequent’,
followed by ‘falling-rising’. ‘Rising tone’ is ‘more common in
dialogue than in narrative’; ‘in formal speech and loud-reading’ ‘level
tone’ ‘increases’; and ‘rising-falling tone’ is ‘characteristic of
children's speech’.
9.54
As might be expected, ‘the unmarked realization of a statement’ ‘in a
declarative clause’ ‘is falling tone’ (IF 281, 284, IG 25). The ‘other
tones convey a statement’ with ‘additional’ ‘features’, e.g.,
‘rising tone’ for ‘contradiction or protest’, ‘falling-rising’ for
‘reservation’, and ‘rising-falling’ for ‘strong assertion’ (IF 284,
281). A ‘falling tone’ is used for a ‘WH-question’ (in the sense of
9.58), and a ‘rising’ one for a ‘yes-no question’ (IF 281, 284). The
‘imperative’ has ‘two unmarked tones': ‘falling’ ‘for command’,
and ‘level’ ‘for invitation’ (IF 284). ‘Minor clauses’ (in the sense
of 9.74) ‘have varied tones depending on their function’, especially
‘calls (vocatives)’ (IF 285).
9.55
‘Theme’ -- the other aspect of textual meaning alongside ‘information
structure’ -- ‘is concerned’ with ‘the status of elements’ as
‘components of a message’ (NT 2/199; IF 36, 38f).26 ‘The
interplay of thematic and information structure carries the rhetorical gist’
(IF 280). Yet whereas ‘information’ and the ‘Given-New’ ‘dimension’
‘determine the organization’ of ‘a text’ ‘into discourse units’, and
whereas ‘information options’ are not ‘clause systems’, ‘theme’
affects the ‘organization’ and ‘sequence of elements of the clause in
sentence structure’ (IF 287, NT 2/200, 223). ‘The choice of information
focus’ ‘expresses the main point’ ‘of the discourse’; in
‘contrast’, ‘the choice of theme, clause by clause’, ‘carries forward
the development of the text as a whole’ (IF 315). Whereas
‘information focus’ ‘favours
the more “peripheral” elements, especially circumstances’, ‘thematic
prominence’ favours ‘the more
“central” among the clause elements (the participants’ in ‘the most
active roles in transitivity’, cf. 9.60) (NT 2/214). Also, ‘information
structure’ is ‘listener-oriented’ (‘“what I am asking you to attend to”’),
whereas ‘thematic structure’ is ‘speaker-oriented’ (‘“what I am
talking about”’) (IF 278,
316, 368). For all these reasons, ‘information’ and ‘theme’ are
‘independently variable': being ‘combinable in only one way’ would
‘curtail the potential of these two systems’ and remove an occasion for
‘meaningful choice’ (NT 2/205, 211f, IF 287) (cf. 13.50).27
9.56
As shown by ‘the linguists of the Prague tradition’, who ‘explored’ ‘functional
sentence perspective’
(cf. Vachek 1966; Firbas & Golkova 1976), ‘the sequence of elements in the
clause tends to represent thematic ordering’ rather than
‘actor-action-goal’ (NT 2/205, IF 315; EF 107) (cf. 4.68; 714;
9.46, 67). ‘Thematization’ ‘assigns to the clause a structure in terms of
the functions “Theme” and “Rheme”‘ (NT 212). ‘If a clause is structured as two
information units, the boundary’ ‘nearly always coincides with that between
Theme and Rheme’ -- ‘a strong piece of evidence for construing the Theme’
this way (IF 40, 56). Since ‘Theme always precedes Rheme’, ‘the unmarked
case’ ‘associates’ ‘the Theme with the Given’ and places ‘the focus
of information’ (and ‘the New’) ‘within the Rheme’, though not always
‘extending over the whole of it’ (NT 2/205, 212, IF 60, 278). The
‘Theme’, ‘usually marked off as a tone group’, may ‘consist of just
one element’ or of ‘two or more forming a single complex element’ (IF
40f).
9.57
‘Typically’ ‘in a declarative clause’, ‘the Theme is conflated
with the Subject’ -- a
‘mapping’ yielding ‘the unmarked Theme’ (IF 44f, 60) (cf. 9.46;
11.68). ‘In everyday conversation, the item most often’ used as such is
‘the first person pronoun “I”‘; ‘next’ ‘come the other’
‘pronouns’, and ‘then’ ‘nominal groups’ (with ‘common’ or
‘proper noun as Head) and nominalizations’ (IF 45). In contrast, ‘a
Theme’ ‘other than the Subject in a declarative clause’ is ‘marked’,
‘usually an adverbial group’ or a ‘prepositional phrase’ ‘functioning
as adjunct in the clause’. ‘Thematic status’ makes ‘adjuncts’
of ‘time/place’, ‘cause, manner, etc.’ into ‘sentence adjuncts’;
‘their domain may extend over various levels of sentence structure’ (NT
2/220). Such cases show how ‘theme plays a part in the bracketing function of
information structure’; if a ‘marked thematic element’ ‘occurs as a
separate information unit’, its ‘domain extends over the whole of the next
following information unit’, but if not ‘separate’, only over the ‘unit
in which it occurs’ (NT 2/219f) (cf. 9.24). Also, ‘adjuncts’ ‘occurring obligatorily
in initial position’ because they have ‘floated to the front of the
clause’ during ‘the evolution of the language’, ‘do not take up the
whole’ position of ‘theme’; the next element functioning as ‘Subject,
Complement, or Adjunct’ is included too (IF 51, 53, i.r.).
9.58
‘Interrogative clauses’ ‘embody the theme principle in their
structural make-up': the ‘theme’ ‘element’ ‘comes first’ because of
‘the thematic significance attached to the first position in the English
clause’ (IF 47f). In a ‘polar’ (‘yes/no’) question’ that
‘element’ is ‘the finite verb’, but in a ‘non-polar’ or
‘content’ (‘WH-’) ‘question’ (with ‘“who”, “what”,
“when”, “how”, etc.’) it is ‘the element that requests’ ‘a
missing piece of information’ (IF 47, 44, 85, NT 212f) (cf. 4.69). ‘The
preference for the “inverted” interrogative structure in English’ confirms
the ‘importance of thematic organization by sequence in the syntax of the
English clause’; ‘interrogatives have a built-in unmarked theme’ (NT
2/214). ‘In the declarative the thematic pressure on the subject is much less
strong, and marked themes are frequent in all registers’ to ‘foreground the
speaker's point of departure’ (NT 2/215). The ‘imperative’,
however, ‘commonly’ ‘with no subject or finite verb’, has ‘no explicit
theme’; ‘the basic message is realized simply by the form of the clause’,
which ‘consists of rheme only’ (IF 49) (cf. 9.52, 72, 96) (4.56).
9.59
‘The ideational'28
metafunction has a ‘vast and complex’ ‘meaning potential’ (EF 39). In
Halliday's earlier scheme, it was two ‘separate’ metafunctions
(‘components’), ‘the experiential’
and ‘the logical’ (NT 3/209, EF
106). Maybe he merged them because he likes threes (9.47), but his concern
remains for the ‘basic logical
relations’ in ‘natural language’, such as ‘in a univariate
structure’ with a ‘recurrence of the same function’ and in a ‘multivariate
structure’ with a ‘constellation’ of distinct functions’ (EF 66, IF 193,
172) (cf. 9.75, 80, 82f). Since these ‘relations’ form ‘part of the
semantics of a language’, they do not ‘fit exactly into non-linguistic
logical categories’ (understatement) -- ‘although since the latter derive
from natural language in the first place there will obviously be a close
resemblance’ (overstatement) (IF 202). However, Halliday frequently criticizes
the reliance on ‘logic’ by linguists or grammarians, as when he warns
against ‘problems’ ‘arising in linguistic analysis’ by ‘attempting to
make the logical structure do duty for the other components’, or opines that
‘the logical element in the description of the clause appears to be, in
English, entirely dispensable’ (NT 3/211f) (cf. 9.3, 5, 48; 8.5, 17; 13.17f).
9.60
The ‘experiential’ aspect covers
‘the interpretation and expression in language of different types of process
of the external world, including material, mental, and abstract processes of
every kind’, plus those ‘of our own consciousness’ (EF 39, IF 66). ‘A
process’ can have ‘three components: the process itself, the
‘participants’, i.e. all things that ‘can become a Subject’, and the
‘circumstances’ (IF 101, 54, 114). ‘This tripartite interpretation’ of
‘how phenomena of the real world are represented as linguistic structures’
‘lies behind the grammatical distinction of word classes into verbs, nouns,
and the rest’ -- a ‘probably universal’ ‘pattern’ ‘among human
languages’ (IF 102) (13.18). In ‘the preferred’ (‘unmarked’) ‘clause
type’, ‘the initiating’ ‘element in the message’ is the ‘most
closely associated with the process; and the culminating, information-carrying
element’ is the ‘most remote’ (NT 3/214f).
9.61
‘The grammar of the clause’ as ‘a structural unit’ for ‘expressing a
particular range of ideational meanings’ is called ‘transitivity’
(EF 39). This domain is ‘the cornerstone of the semantic organization of
experience’; it subsumes ‘all participant functions’ and ‘all
experiential functions relevant to the syntax of the clause’ (EF 134; NT
3/182). ‘Endless variation is possible’ and ‘meaningful’; ‘the textual
component provides’ ‘the means for distributing the experiential functions
in every possible way over the functions Theme-Rheme and Given-New’ (NT 3/215)
(13.43). The term thus denotes not the familiar ‘opposition’ between
‘transitive and intransitive verbs in English’, but ‘a set of clause types
embodying a full range of possible transitivity distinctions’ (EF 39, NT
3/181f, 1/52, IF 103). ‘The potential distinction’ ‘between verbs which
are inherently goal-directed or not is less useful as a generalization than the
actual distinction between clauses’ which either have or lack ‘a feature of
goal-directedness’ (NT 3/182) (cf. 9.67).
9.62
Halliday's way of classifying ‘processes’ instructively shows his balancing
the plausible with the technical as well as the semantic with the grammatical
(Table 9.1).
9.63
‘Mental processes’ have the ‘principal subtypes’ of ‘perception
(“seeing, hearing”, etc.), affection (“liking, fearing”, etc.),
and cognition (“thinking, knowing, understanding”, etc.)’ (IF 111).
‘Material processes’, in contrast, are divided into ‘dispositive’
(‘“doing to”’) and ‘creative’ (‘“bringing about”’),
each of which may be either ‘concrete’ or ‘abstract’ (IF 103ff).
