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