Halliday recognizes as a third type ‘relational processes of being’ (IF 112). ‘Every language
accommodates in its grammar a number of distinct ways of being’; ‘English’
has ‘intensive’ (i.e., ‘a relation of sameness’) (as in ‘“Tom
is the leader”’), ‘circumstantial’ (as in ‘“the fair is on a
Tuesday”’), and ‘possessive’ (as in ‘“Peter has a
piano”’) (IF 112, 114). Each of these three ‘comes in two modes: attributive’
has the ‘functions’ ‘Attribute and Carrier’ (as in ‘“Sarah is
wise”’), whereas ‘identifying’ has ‘Identified and
Identifier’ (as in ‘“tomorrow is the tenth”’) (IF 113). Only
‘identifying clauses are reversible’ and have a ‘passive’ (as in
‘“Tom plays the leader”‘ and ‘“the leader is played by Tom”’);
‘attributives’ do not (as in ‘“the fair lasts all day”‘ but not
‘“all day is lasted by the fair”’), because an ‘Attribute is not a
participant’ and so cannot ‘become a Subject’ (IF 114, 119f) (cf. 9.60).
9.64
Beyond these ‘three principal types of process found in the English clause’,
Halliday sets up ‘three other subsidiary types’ (IF 128). ‘Behavioural processes’, both ‘physical and psychological’
(e.g. ‘“breathing, dreaming”’), are ‘intermediate between material and
mental’, are usually ‘conscious’, and have the structure of ‘Behaver’
and ‘Process’ (as in ‘“the Mock Turtle sighed deeply”’) (IF 128f).
‘Verbal processes’ (e.g. ‘saying’) are ‘unlike mental
processes’ in ‘not requiring a conscious participant’, and in having the
structure of ‘Sayer’, ‘Receiver’, and ‘Verbiage’ (the
‘proposition’ or ‘proposal’) (as in ‘“he told me it was
Tuesday”’) (IF 129f). ‘Existential
processes’ (e.g. ‘existing’, ‘happening’) have the structure of
‘Existent’, ‘Process’, and optionally ‘Circumstance’ (as in
‘“there was an old woman tossed up in a basket”’) (IF 130f).
9.65
Even the six ‘process types’ cover only ‘participant functions’
‘directly involved in the process’; ‘grammatically these are the elements
that typically relate directly to the verb, without a preposition’ (IF 131).
The ‘other participant functions’ for the ‘oblique or “indirect”
participants’ that are more ‘optional’ than ‘inherent’ ‘in the
process'30 are ‘grouped’ under ‘Beneficiary’,
including the ‘Recipient’ of ‘goods’ and the ‘Client’ of
‘services’ (e.g. ‘“John”‘ in ‘“I gave John a parcel”‘ or
‘“I painted John a picture”’); and ‘Range’, i.e., the
‘scope of the process’ (e.g. ‘“croquet”‘ in ‘“do you play
croquet with the Queen today?”’) (IF 132ff).
9.66
Besides ‘participants’, Halliday has ‘circumstantial elements’,
‘the principal types’ of which, ‘in English’, are: ‘Extent and Location
in time and space (including abstract space)’ (as in ‘“stay for two
hours”‘, ‘“walk for seven miles”’); ‘Manner (means, quality
and comparison)’ (as in ‘“beat with a stick”’); ‘Cause
(reason, purpose, and behalf)’ (as in ‘“for want of a nail the shoe was
lost”’); ‘Accompaniment’ (‘comitative’, i.e. ‘what with’,
as in ‘“Fred came with Tom”‘, and ‘additive’, i.e. ‘what else’,
as in ‘“Fred came as well as Tom”’); Matter (i.e. ‘what
about’, as in ‘“I worry about her health”’); and Role (i.e.
‘what as’, as in ‘“I come here as a friend”’) (IF 137-42). This
classification is drawn four ways: by meaning, by presupposed questions, by
prepositions, and by illustrations (cf. Table on IF 148). Some interesting
comparisons emerge. ‘Extent and Location’ show up the ‘close parallels
between temporal and spatial expressions': having ‘standard units’, being
‘either definite or indefinite’, and being either ‘absolute or relative’
(IF 138). In return, ‘time is unidimensional’ and ‘moving’ whereas
‘space is ‘three-dimensional and static’; and only ‘time’ appears
‘in the tense system of the verb’ (IF 138f).
9.67
‘From one point of view’, each ‘type of process’ ‘has a grammar of its
own’ (IF 144f). Yet ‘from another point of view they are all alike’ and
share ‘just one generalized representational structure’, based on one ‘ergative’ ‘variable’ of ‘causation': ‘is the process
brought about from within or from outside?’ (IF 145, 147, NT 3/182). ‘The
majority of verbs of high frequency in the language yield’ only ‘pairs’ of
this kind (IF 145). Halliday attributes this ‘predominance’ in ‘modern
English’ to ‘a far-reaching complex process of semantic change’ in the
‘language over the past five hundred years or more’ (IF 146). ‘The
changes’ tend to ‘emphasize the textual function in the organization of
English discourse’ over the ‘experiential function’, and within the latter
function, ‘the cause-and-effect aspect’ over ‘the deed-and-extension’ or
‘actor-action-goal’ aspect (IF 146, EF 127; cf. IF 103; 9.56). The ‘waves
of change’ indicate that ‘the transitivity system is particularly unstable
in contemporary language’, due to ‘great pressure’ ‘for the language to
adapt to a rapidly changing environment’ (IF 146) (cf. 12.59).
9.68
Halliday accordingly proposes ‘another interpretation’ of ‘the semantics
of English’ vis-a-vis ‘the real world’, and of ‘the clause in its
experiential function’ for ‘making generalizations about processes in the
real world’ (IF 144-47). ‘Every Process’ has the ‘obligatory’
‘participant’ or ‘element’ called ‘the Medium’, ‘through
which the process is actualized’ (e.g. ‘“boat”‘ in ‘“the boat
sailed”’) (IF 146).31 ‘The Process and the Medium together form
the nucleus of an English clause’ that ‘determines the range of options’
for ‘the rest of the clause’ (IF 147). ‘The most general’ ‘option’,
‘turning up in all process types’, is the ‘ergative one': ‘the
participant functioning as an external cause’, such that ‘the process’ is
‘represented as engendered from outside’ (e.g. ‘“Mary”‘ in
‘“Mary sailed
the boat”’). We might need to ‘restructure our thinking’ to move
from the ‘linear interpretation’ in terms of ‘transitive’,
‘emphasizing the distinction between participants’ and ‘circumstances’,
to the ‘nuclear’ ‘interpretation’ in terms of ‘ergative’, allowing
‘a whole cluster of participant-like functions in the clause’ (IF 145, 149).
These functions subsume further types of ‘causative agent’ -- ‘initiator’
(as in ‘“the police exploded the bomb”’), ‘inducer’ (as in
‘“the report convinced Mary”’), and ‘attributor’ (as in
‘“the sun ripened the bananas”’) -- which ‘in the transitive
analysis’ would be ‘assigned different structural configurations’
(‘doing’ versus ‘making do’) (IF 152f).
9.69
‘Probably all transitivity systems, in all languages, are some blend of these
two semantic models of processes, the transitive and the ergative’ (IF 149).
‘Semantically, therefore, Agent, Beneficiary, and Range have some features of
participants and some of circumstances’; ‘grammatically, also, they are
mixed’ and may ‘enter’ ‘directly as nominal groups or indirectly in
prepositional phrases’. The ‘choice’ to use a ‘preposition’ is thus
not ‘random variation’, but ‘serves a textual function’; ‘a
participant other than the Medium’ and having ‘prominence in the message’
-- i.e. ‘occurring either earlier’ (‘as marked theme’) ‘or later’
(‘as “late news”’) ‘than expected in the clause’ -- ‘tends to take
a preposition’.32
9.70
A related drift ‘away from a purely transitive type of symbol organization can
be seen in the system of voice’,
another major ‘resource of transitivity’ (IF 150, NT 3/203). Instead of
labelling just ‘verbs’ as ‘active’ and ‘passive’, we
might use ‘ergative terms’ and sort whole ‘clauses’ into ‘effective’
(with a ‘feature of agency’, as in ‘“the cat broke the glass”’) and
‘middle’ (without it, as in ‘“the glass broke”’). ‘The
choice between active and passive’ is open only for an ‘effective’
‘clause’, and ‘the reasons for choosing passive’ are: ‘to get the
Medium as subject’ and thus as ‘unmarked theme’, or ‘to make the Agent
either “late news” by putting it last’ in the slot for ‘unmarked’
‘information focus’, or else ‘implicit by leaving it out’ (IF 151, 118;
NT 3/205, 2/215, 217).33 ‘In spoken English the great majority of
passive clauses are, in fact, Agent-less’ (IF 151f) (cf. 7.53).
9.71
‘The interpersonal’ meta-function
concerns ‘forms of interaction’ and ‘embodies all use of language to
express social and personal relations’, ‘personalities, and personal
feelings’, as well as ‘the speaker's intrusion into speech situation and
speech act’ (EF 41, 66, 106, NT 3/210). This ‘function’ ‘extends
beyond’ the ‘rhetorical’ by ‘expressing both the inner and the outer
surfaces of the individual’, and is thus ‘personal in the broadest sense’
(EF 107). ‘The speaker’ (‘a cover term for both speaker and writer’)
‘expresses his comments, attitudes, evaluations’, ‘adopts’ a ‘speech
role’, and ‘assigns the listener a complementary role’, ‘the most
fundamental’ being ‘giving’ and ‘demanding’ (IF 68, EF 106, NT 3/210).
But ‘we can recognize an unlimited number’ of ‘specific’
‘socio-personal’ ‘uses of language': ‘ask and answer’, ‘approve and
disapprove’, ‘greet, chat up, take leave’, ‘express belief, opinion,
doubt’, and ‘feelings’, ‘include in’ or ‘exclude from the social
group’, and so on (EF 41) (cf. 8.42). ‘The act of speaking’ might well
‘be called an “interact”‘ (IF 68).
9.72
The ‘interpersonal function of the clause is that of exchanging roles in
rhetorical interaction’ (IF 53). ‘Goods-&-services’ are also
‘exchanged’ via ‘offers and commands’, wherein ‘language functions
simply as means’ toward ‘non-linguistic ends’; these uses have ‘priority
in the ontogenetic development of language’ and ‘serve as a point of entry
to a great variety of different rhetorical functions’ (IF 68, 70f) (cf. 9.14).
‘Information'34 is ‘exchanged’ via ‘statements and
questions’, wherein ‘language is the end’ and ‘the means’, and ‘the
clause takes on the form of a proposition’ ‘that can be affirmed or denied, qualified’,
‘regretted, and so on’ (cf 3.36, 44f; 8.55; 924; 11.39-50).
‘Propositions’ are ‘useful to look at’ because they ‘have a clearly
defined grammar’ with more ‘special resources’ (IF 70).
9.73
‘Mood represents the organization
of participants in speech situations’ and ‘speaker roles’, such as
‘informing’, ‘confirming’, ‘contradicting’, etc. (NT 2/199). In
‘the clause as domain’, if ‘theme is the grammar of discourse’ and
‘transitivity is the grammar of experience’, then ‘mood is the grammar of
speech function’. The ‘choice’ of an ‘element’ ‘as theme’ may
‘depend on the choice of mood’; and ‘some options are on the borderline of
theme and mood’ (IF 44, NT 2/243n). ‘Any thematic element’ not ‘derived
from the mood of the clause’ must be ‘a “marked Theme”‘ (NT 2/223).
Yet ‘unlike the Theme’, which ‘carries forward the development of the text
as a whole’, ‘the Mood element has little significance beyond the immediate
sequence of clauses’ (IF 98).
9.74
In the grammar, ‘the Mood’ is the ‘constituent’ formed by ‘Subject and Finite’
‘closely linked together’, ‘the remainder of the clause’ being ‘the Residue’
(IF 73f). ‘Every ‘major clause’, ‘whether independent or not’,
‘selects for mood’; ‘those which do not’ are ‘minor clauses’ (e.g.
in ‘calls, greetings, and exclamations’) (IF 44, 61, 63) (cf. 9.54). The
‘independent major clause’, in which ‘the constituent specified by the
mood systems’ ‘is obligatory’ and which ‘exhibits the options of theme
in its full interpretation’, is either ‘indicative or imperative
in mood’ (IF 44, NT 2/213, 221). As a ‘general principle’, ‘the
indicative’ is ‘used to exchange information’, either by ‘statement’
in ‘the declarative’ (with ‘Subject before Finite’), or by
‘question’ in ‘the interrogative’ (with ‘Finite before
Subject’, unless a ‘WH-element is the Subject’) (IF 74). Another
‘subcategory’ of ‘declarative clause’ is ‘the exclamative’
with a ‘WH-element as theme’ (e.g. in ‘“what tremendously easy questions
you ask!”’) (IF 47).
9.75
‘Below the clause’ is ‘the grammar of the group’,
‘interpreted as a word complex’ with ‘Head’ and ‘modifying element’
(IF 158f, 192) (compare Firth's ‘piece’, 8.55). ‘In the Western
grammatical tradition, it was not recognized as a distinct structural unit;
instead, simple sentences’ ‘(clauses in our terms) were analysed directly
into words’ (IF 158f). ‘Such an analysis’ requires ‘confining our
attention’ to the ‘idealized isolated sentences that grammarians have
usually dealt with’ (e.g. ‘“John threw the ball”’) and ‘ignoring
several important aspects of the meanings’; ‘and in the analysis of
real-life discourse it leads to impossible complexity’ -- like ‘describing a
house’ as ‘bricks’ without ‘intermediate structural units’ such as
‘walls and rooms’. So ‘the group’ should be ‘recognized’ ‘as a
distinct rank in grammar’ with its own ‘multivariate constituent
structure’, even if it ‘no doubt evolved by expansion outwards from the
word’ just as the ‘sentence’ did from the ‘clause’ (IF 192, 159) (cf.
9.82; 13.54). This factor divides the group from the ‘phrase’, which has
‘roughly the same status on the rank scale’ but ‘is a contraction of a
clause’.
9.76
In ‘the group’, ‘the three’ metafunctions are ‘represented’ not as
‘separate whole structures, but rather as partial contributions to a single
structural line’ (IF 158). This ‘difference between clause and group’,
though ‘only one of degree’, allows us to ‘analyse the group in one
operation, not three’ (IF 158, 169, 176; cf. 9.46ff, 80). However, Halliday
does ‘split the ideational’ back into ‘experiential’
and ‘logical'35, the
latter showing ‘the group’ as ‘a word complex: ‘a combination of
words built up on the basis’ of ‘generalized logical-semantic relations’
‘encoded in natural language’ (IF 158f, 170) (cf. 9.57).
9.77
The ‘main classes of group’ are ‘nominal’, ‘verbal’, and
‘adverbial’ (IF 159). ‘Interpersonal
meanings’ in ‘the nominal
group’ are ‘embodied in (a) the person system’, (b) ‘the attitudinal’
‘Epithets’ (like ‘“splendid!”’), (c) ‘the connotative meanings of
lexical items’, and (d) ‘prosodic features such as swear-words and voice
quality’ (IF 169f). ‘The experiential structure of the nominal group’ includes ‘the
functional elements Deictic, Numerative, Epithet, Classifier, and Thing’ (IF
160, 164). ‘The Deictic’ ‘indicates whether or not some subset’
of ‘a class of things’ is ‘intended’ (e.g. ‘“all”’,
‘“some”’), and, used ‘demonstratively’, can stipulate ‘proximity
to the speaker’ (e.g. ‘“this”’) or ‘possession’ (e.g.
‘“your”’). The ‘Numerative’ ‘indicates some numerical
feature of the subset’ and can be ‘quantifying’ (e.g. ‘“two”’) or
‘ordering’ (e.g. ‘“second”’), matching the familiar classes of
‘cardinal’ and ‘ordinal numerals’, plus ‘inexact number’ (e.g.
‘“many”’). ‘The Epithet indicates some quality of the
subset’, with ‘no hard and fast line’ between ‘objective property of the
thing’ (‘experiential in function’) (e.g. ‘“old”’) versus ‘the
speaker's subjective attitude’ (‘interpersonal’ in function) (e.g.
‘“silly”’) (IF 163) (cf. 13.24).36 The ‘Classifier
indicates a particular subclass of things’ in terms of ‘material’,
‘scale’, ‘origin’, and so on (e.g. ‘“wooden”’) (IF 164).
Finally, the ‘Thing’ is ‘a phenomenon of our experience’ and
‘the semantic core of the group’, usually ‘realized’ as a ‘noun’
(e.g. ‘“nose”’) (IF 108, 167, 164). We could thus have the sequence
‘“your two silly old wooden noses”‘.
9.78
The ‘ordering’ of ‘the nominal group’ is thereby
‘interpreted’ in terms of an ‘experiential pattern’ (IF 165). ‘The
progression’ goes from ‘greatest specifying potential to’ ‘the least’
(IF 166). ‘The Deictic’ ‘starts by relating to the speaker in the context
of the speech event’, and then come ‘elements with successively less
identifying potential’ and more concern for ‘permanent attributes’. Hence,
we ‘begin with the immediate context’ and ‘go on to quantitative
features’ (‘order and number’), then ‘qualititative features’, and
‘finally’ ‘class membership’ (IF 165f). ‘We should beware, however, of
assuming that the taxonomic order of modification always corresponds to
something in the extra-linguistic universe’ (IF 171) (13.24).
9.79
‘The verbal group’ has the
‘structure’ of ‘Finite’ plus ‘Event (with an optional
Auxilary’ if ‘the Finite’ is not ‘fused with the Event’, as in ‘one
word verbal groups such as “ate”’) (IF 175) (cf. 9.74).37
‘Finiteness’ is ‘expressed by means of a verbal operator which is either
temporal or modal’ (IF 75; cf. 8.59, 64). This ‘finite element’ gives
‘the proposition’ ‘a point of reference in the here and now’,
‘relates’ it ‘to its context in the speech event’, and ‘refers’
either ‘to the time of speaking’ (via ‘primary tense': ‘past, present,
or future’) or ‘to the judgment of the speaker’ (via ‘modality':
‘probabilities’, ‘obligations’, ‘desires’) (IF 75f, 86).38
9.80
Beyond this ‘experiential’
aspect, ‘the verbal group’ (like the nominal) needs no ‘separate
analysis’ for the other two metafunctions (IF 176) (cf. 9.76). ‘Textual
meaning is embodied in the ordering of the elements’; ‘interpersonal meaning
resides in the deictic feature associated with finiteness (primary tense or
modality)’ and in ‘attitudinal colouring’ of ‘the lexical verb’.
However, ‘the logical structure’
carries ‘most of the semantic load’, and in a way having ‘no parallel in
the nominal group’, where the main issue is ‘the recursive aspect of the
modifying relation’ for ‘generating long strings’ ‘in univariate’ and
‘multivariate structures’ (IF 175, 172) (cf. 9.59). In ‘the verbal
group’, in contrast, the ‘logical’ issue is ‘the recursive tense
system’ (IF 176f). ‘The primary tense’ is ‘relative to speech event’
(‘past, present, future’), and ‘the secondary tenses’ are ‘relative to
time selected in previous tense’. Though a ‘recursive’ ‘system’ has
‘no longest possible tense’, ‘in practice, the total set’ of ‘finite
tenses’ is ‘limited’ to ‘thirty-six’ by ‘“stop rules”':
‘future’ and ‘present occur only once’ and ‘the same tense does not
occur twice consecutively’ (IF 179).39 Also, ‘the system varies
for different speakers’ and ‘is tending to expand all the time, although it
has probably just about reached its limits’ (IF 184).
9.81
Albeit only ‘the elements of verbal group are purely grammatical’ in that
‘the options they represent are closed’ rather than ‘open-ended’,
Halliday sees a major ‘parallelism’ between ‘the verbal group as the
expansion of a verb’ and ‘the nominal group as the expansion of a noun’
(IF 175, 178). Both ‘Finite’ and ‘Deictic’ ‘relate’ ‘to the
“speaker-now”‘ (IF 176, 160). ‘The Event’ ‘is the verbal equivalent
of the Thing’ in that ‘both represent the core of the lexical meaning’,
although since ‘Things are more highly organized than Events’, the
‘nominal’ has ‘additional lexical elements’ (IF 176, 184n).40
In sum, ‘both verbal and nominal groups begin with the element that
“fixes” the group in relation to the speech exchange; and both end with the
element that specifies the representational content’ (IF 176). This makes
sense: ‘initial position is thematic’, the ‘natural theme’ being the
‘relation to the here-and-now’, whereas ‘final position is informative’,
the natural place for ‘the newsworthy’ (cf. 9.51f; 714). ‘So
the structure of groups recapitulates, in the fixed ordering of their
elements, the meaning’ ‘incorporated as choice in the message
structure of the clause’ (IF 176, 166).
9.82
‘One step above the clause’ is ‘the clause
complex’, which has ‘the typical sequence’ of ‘Head (dominant)
clause plus Modifying (dependent) clause’ or, for ‘thematic’
‘motives’, ‘the reverse order’ (IF 57, 192). The ‘clause complex
corresponds closely to a sentence of written English’ and has in fact ‘led to the
evolution of the sentence in the writing system’ while ‘the sentence’
‘evolved’ ‘over the centuries’ by ‘expansion outward from the
clause’ (IF 288, 192f) (cf. 9.75; 13.54). Yet ‘the sentence’ does not
qualify ‘as a multivariate constituent structure with its own range of
functional configurations’ (IF 192). It does not have ‘elements that are
distinct in function, realized by distinct classes, and more or less fixed in
sequence’. Instead, ‘the tendency is’ ‘for any clause to have the
potential for functioning with any value in a multi-clausal complex’. Halliday
accordingly makes ‘the “clause complex”‘ ‘the only grammatical unit
above the clause’ and ‘assumes’ it ‘enables us to account in full for
the functional organization of the sentence’ (IF 193). ‘The sentence’ will
be not ‘a distinct grammatical category’ but ‘an orthographic unit’
‘between full stops’ -- ‘a constituent of writing, while a clause
complex’ is one of ‘grammar’.41
9.83
‘The relations between clauses’ are again referred to ‘the logical component’ (IF 193; cf. 9.59). In one ‘system’, ‘expansion’
makes ‘the secondary clause’ (the later one) relate to ‘the primary
clause’ (the earlier one) by ‘elaborating’ (as in ‘“John didn't wait;
he ran away”’), ‘extending’ (as in ‘“John ran away and Fred stayed
behind”’), or ‘enhancing’ it (as in ‘“John was scared, so he ran
away”’), whereas ‘projection’ makes the ‘primary clause’
‘instate’ ‘the secondary clause’ as a ‘locution’ (‘a construction
of wording’, as in ‘“John said, ‘I'm running away'”’) or ‘an
idea’ (‘a construction of meaning’, as in ‘“John thought he would run
away”’) (IF 195ff). ‘Expansion and projection form the basis of the
English clause complex’, and ‘generally’ ‘recur throughout the semantic
system’ and ‘the lexicogrammar’ (IF 378). In another ‘system’, ‘parataxis’
links ‘two elements of equal status’ in ‘sequence’, ‘one initiating
and the other continuing’ but both ‘free’ (i.e., able to ‘stand as a
functioning whole’), whereas ‘hypotaxis’ links two of ‘unequal
status’ in ‘dependence’, the ‘dominant’ one being ‘free’ but the
‘dependent’ one not free (IF 193, 195) (cf. 4.68; 5.53). ‘Parataxis and
hypotaxis’ are ‘the two basic forms of logical relations in natural
language’ and can ‘define’ ‘univariate structures’ in ‘complexes of
any rank’ -- ‘word, group, phrase, and clause alike’ (IF 198, 193) (cf.
9.59). In ‘the tone system’, for example, they appear as ‘tone concord’
(‘two or more instances of same tone’) and ‘tone sequence’ (different
tones), respectively (IF 285).
9.84
A familiar type of hypotaxis is ‘relative
clauses’, which Halliday again divides in two groups. ‘Defining’
ones ‘define subsets’ (as in ‘“the only plan which might have
succeeded”’), whereas ‘non-defining’ ones ‘(also called
“non-restrictive”, “descriptive”)’ ‘add a further characterization
of something’ ‘taken to be already fully specific’ (as in ‘“inflation,
which was necessary for the system, became also lethal”’) (IF 204, 167, 379,
NT 2/209). This division is ‘clearly signalled in both speech and writing’
(IF 205). In ‘speech’, the ‘defining’ relation is marked by ‘tone
concord’, whereas ‘the non-defining relative forms a separate tone group’.
In writing, only the ‘non-defining’ ‘is marked off by punctuation, usually
commas but sometimes’ ‘a dash’. Halliday sees ‘an analogy’ between
‘identifying process’ and ‘defining relative’ on the one hand, and
between ‘attributive process’ and ‘non-defining relative’ on the other
(IF 379; cf. 9.63).
9.85
‘In the clause complex’, ‘dependent clauses may be finite or non-finite’
(IF 199, 204ff). The ‘finite’ kind is well known, though Halliday's
conception of ‘finiteness’ is unusually elaborate (9.58, 74, 79f). What he
calls the ‘non-finite clause’, however (e.g. ‘“selling office
equipment”‘, IF 206), has often not been counted a clause at all, but a
participial modifier (cf. 4.69). He admits it may ‘occur’ without a
‘marker’ or ‘indication of its logical-semantic function’ or its
‘category’ (IF 217f). ‘The best solution here is to find the nearest
finite form’ and classify that. But ‘in most instances the Subject is left
implicit, to be presupposed from the primary clause’; it can be ‘difficult
to identify’ because ‘the non-finite’ ‘makes it unnecessary to decide’
(IF 207). Or, we could suspend the problem by not postulating a clause at all,
and assuming the presupposed material to be semantic (agent), not grammatical
(subject), but that would violate the principle that all catgories be ‘there
in the grammar’ (9.36).
9.86
Beyond the clause complex lies the domain of ‘cohesion’, based on ‘additional relations within the text’
which ‘hold across’ ‘gaps of any distance’ and ‘link items of any
size’ ‘from single words to lengthy passages’ (IF 288f) (Hasan 1967;
Halliday & Hasan 1976) (cf. 1015). ‘Typically any clause
complex in connected discourse will have from one up to half a dozen cohesive
ties with what has gone before it’, plus ‘some purely internal ones’ (IF
290). These ties are termed ‘non-structural forms of organization’ on the
grounds that ‘the clause complex’ sets ‘the upper limits of grammatical
structure’, and that not ‘words and structures’ but ‘ongoing semantic
relationships’ ‘make text’ (IF xxi, 288, 318, 291; cf. IF 380f; NT 2/206)
(cf. 4.67; 9.3, 22, 91f, 95). Yet since the whole grammar is to some degree
text-based and semantic, this division is troublesome, as we shall see (9.95).
9.87
‘English’ has ‘four ways by which cohesion is created': ‘conjunction’,
‘reference, ellipsis’, and ‘lexical organization’ (IF 288, 313). ‘Conjunction’ covers a ‘cohesive bond’, ‘expressed’ by a
‘conjunction’ (like ‘“but”’) or a ‘conjunctive adjunct’ (like
‘“however”’) between ‘two’ ‘typically contiguous elements’,
ranging from ‘clauses’ up to ‘paragraphs or their equivalent in spoken
language’ (IF 303f, 289) (cf. 11.48). The ‘semantic relations’ ‘are
basically of the same kind’ as ‘between clauses’ in a ‘clause complex':
‘elaboration, extension, enhancement’ (IF 289, 303f) (cf. 9.81). But
Halliday now breaks them down further into ‘categories’ of ‘apposition’,
‘clarification, addition’, ‘variation’, ‘temporal’, and
‘causal-conditional’; these are further subdivided, yielding around 30 final
categories, some with erudite names like ‘adversative addition’
(‘“however”’), ‘verifactive clarification’ (‘“actually”’),
and ‘punctiliar temporal conjunction’ (‘“at this moment”’) (IF
303-08). The ‘categories’ are mainly commonsensical (but not all, e.g.,
‘distractive’ and ‘dismissive’ are listed as ‘clarifying’) and
‘may be found useful in the interpretation of texts’ (IF 303f, 308f).
9.88
‘Conjunction’ is ‘a way’ of ‘achieving texture’ by ‘setting up
logical-semantic relations’ ‘between messages’ ‘in the absence of
structural relationships’ (IF 308, 301, 289, 317). Such relations are
obviously ‘cohesive’ when ‘expressed’ by ‘words’ (e.g.
‘“consequently”‘ expressing ‘cause’); ‘implicit conjunction’
applies where ‘the semantic relationship is clearly felt to be present but
unexpressed’ (IF 301f, 308). We could ‘recognize’ these cases ‘by the
possibility of inserting a conjunction without changing the logical-semantic
relation’; or we could ‘treat them as semantically unrelated’ because
‘if the speaker had wanted to relate’ them ‘he could have done so’ (IF
217). ‘Including’ these ‘relations’ ‘in the analysis leads to a great
deal of indeterminacy’ about ‘whether’ they are ‘present’ and
‘which’ ‘kind’ ‘hold between pairs of adjacent sentences, or between
each sentence and anything that precedes it’ (IF 308f). So we should be
‘cautious in assigning implicit conjunction’ by ‘noticing’ where it is
‘recognized’, yet ‘characterizing the text without it: to see how much we
still feel is being left unaccounted for’. ‘The presence or absence of
explicit conjunction’ is a ‘principled variable in English discourse’ and
should not be ‘obscured’. We should look also to ‘other forms of
cohesion’ to assist ‘our intuition’ about the ‘pattern of conjunctive
relationships’.
9.89
‘Reference’, usually termed ‘co-reference’
in text linguistics,42 is ‘a relation between things or facts’,
‘usually’ ‘single elements that have a function within the clause --
processes, participants, circumstances’ (IF 289). Probably, ‘reference first
evolved’ as ‘exophoric reference': ‘linking “outwards” to some
person or object in the environment’ (IF 290) (cf. 13.24). ‘We may postulate
an imaginary stage in the evolution of language when the basic referential
category of person was deictic’, ‘referring to the situation here and now’
(IF 291) (cf. 9.77f, 80f). ‘First and second person’ pronouns ‘retain this
deictic sense’ (4.70), as do the ‘demonstratives “this/that”‘; but
‘third person’ pronouns are ‘more often than not anaphoric’, i.e.
‘pointing’ ‘to the preceding text’, or, more rarely, ‘cataphoric’,
pointing to ‘the following text’ (IF 291ff). Whenever ‘the listener has to
look elsewhere’, the ‘effect’ is ‘cohesive’, ‘linking the two
passages into a coherent unity’. ‘If the pronoun and referent are in the
same clause complex’, we have ‘already one text by virtue of the structural
relationship between the clauses’. If not, ‘cohesion’ is ‘the sole
linking feature and hence critical to the creation of text’. So ‘the
cohesive relationship’ ‘carries a greater load’ beyond the ‘clause
complex’.43
9.90
‘Ellipsis’ occurs when ‘a
clause, or a part of a clause’ or ‘of a verbal or nominal group’ is
‘presupposed at a subsequent place’ via ‘positive omission’ -- ‘saying
nothing where something is required to make up the sense’ (IF 288). Again,
what is missing depends upon one's grammatical expectations, and here Halliday
takes a rather extreme view. In ‘clausal ellipsis’, as is ‘typical in a
dialogue sequence’, ‘everything is omitted’ ‘in a response turn’
‘except the information-bearing element’, so that ‘the listener’ must
‘supply the missing words’ ‘from what has gone before’ (IF 300). ‘It
is always possible to “reconstitute” the ellipsed item’ and make it
‘fully explicit’ (more overstatement); ‘the exact wording’ is ‘taken
over’, aside from ‘reversal of speaker-listener deixis’ and ‘change of
mood where appropriate’. In a ‘question-answer sequence’, mere
‘“yes”‘ and ‘“no”‘ are taken to be ‘elliptical’ for ‘the
whole clause’, as are ‘“Why?”‘ and ‘“Who?”‘ in responses to
statements (IF 297).
9.91
Ellipsis doesn't fully match the other means of cohesion. It is a relation not
between two actual passages in a text, but between an actual passage and a
virtual or theoretical complete version. Also, though it ‘contributes’ to
‘the semantic structure’, it ‘sets up a relationship that is not semantic
but lexicogrammatical’ -- ‘in wording’, not ‘meaning’ (IF 296, 300).
For instance, since ‘every independent clause in English requires a
Subject’, ‘the listener will understand the Subject’ removed by
‘ellipsis’ -- e.g., ‘“I”‘ ‘in a giving clause (offer or
statement)’ (e.g. ‘“carry your bag?”’) , or ‘“you”‘ ‘in a
demanding clause (question or command)’ (e.g. ‘“play us a tune”’) (IF
90f). In this view, despite ‘most accounts of English grammar, the
imperative’ is not ‘a special case’ but ‘an instance of this general
principle by which a Subject is understood’ (cf. 4.56).
9.92
‘A substitute serves as a
place-holding device, showing where something has been omitted and what its
grammatical function would be’ (IF 297; cf. NT 2/239ff). ‘“Do”‘ is a
‘verbal substitute’, and ‘“one”‘ ‘a nominal substitute’, both
‘derived by extension from an item in the full, non-elliptical group’ (IF
300f). Although differing by ‘environments’, ‘ellipsis and substitution
are variants of the same type of cohesive relation’, in that ‘the missing
words’ listeners presumably ‘retrieve’ ‘must be grammatically
appropriate’ for being ‘inserted in place’ (IF 297, 301f). ‘This is not
the case with reference’, where ‘the relationship’ is ‘semantic’ and
has ‘no grammatical constraint: the class of the reference item need not match
that of what it presupposes, and one cannot normally insert the presupposed
element’ (IF 302). For that ‘reason’, ‘reference’ ‘can reach back a
long way, whereas ellipsis - substitution is largely’ ‘confined to closely
contiguous passages’, e.g. ‘“adjacency pairs” in dialogue’ (IF 302,
289, 317). In return, ‘reference’ usually ‘refers to the same thing’
while ‘ellipsis - substitution’ need not (IF 302).44
9.93
‘Lexical cohesion’ ‘selects
items’ ‘related in some way to previous ones’ and creates whole
‘referential chains’ whose ‘interaction’ ‘gives the text its
coherence’ and ‘dynamic flow’ (IF 316, 310, 289) (cf. 11.30, 45). Subtypes
include ‘repetition’, where a repeated item is the same word or some
‘inflectional’ or ‘derivational variant’ (e.g. ‘“dine -
dinner”’); and ‘synonymy’ (e.g. ‘“sound - noise”’), along
with its ‘variants': ‘hyponymy’ of ‘general’ and ‘specific’ (e.g.
‘“vegetation - grass”’), ‘meronymy’ of ‘whole’ and ‘part’
(e.g. ‘“bottle - stopper”’), and ‘antonymy’ of ‘opposites’ (e.g.
‘“fell asleep - woke”’) (IF 310ff). Also, Firth's ‘collocation’ is
included as a ‘“co-occurrence tendency”‘ having a ‘semantic basis’
and a ‘considerably greater probability’ than is implied by ‘their overall
frequency in the language’ (IF 312f) (8.78ff). The ‘cohesive effect’ of
‘synonymy’ actually ‘depends more on collocation’, which affects ‘our
expectations of what is to come next’ in ‘strong’ though ‘localized’
ways (IF 313, 317). However, ‘fixed phrases and cliches’ (like ‘“stretch
of the imagination”’) ‘contribute little’, since they ‘behave almost
like single lexical items’ (IF 313) (cf. 2.61; 4.60; 5.32, 54; 734;
13.28).
9.94
One ‘way to see how these resources work is to deconstruct a text, destroying
its textual patterns one by one’, ‘removing the cohesion’ and ‘selecting
options at random’ (IF 314f). For a piece of a dialogue about ‘the art of
selling silver’, the original passage ‘“if they come in they're usually
people who love beautiful things”‘ gets turned into ‘“the people who
love beautiful things are usually people if people come in”‘ (IF 283, 315;
cf. IF 346-59). But ‘this is’ a patently ‘artificial exercise': ‘in real
life the different “metafunctions” are so closely interwoven’ that one can
hardly be ‘disturbed while the others remain unaffected’, aside from
‘aphasia’ (IF 315). Surely a functional grammar should address the relation
among genuine alternatives, all cohesive but differing in effect and
impact.
9.95
An inconsistency arises when Halliday argues cohesion is needed because ‘the
organization of text is semantic rather than formal’, ‘much looser than that
of grammatical units’ (IF 290) (cf. 9.3, 22, 32, 36 91f, 86; 1224).
Since ‘text’ is ‘an ongoing process of meaning’, we should ‘think
of’ ‘cohesion as an aspect of this process, whereby the flow of meaning is
channelled along the speaker's purposive courses instead of spilling out in
every possible direction’. However, since ‘“text” is usually taken as
referring to the product’ (9.43), it seems ‘natural to talk about cohesion
as a relation between entities, in the same way we talk about grammatical
structure’ in ‘the clause’. ‘In the last resort, a clause (or any other
linguistic unit) is also a happening; but since a clause has a tight formal
structure, we do not seriously misrepresent it’ as ‘a static
configuration’ (cf. 12.55). And Halliday is content to ‘represent cohesive
relations simply by additions to the structural notation’.
9.96
Moreover, the devices Halliday presents are not really what prevents the ‘flow
of meaning’ from ‘spilling out aimlessly’. ‘For a text to be
coherent’, ‘it must be cohesive, but must be more besides’ (IF 318). It
must not merely ‘have structure’, but must also ‘be semantically
appropriate, with lexicogrammatical realizations to match (must make sense)’.
Yet Halliday is inconsistent here again. On the one hand, he declares that
‘structure is not the appropriate concept for interpreting the semantic
domain’, and he views cohesion as ‘non-structural forms of organization’
(IF 188 xxi, 288, 318) (9.86). Also, ‘semantic structures’ ‘need by no
means have the same shape as structures at any other level’ (EF 94f). On the
other hand, he grants that ‘a text has’ ‘semantic structure’ ‘above
the clause complex’, and that ‘the concept of structure is the same’ as in
‘grammatical structure’, albeit ‘the level at which it is coded is
different’ (IF 318). Also, ‘structure’ should be ‘defined as any
viable’ or ‘meaningful’ ‘configuration of functions’, and this
‘definition’ is ‘abstract enough to cover semantic structure’ (IF 32,
37, EF 95). The ‘concept of semantic structure’ might even ‘handle more
complex areas of behaviour’, e.g. ‘in the study of institutional
communication networks’, and might render ‘complex decision-making
strategies’ ‘accessible to linguistic observation’ (EF 95f). But these
prospects are ‘a matter of speculation’ because ‘sociological semantics’
is at an ‘elementary stage’, still ‘investigating’ ‘closely
circumscribed’ ‘contexts’, describable by ‘direct pre-selection between
semantic and grammatical systems’ (cf. 9.11f, 39).
9.97
The range of the approach is further increased by introducing a broad
‘lexicogrammatical’ conception of ‘metaphor’
for any ‘aspect of the structural configuration of the clause’ that
‘differs from that which would be arrived at’ by ‘the most straightforward
coding of the meanings’ (IF 345). Each ‘metaphorical expression
corresponds’ to one or more ‘congruent’
(‘“literal”’) ones for the same ‘semantic configuration’ that are
attainable by ‘a natural sequence of steps’ (IF 321). ‘The congruent’
version need not be ‘better’, ‘more frequent’, or ‘maximally
simple’, nor ‘function as norm’; as ‘the history of every language’
shows, the ‘metaphorical’ one can ‘become the norm’ by ‘a natural
process of linguistic change’ (IF 321f, 327, 329).45 ‘We do not
know’ if ‘language evolved’ from ‘congruent modes of representation’
being ‘gradually elaborated’, or if ‘metaphor has been inherent’ ‘from
the very beginning’ (IF 322), although the argument based on child development
suggests the former (9.11), as do physicalist notions of meaning (4.24; 5.66f).
‘In most types of discourse’, ‘we operate in between’ ‘two extremes':
‘the totally congruent’, which ‘sounds ‘flat’, and ‘the totally
incongruent’, which sounds ‘artificial and contrived’ (IF 324).
9.98
As with ‘logic’ at the other end of normalcy (9.59), Halliday airs some
problems with metaphor, but remains undismayed. He says ‘it is not always
possible to say exactly what is’ ‘metaphorical’ (understatement), and yet
‘it is always possible to analyse such clauses in non-metaphorical terms’
(overstatement) (IF 334, 157; cf. IF 327, 343). ‘We are able to recognize
congruent forms’, because ‘knowing a language’ includes ‘knowing what is
the most typical “unmarked” way of saying a thing’ (IF 322) -- true in
general, but not for all specific locutions. Also, two alternate versions will
not be ‘totally synonymous’, since the ‘metaphorical’ one ‘adds’
‘semantic features’; yet the two ‘will be systematically related in
meaning, and therefore synonymous in certain respects’ (IF 321, 58). And, the
‘concept of grammatical metaphor’ is itself ‘a metaphorical extension of
the term from its rhetorical sense as a figure of speech’ (IF 345).
9.99
These various qualifiers suggest Halliday's own uneasiness about a possibly huge
inflation beyond the ‘pointedly metaphorical’ usage he ‘largely avoids’
(IF 157). We see this trend in his ‘ideational’ ‘metaphors of
transitivity’ (IF 321). It seems reasonable to include ‘“the fifth day saw
them at the summit”‘ versus ‘“they arrived at the summit on the fifth
day”': ‘time’ ‘has been dressed up’ as ‘participant’, making
‘“a day”‘ a ‘conscious being’ (IF 322-25). But including ‘“she
has brown eyes”‘ and ‘“he writes good books”‘ by contrast with
‘“her eyes are brown”‘ and ‘“he writes books, which are good”‘
seems to reserve ‘congruence’ for syntactically simple (kernel-like) clauses
(cf. 7.52), even where, as here, the ‘metaphorical’ version is ‘part of
the system of English’ and ‘the unmarked choice’ (IF 327f).
9.100
The same inflation impends for the ‘interpersonal’ ‘metaphors of mood and
modality’ (IF 321, 342). ‘The explicitly subjective and objective forms of
modality are all strictly speaking metaphorical’ in ‘representing the
modality as being the substantive proposition’ rather than the ‘adjunct’
required for a ‘congruent form’ (IF 340). So all statements depending on
‘projecting clauses’ like ‘“I think that”‘ or ‘“I'm certain
that”‘ get counted as ‘metaphorical’ counterparts to ‘congruent
realizations’ with ‘a modal element’ like ‘“probably”‘ or
‘“certainly”‘ ‘within the clause’ (IF 332f). Halliday remarks here
that in ‘the “games people play” in the daily round of interpersonal
skirmishing’, we ‘give prominence to our own point of view’ by ‘dressing
it up’ as ‘the assertion’ and ‘making it appear’ ‘objective’ by
‘claiming’ ‘certainty’ (IF 340; cf. IF 333). Indeed, ‘the entire
system’ of ‘the grammar of interpersonal exchanges’ ‘rests’ on a
‘paradox': ‘we only say we are certain when we are not’ (IF 340, 358).
9.101
Lending ‘metaphor’ so wide a sense raises the question: ‘how far does one
go in this direction in the course of textual analysis?’ (IF 331).46
‘A general guide would be: unscramble as far as is needed’, e.g., for
‘explaining the impact’ of a ‘text’ (IF 332, 345; cf. IF 329). Even if
we can ‘establish a chain of metaphorical interpretations leading from the
clause under scrutiny’ to a ‘congruent form’ via ‘a series of
intermediate steps’, we have no ‘“history” of the clause’ as ‘the
process whereby speaker or writer has arrived at’ it (IF 328, 345) (cf. 7.48,
51; 13.54). Still, if we can ‘suggest how an instance in text may be referred
to the system of the language as a whole’, we can gain ‘an important link in
the total chain of explanations whereby we relate text to system’ (IF 345).
9.102
Halliday takes an equally wide view of style,
declaring ‘there are no regions of language in which style does not reside’
(EF 112) (cf. 3.69; 5.82; 6.52; 8.83; 11.57). Here too, the ‘central problem
in the study of style’ is ‘relevance': ‘determining whether any
particular instance of linguistic prominence’ ‘is significant’ and
‘motivated (EF 103, 112). A ‘prominent’ ‘feature’, which ‘stands out
in some way’, is ‘foregrounded only if it relates to the meaning of the text
as whole’ (EF 112f).47 It may be seen either as ‘a departure from
a norm’ or as ‘an attainment or establishment of a norm’. ‘The use of
ungrammatical forms has received a great deal of attention’ because it
supports ‘a deterministic concept’ of ‘deviation’ (‘forms prohibited
by rules’), which is however ‘of very limited interest in stylistics’ (EF
114) (cf. 13.40). ‘Prominence’ can be ‘probabilistic’, based on
‘departures from some expected pattern of frequency’ (EF 115, 113). Or,
‘“the impact of entire work may be enormous”‘ without showing anything
‘“unusual or arresting in grammar or in vocabulary”‘ (EF 115) (McIntosh
1965:19).
9.103
As befits his broad approach, Halliday looks beyond ‘“effects” in grammar
and vocabulary’, in the sense of ‘syntactic or lexical patterns’, to the
‘subject-matter’ and the ‘vision of things’ (EF 118, 120). ‘In
stylistics we are concerned with language in relation to all the levels of
meaning a work may have’ (EF 120) (cf. 8.84). ‘Language, by the multiplicity
of its functions, possesses a fugue-like quality in which a number of themes
unfold simultaneously’ (EF 121). ‘Powerful impact’ results when ‘the
subject-matter is motivated by deeper meaning, and the transitivity patterns
realize both’ (EF 120).
9.104
In a Sapirian manner, Halliday turns to literature: ‘the relation’ of ‘the
language system’ ‘to the meanings of a literary work’ (EF 133) (cf.
3.68ff). In William Golding's The Inheritors, ‘the literal use’ of
‘syntactic patterns provides a context for their metaphorical use’ (EF 121).
To invoke a ‘Neanderthal’ ‘tribe's point of view’, ‘the language
conveys’ a ‘picture in which people act, but do not act on things’ (EF
123). ‘Such normally transitive verbs as “grab” occur intransitively’.
Often ‘the Subjects are not people’ but ‘parts of body or inanimate
objects’. The effect is ‘an atmosphere of ineffectual activity’ and
‘helplessness’, and a ‘reluctance to envisage the “whole man”‘
‘participating in a process’ (EF 123, 125). In sum, ‘transitivity’ is
‘the theme of the entire novel: man's interpretation of his experience’ (EF
134). In some such way, ‘every work achieves a unique balance among the types
and components of meaning, and embodies the writer's individual exploration of
the functional diversity of language’ (EF 135).
9.105
Kindred to style but with a broader range is the concept of register’,
such as ‘narrative, transactional, expository’, and so on (IF 318).48
‘Elements’, ‘configurations’, and ‘collocations’ ‘vary from one
register to another’, as does ‘the patterning of clause themes throughout a
text’ (IF 318, 313, 315). But in IF Halliday decides not to ‘go into
questions of register structure’, which ‘we are only beginning to be able to
characterize’ (IF 290, xxxv). He merely assumes that ‘a speaker of the
language “knows”‘ ‘how likely a particular word or group or phrase is’
‘in any given register’; but the ‘treatment of probabilities’, albeit
‘an important part of the grammar’, is also ‘outside the scope’ (IF xxii;
cf. EF 114). We thus cannot evaluate his claim that ‘registers select and
foreground different options, but do not normally have a special grammar’; yet
‘some registers do’, such as ‘newspaper headlines’ (IF 372; cf. IF
373-77).49
9.106
More ‘specialized’ than registers are the ‘“restricted languages”‘ that make up ‘much of the speech’ of
‘daily life’ in ‘contexts where the options are limited and the meaning
potential’ ‘closely specifiable’ and ‘explainable’ (EF 25ff) (cf.
8.76ff). Exploring them might ‘throw light on certain features in the internal
organization of language’ (EF 27). Halliday lists ‘games’,
‘greetings’, ‘musical scores’, ‘weather reports’, ‘recipes’,
‘cabled messages’, and so on, along with ‘routines of the working day’
like ‘buying and selling’ (EF 25f, 63).50 In such domains, ‘the
language is not restricted as a whole’ and ‘the transactional meanings are
not closed’, but ‘definable patterns’ and ‘options’ do ‘come into
play’, e.g., for ‘beginning and ending’ a ‘conversation on the
telephone’ (EF 26).
9.107
By now we can appreciate the scope and motives in Halliday's plea to
‘construct a grammar’ for the ‘analysis’ and ‘interpretation of texts
of a broad variety of registers in modern English’ (IF x, xv, xx). This
‘analysis’ ‘has two aims’ or ‘levels’ (IF 371, xv). The ‘lower
level’ -- ‘always attainable’ if we ‘relate the text to general features
of the language’ -- is ‘to show why the text means what it does’. ‘The
higher level’ is ‘to show why it is valued as it is’ -- as ‘effective or
not’ ‘in relation to its purpose’. ‘This goal’ is ‘more difficult’
and presupposes the first: ‘evaluation rests on interpretation’ of the
‘“context of situation” and “context of culture”‘ (cf. 8.91; 9.1, 8,
18; 22f; 13.62). Moreover, we must ask ‘how the linguistic features of a text
relate systematically to the features of its environment, including the
intentions of those involved in its production’ (IF xvif). Like ‘any
systematic inquiry’, ‘the study of language in a social context’
‘involves’ ‘some idealization’, because ‘the object’ of
‘linguistic study’ is never an ‘unprocessed language event’ but a ‘“text”,
that is, language in a context’, ‘an operational unit’ -- and ‘the text,
whether invented, elicited, or recorded, is an idealized construction’ (EF 68,
107) (cf. 5.5). But in communication, ‘success does not depend’ on whether a
text is ‘consciously’ ‘planned and polished’; a ‘spontaneous’ one is
not ‘formless and unstructured’ (IF 371). ‘Most discourse falls in between
the rhetorical ideal and the total flop.'
9.108
The problems and inconsistencies I have pointed out are largely due to the
friction between the intent to construct a fully general grammar and the drive
to fit it closely to a wide range of realistic data. ‘Ideally, every example
should be a whole text’, but ‘increasing the length and picking’ out a
given ‘feature’ can be difficult (IF xxxiii). An ‘example’ may
‘illustrate a category’ ‘clearly and unambiguously’, but ‘discourse’
‘in real life’ has ‘vastly greater scope and variation’ (IF xxxiii, 92).
In fact as ‘a general principle in language’, ‘the easier a thing is to
recognize, the more trivial it is’, whereas ‘a semantically significant
category is usually not simple or clearcut’ (IF xxxiii). Halliday prefers to
analyse ‘a brief extract’ ‘understandable out of its context’, or ‘a
passage from a well known text’ -- Alice in Wonderland being his
standby (also in Hasan 1967) -- though, for purposes of publicity, he uses some
excerpts by linguists like Saussure, Firth, Hjelmslev, and Whorf (IF xxxiii, 45,
40f). He ‘invents’ examples ‘as a last resort’ or ‘to keep
illustration down to manageable size’ (IF xxxiii). He does lean heavily on one
‘hypothetical example': a mother's response to a naughty ‘boy’ who has
been ‘playing’ ‘on a building site’ -- will she ‘smack him’, or will
she use ‘moral’ ‘disapproval’, ‘threat of punishment’, or
‘emotional blackmail’ (EF 61, 58ff, 73-78, 85-91, 94)?
9.109
Traditional grammar and much of linguistics have analysed ‘grammar’ within a
single system or account by carefully selecting examples wherein the multiple
systems correspond fairly well (cf. 5.37; 9.46, 55, 75; 13.50). Halliday's
comprehensive functional grammar pries these interacting systems apart in order
to explore the rich variety of ways for mapping from system to system (9.48, 50,
57). Predictably, the foray plunges him into a multitude of decisions and
perplexities about how to identify and label things and how to interrelate them.
Whereas Chomsky's grammar and its successors herald an analysis in which rigour
and uniformity steadily increase as we move away from the ‘surface’ data,
Halliday's grammar enables an analysis in which richness and multiplicity
steadily increase (cf. 9.21). We therefore produce not some tidy artifact,
logical formula, or ‘deep’ tree structure, but a still open-ended exegesis
of yet farther-reaching issues. The text is not transformed into a vast feature
matrix or configuration of minimal units, but rewoven into a complex pattern of
vectors that gives a renewed sense of intricacy.
9.110
And herein lies the realism. Halliday wants to emphasize, not downplay the
prospect that the ‘text’ may not be ‘homogeneous, univocal, or
“flat”‘ but replete with ‘multiple meanings, alternatives, ambiguities,
metaphors, and so on’ (IF 318, xv). ‘Discourse is a multidimensional
process; “a text”‘ ‘is the product of that process’ and ‘embodies
the same’ ‘polyphonic structuring as is found in the grammar’. Yet ‘the
text’ is also ‘functioning at a higher level of the code, as the realization
of semiotic orders “above” the language’, and ‘may contain’ ‘all the
inconsistencies, contradictions, and conflicts that can exist within and between
such semiotic systems’ (IF 318). When we analyse ‘a text’ as ‘a highly
complex phenomenon’, we may move ‘further away from the language into more
abstract semiotic realms, with different modes of discourse reinterpreting,
complementing, and contradicting each other as the intricacies are progressively
brought to light’ (IF xvi) (cf. 9.92, 104). This ‘exegetical work’ cannot
be ‘turned into an algorithm’ by ‘specifying a series of steps or
operations’ leading to ‘an objective account of the text, still less of the
culture’ (cf. 5.62, 86; 11.14; 13.50).
9.111
For Halliday, ‘the test of a theory’ is: ‘does it facilitate the task at
hand?’ (IF xxx) (9.1). He sees a ‘trade-off’ between ‘depth’ and
‘breadth’, i.e., between ‘highly specialized machines’ for ‘just one
job’ and ‘less specialized’ ones for ‘a broad range of jobs’ (cf.
9.21). His ‘account’ ‘is biased toward breadth’ and has already served
‘a variety’ of ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’ ‘purposes’ (IF xv,
xxx). These involve ‘the relation between language and ‘culture’; the
‘analysis of text, spoken and written’, notably ‘spontaneous
conversation’; ‘computational’ and ‘developmental linguistics’; the
‘study of socialization’ and ‘functional variation’; the ‘comparison
of registers, or functional varieties of English’; and the ‘stylistic
analysis of poems and short stories’. ‘Educational applications’ include
‘teacher education’; ‘analysis’ of ‘textbooks’, ‘teacher-pupil
communication’, and ‘children's writing’; ‘language in secondary
education’; ‘error analysis’; and ‘the teaching of literature’ and
‘foreign language’. Halliday's ‘approach’ is thus more ‘applied’
than ‘pure’, more ‘functional’ than ‘formal’, more ‘actual’ than
‘ideal’, more ‘rhetorical’ than ‘logical’, and addresses ‘the text
rather than the sentence’ (IF xviii).
9.112
Such tasks and applications form the framework of his search for a ‘concept of
linguistic function’ that would allow us to ‘understand language in
educational, developmental, social, and aesthetic aspects’ (EF 8). We also
need to seek ‘criteria’ ‘at the interfaces between language and
non-language’, notably ‘the socio-semantic interface’ (EF 68f). We must
explore the respective role of ‘language’ ‘in humanities, social science,
natural science, medicine, and engineering’ (IF xxix) (13.63). The prospect is
imposing, and most of the work still lies in the future. But Halliday has
already covered much ground to make us aware that ‘a text is not a mere
reflection of what lies beyond’ but ‘an active partner in the reality-making
and reality-changing process’ (IF 318).
NOTES
ON HALLIDAY
1
The key to Halliday references is: EF: Explorations in the Function of
Language (1973); IF: An Introduction to Functional Linguistics
(1985); IG: Intonation and Grammar in British English (1967a); and NT:
‘Notes on transitivity and theme in English’ (1967-68). NT has three parts,
cited as NT 1, NT 2, and NT 3. IG and EF consist (like Firth's later books)
chiefly of ‘previously published papers’ (IG 7; cf. EF 20, 45, 70, 101,
139). IF is a fairly organic whole, ‘grown out of’ ‘class notes prepared
for students’ of ‘discourse analysis’ (IF ix). It only partly fulfils the
promise of ‘a monograph with revisions’ to be made from the ‘Notes’ of
1967-68 (IF ix, NT 215n), because it does not ‘spell out all the arguments’
(letter to me, 16 November 1988) -- a reason why IF was entitled A Short
Introduction’ until the publishers objected. I faced special problems for this
chapter: treating Halliday's work apart from Ruqaiya Hasan's; condensing his
‘spontaneous’ ‘style’ (IF 371); and having for IF no ‘index’, judged
‘superfluous’ because ‘the table of contents’ ‘makes the structure of
the book immediately clear’ (IF xii) (of course it does, but that's not what
indexes are for!).
2
Whorf (1956) ‘pointed out’ the ‘naivete’ of picking out ‘isolated’
instances, such as large numbers of ‘Eskimo words for “snow” or Arabic
words for “camel”‘, as measures of ‘importance’ in the ‘culture’
(IF xxxi). ‘Chinese has a single word for “rice”‘, being ‘a
language’ ‘that favours general nouns’.
3
Halliday (1988:viii) distinguishes ‘realization’
as ‘the relationship among the levels of the system’, from ‘instantiation’
between ‘instance and ‘system’, and says Saussure ‘confused’ the two
(cf. 9.27, 39; 13.39).
4
Still, his ‘theory’ ‘has been used in a general cognitive framework’ and
allied with ‘neurolinguistics’, ‘learning theory’, and artificial
intelligence (IF xxxi; cf. IF xxix; IG 10n).
5
Being ‘cumbersome’, ‘lexicogrammar’ is often replaced by ‘grammar’,
but we should remember ‘that syntax and vocabulary are part of the same level
in the code’ (IF xiv) (cf. 13.28).
6
And a lot on Halliday's own son Nigel (IF 94-9, EF 27-33, 37), who, Halliday
told me in October 1989, is the only child he directly studied. A thick
manuscript collection of data on Nigel lies unpublished in Halliday's desk. One
wonders how representative a child can be whose parents are both famous
linguists; but recent casework confirming Halliday's view of acquisition is
provided by Painter (1984).
7
Halliday complains that ‘“acquisition”‘ is a ‘misleading metaphor,
suggesting that language’ is ‘property to be owned’ (EF 24). Probably, the
psycholinguists used the term to dissociate their work from behaviourist
research on learning (e.g. word-list experiments, cf. 11.70, 93).
8
Actually, Bernstein's concept of the ‘restricted code’ (first proposed in
1961) was widely interpreted in just the sense Halliday disputes here: as a
‘lack of words’, ‘grammar’, and ‘syntactic options’ (EF 18). A
reinterpretation in terms of ‘functions’ would be highly significant and
helpful for educational programmes.
9
‘Classifications of functions’, such as Buhler's (1934) ‘representational,
expressive, and conative’, or Malinowski's (1923) ‘pragmatic and magical’,
are cited as ‘alternatives to the undifferentiated notion of language as the
expression of thought’ (NT 3/207; cf. EF 104, 107) (3.10ff; 5.69; 6.6; 7.10;
8.24f; 12.17ff, 22; 13.10). Unlike Malinowski, Buhler ‘was concerned with the
functions of language from the standpoint not so much of the culture but of the
individual’ (Halliday & Hasan 1985:15; cf. 13.14).
10
‘Systemic theory follows in the European functional tradition': ‘Firth's
system-structure theory’, Hjelmslev's ‘principles’, and ‘Prague
school’ ‘ideas’ (IF xxvi) (cf. 9.47, 56, 919). Halliday's
‘publishers’ said he ‘should not be renaming “his” grammar functional
instead of systemic’; he ‘found that difficult to accept’, the more so as
he associates the ‘systemic part’ with ‘networks’, which are omitted
from IF (IF x, xv) (cf. 9.20; 912).
11
Like Firth, Halliday would extend ‘paradigms’ from the ‘word to larger
units’ (IF xxxii) (8.57; 9.27). The traditional sense entails a
‘contradiction': when we display ‘things that do not go together’ ‘by
definition’, they get ‘turned into syntagms’ (cf. 2.66; 8.59; 13.27).
Besides, ‘paradigms have a role’ less ‘in language learning’ than ‘in
learning linguistics and in carrying out linguistic research’ (IF xxxiif) (cf.
4.86).
12
He says ‘the theoretical component’ was omitted, namely ‘the system
networks and realization statements’ (IF x). How these notations count as
‘theory’ needs explaining (cf. 13.25); and plenty of theoretical groundwork
remains in the book.
13
‘In the European linguistic tradition, classes were originally derived from an
analysis of sentences into parts; the term “parts
of speech” is a mistranslation’, though I don't see why Halliday's
‘parts of a sentence’ is necessarily more accurate for ‘meroi logou’ and
‘partes orationis’ (IF 30) (cf. 8.54, 61). Still, ‘the scheme of word
classes’ based on the ‘inflectional potential’ of ‘words in classical
Greek’ (hence ‘case, gender’, etc.) (IF 30) is clearly removed from both
‘speech’ and ‘sentence’. ‘English’ calls for ‘other principles’.
14
For consistency, I use capitals for these terms also when citing earlier works
before Halliday used the device. When he puts whole terms in small capitals for
emphasis, I make my best guess whether to capitalize them in the citation.
15
Of these ranks, the ‘morpheme’ gets scant coverage, figuring briefly as ‘a
creation of modern linguistics’ ‘for the smallest unit’, although
‘words’ may ‘consist of only one morpheme’ (IF 25, 20) (cf. 4.53, 60;
13.28). Because ‘in speaking English we are not normally aware of the internal
structure of words’, ‘constituent morphemes have never come to be marked
off’ ‘in writing’ (IF 20) (4.54; 5.46, 48). We are ‘more aware of how
words combine into larger units’, such as ‘group’ and ‘clause’ (IF
20f), and these ranks are covered in detail (13.29).
16
For an easy start, Halliday presents ‘orthographic constituents’ with neatly
‘layered part-whole relationships among units of a written text, each unit
consisting of one or more of the next smaller’ (cf. 5.41) -- all
‘without reference to the grammatical structure’ (IF 2f; cf. IF 22, 271).
Then follows ‘constituent structure in verse': ‘stanzas’, ‘lines’,
‘feet’, and ‘syllables’ -- admittedly not ‘the most fundamental’
‘form of organization in language’ but ‘the most readily observable’ (IF
4, 18). Noting that ‘all the elements of verse structure have their basis in
the spoken language’, he proposes a ‘phonometric interpretation’ to
replace the ‘classic metric’ one from ‘Latin and Greek’ (IF 8, 10, 12,
14). This gives ‘a more accurate account of verse as spoken aloud’,
‘correctly predicts the relative length of syllable within the foot’ and
‘allows for silence’ ‘wherever it would occur in a natural rendering’
(i.e. ‘a silent beat’ or ‘foot’ to fill out ‘odd numbers’ ‘because
all phonometric structures in English are binary’) (IF 14, 12, 273). ‘The
foot’ is also treated as ‘a unit of ordinary everyday speech, with no
definite number of syllables’ (IF 13, 271; cf. IG 12f).
17
Like Saussure's and Bloomfield's, Halliday's examples are words in different
languages for the same thing (‘“rain”’), showing ‘there is nothing
natural about the relation of the sounds’ to the ‘phenomenon beyond the
code’ (2.28; 4.27).
18
He offers terms for three ‘different aspects’ of a ‘combined function':
‘“semantic” suggests its place in the total linguistic system;
“representational” emphasizes its relation to extra-linguistic factors’;
and ‘“logical” implies an underlying structure’ ‘independent of
syntax’ and ‘opposed’ to ‘“grammatical” as “meaning” to
“form”‘ (cf. Sweet 1891) (NT 3/209). In IF, the term
‘logical-semantic’ (or ‘logico-semantic’) seems to collapse this
division (cf. 9.74, 84f, 99).
19
Even so, ‘the European functional “schools”‘ in Prague, France, London,
and Copenhagen ‘all regarded the text as the object of linguistics’ (IF xxii)
(though to me, Hjelmslev's is a prime case of ‘an elegant theory’ with no
attempt to ‘account for how the system engenders text’). ‘“Systemic”
description’ seems to be a British product, however: the earliest references
are ‘mimeographs’ by Halliday, Alick Henrici, and Rodney Huddleston, dating
from 1964-66 (NT 37, 81) and produced within a research project on scientific
English. These papers were finally published in Halliday & Martin (eds.)
(1981).
20
Halliday's notion ‘corresponds to the “surface subject” in
transformational grammar’; ‘a “deep subject” is unnecessary’ and
‘self-contradictory’, since the relations it would account for are handled
‘systemically’ by ‘a transitivity function’ (NT 1/39n, 2/213) (cf.
7.63). To ‘identify’ ‘the subject’ ‘in a text’, we can treat it as
‘the nominal group’ ‘picked up by the pronoun’ in a ‘tag question’;
for ‘“that teapot your aunt got from the duke” the tag would be “didn't
she?”‘, not ‘“didn't he?” or “wasn't it?”‘ (IF 73). The results
‘accord with the classical conception of the subject’ based on ‘concord
with the verb’ -- hardly a helpful basis ‘in Modern English’ with its
scant ‘manifestation of person and number’. And we ‘bring in things not
traditionally regarded as subject, like “it” in “it's raining”‘
expressing an ‘unanalysed’ ‘process’ with no ‘participants’ (IF 102,
NT 3/193, 195). Halliday often uses ‘tag questions’ to reveal or
differentiate grammatical categories (IF 59, 69, 72, 85, 91, 119, 169, 333, 389,
NT 3/213, EF 55). Compare Note 29.
21
For clarity, I use the term ‘metafunctions’ throughout, though Halliday may
call them ‘functions’, ‘elements’, ‘components’, or ‘meanings’.
I also unify variations in the names, e.g., ‘discoursal’ for ‘textual’,
and ‘speech-functional’ for ‘interpersonal’ (cf. NT 3/209f); on the
merger of ‘experiential’ and ‘logical’ into ‘ideational’, see 9.59.
22
One case is the ‘cleft’ form, as in ‘“What we want is Watney's”‘ (NT
223f; cf. IF 43, 59, 280f). In his own writing, Halliday favours it to the verge
of cleftomania; pressed for space, I removed dozens of cleft constructions in my
quotes.
23
Halliday finds his ‘term’ ‘different from the mathematical concept of
information’; but ‘transitional probabilities’ and ‘statistic
concepts’ are elsewhere related to ‘prominence’ (IF 275, EF 115) (cf.
7.38).
24
‘More specifically, it is one non-embedded clause with all the clauses
embedded in it’ (NT 2/201). An ‘embedded’ ‘item’ was ‘earlier’
called ‘rankshifted’ or ‘downranked’, because it has an ‘equivalent or
higher rank’ in respect to the item in which it is a ‘constituent’ (IF
166f, 129, 219, NT 243n, IG 20f). Perhaps because Halliday sees ‘no direct
relationship between an embedded clause and the clause within which it is
embedded’, or at least ‘not a structural one’, he tends to ‘ignore
embedded clauses’; ‘they do not function as propositions or proposals’ and
‘play no part in the structure of the interaction’ (IF 219, 225, 98) (but
cf. 11.67).
25
Also, ‘tone realizes modal options’ whereas ‘tonality and tonicity’
‘realize thematic options’ (NT 2/243n). IG has a more elaborate scheme:
besides the five ‘tones’ in the ‘primary system’ treated here (I use the
names of tones instead of Halliday's numbering from 1 to 5), some eighteen
‘tones’ across eight ‘secondary systems’ (IG 16f). ‘Strictly speaking,
“key” is outside the scope’ of IF, being ‘not expressed structurally but
prosodically’ (IF 281).
26
In NT, Halliday had listed ‘six distinct but related sets of options’
‘within the theme system': ‘information, thematization, and identification
for the clause as a whole’, and ‘predication, substitution, and reference’
for a ‘single element in the clause structure’ (NT 2/200, 236-41). These are
redistributed in IF across various domains, including ‘cohesion’ (cf. 9.46,
89, 92, 937).
27
Halliday ‘avoids’ the terms ‘topic and comment’ because they are ‘used
in ways which conflate’ these ‘distinct functions’ (NT 2/200, 205). For
him, ‘topic’ is ‘only one’ ‘kind of theme’, namely ‘the first
element in the clause that has some function in the ideational structure’ (IF
39, 56; cf. IF 54, 61, 67n; 7.63).
28
‘The term “cognitive”‘ for ‘ideational’ is ‘misleading’, since
it could apply to ‘all linguistic functions’ (EF 105f; NT 3/209); but the
term does get used (NT 2/236ff) (cf. Note 37).
29
Also, ‘mental processes’ are not ‘probed or substituted by the verb
“do”‘; ‘we cannot say “What John did was know the answer”‘ (IF
108-111).
30
‘In earlier stages of the language’, ‘“indirect” participants’
‘required an oblique case and/or a preposition’ (IF 132). ‘In modern
English, the distinction between direct and indirect participants has largely
disappeared': they ‘all’ ‘can take on the function of subject; there are
no cases’; and the use of ‘a preposition is determined on other grounds’
(cf. 9.65, 69; 932).
31
‘Except’ for the ‘middle’ or ‘mediopassive voice’ in ‘a clause
with no feature of “agency”‘, as in ‘“the light turned on”‘ (IF
146, 150, 152, NT 3/183-88) (cf. 9.68).
32
Some ‘indeterminacy’ remains: ‘participants can sometimes occur with a
preposition’ (as in ‘“play a tune for me”‘ vs ‘“play me a
tune'“), and ‘circumstances’ can occur ‘without one’ (as in ‘“they
stayed two days”‘ vs ‘“they stayed for two days”’) (IF 150, 133).
Furthermore, ‘a complement’ can be made ‘subject’ with the
‘preposition’ put at the end (as in ‘“the bed had not been slept
in”’) (IF 150; cf. IF 48).
33
Halliday points out the ‘systematic distinction between “which am I?”
(“which part do I play?”) and “which is me?” (“which one depicts
me?”)’ (IF 117). It has to be ‘“me”‘ because ‘all complements in
English are in the oblique case’. ‘“Which is I?”‘ (like ‘“it is
I”’), though ‘beloved of English teachers’, is ‘“bad grammar”‘,
i.e., not ‘consistent with the rest of the grammar’.
34
Like several terms appearing on different levels in Halliday's scheme, this
informal use of ‘information’ is inconsistent with the ‘informational
metafunction': content, not ‘news value’, is being ‘affirmed’. Compare
the inconsistent uses of ‘transitive’ (mutually implying), ‘marked’ (signalled
by word, tone, punctuation, etc.), and ‘theme’ (main idea or concern) (IF
198f, 216, EF 120, 133).
35
Fired I suppose by the aura of ‘logic’, Halliday dresses his exposition of
‘nominal’ and ‘verbal group’ (and later of ‘parataxis and hypotaxis’)
in Greek letters and mathematical symbols (IF 170-84, 197-201), which he seldom
uses.
36
Still, only the ‘experiential’ ones are ‘potentially defining’ (IF 163).
As ‘participles’, ‘verbs’ may also ‘function as Epithet’ (as in
‘“knowing smile”’) and ‘Classifier’ (as in ‘“spoken
language”’) (IF 164).
37
The ‘Predicator’ is introduced here as ‘the verbal group’ minus ‘the
Finite’, or ‘the verb function’ ‘in the mood structure’ (IF 175, 78,
80, 49). However, the term ‘predication’ also survives in IF (33, 280) from
NT, where it was a whole system for featuring ‘cognitive themes’ in cleft
constructions (NT 2/236-39; cf. NT 1/64, 2/221; Note 26).
38
A ‘further semantic feature’ of ‘finiteness’ is ‘polarity':
‘positive or negative’ (IF 75, 85). Yet this dimension is not really polar:
‘intermediate degrees’ allow for ‘indeterminacy’ ‘between yes and
no’, and ‘collectively’ constitute ‘modality’ for ‘information’
(‘probability’, ‘frequency’) and ‘modulation’ for
‘goods-&-services’ (‘inclination’, ‘obligation’) (IF 86, 88).
Yet Halliday says that ‘since the finite element is inherently positive or
negative, its polarity does not figure as a separate constituent’, so that
‘“not”‘ fits ‘in the structure of verbal group, not’ ‘of the
clause’ (IF 86).
39
Some ponderous constructions are allowed, though. Halliday accepts
‘“couldn't have been going to be being eaten”‘, ‘“has been going to
have known”‘, and ‘“will have been going to have been taking”‘ (IF
175, 179, 181), none of which I could imagine using.
40
‘Nominalization’ is indeed prized for ‘freedom and flexibility’; it is a
‘resource for achieving maximum thematic variation, since it allows any set of
elements -- processes, participants, and circumstances -- to be grouped together
as a constituent and thus to be mapped onto any function in the discourse
structure’ (NT 3/215, IF 376; cf. NT 3/180, IF 42, 135, 172) (cf. 13.27).
‘Such flexibility is not mere decoration, but is a prerequisite to the
functioning of language as a meaningful system’ (NT 3/215).
41
Yet ‘with a spoken text, we will be able to use the grammar to define and
delimit clause complexes in a way that keeps them as close as possible to
sentences of written English’ (IF 193) -- the idealizing Halliday elsewhere
disdains (9.2, 46, 75).
42
‘Reference’ is an unwise term because of all its philosophical uses, which
Halliday partly echoes in his ‘exophoric’ type. ‘Co-reference’ makes it
clearer that at least two expressions refer to the same thing (cf. citations in
Beaugrande & Dressler 1981). Also, ‘pro-verb’ is usually grouped with
‘pronouns’ and other ‘proforms’, whereas Halliday puts it under
‘substitutes’ because only for the latter can ‘the presupposed element’
be ‘inserted in place’ of it (9.92). I don't see why this can't be done with
pronouns.
43
Yet Halliday and Hasan (1976:8f) find ‘irrelevant’ ‘the question whether
the two fall in the sentence’ (i.e. clause complex). Strange too is the claim
that ‘there is no structural relation between the reference item and its
referent’ (IF 295). Structure in Halliday's sense is certainly involved in
selecting and placing a ‘reference item’.
44
In the dialogue ‘“where's your hat?” -- “I can't find it” -- “take
this one”‘, the ‘“it”‘ refers to the same hat, and the
‘“one”‘ to a ‘different’ hat (IF 302).
45
For instance, ‘technical language becomes more complex if one “simplifies”
it by removing the metaphors’ (IF 329), especially when one's notion of
‘metaphor’ is so broad.
46
When Halliday says ‘“you sell it with beauty”‘ is ‘not really
metaphorical’, but only ‘vague’ (IF 369), I suppose it's because he can't
decide on a congruent form. Many locutions widely counted as metaphors would
entail just this problem, witness the endless disputes of critics over poetry.
47
Like formalist (or ‘New’) literary critics, Halliday says his ‘concern’
‘is not with psychological problems of response to literature but with the
linguistic options selected by writer and their relation to the total meaning of
the work’ (EF 116). That relation is of course viewed in terms of his own
response.
48
According to Halliday (1978: 110), ‘the term “register” was first used’
for ‘text variety by [Thomas Bertram] Reid (1956); the concept was taken up
and developed by Jean Ure (Ure and Ellis 1972)’, and by Halliday, McIntosh,
& Strevens (1964). See now Halliday 1988.
49
Here Halliday goes against Firth, who argued that ‘a restricted language’
has ‘its own grammar and dictionary’; but then Firth, unlike Halliday, did
not ‘attempt a structural and systemic account of a language as a whole’ (P2
200) (cf. 8.76; 9.26, 40).
50
Halliday points to the language used in ‘games’ as a sample system (EF
25, 63, 80ff, 98) and, figuratively, to ‘the games people play’ (IF 279,
340) (9.100, 106). Saussure pointed to the rules of games, notably chess,
for his system of abstract ‘values’ (2.80f).