Fawcett (2010: 142-3):
A second reason for the current status of the IFG style representations is the great disparity between the numbers of publications in each of the two major 'strands' of the theory — these being what I described in Section 5.2 of Chapter 5 as the 'theoretical-generative' and the 'text-descriptive' strands. The fact is that most of those who read Halliday's work read it for its applicability in the description of texts, so that the readership of a theoretical paper such as "Systemic theory" will be a small fraction of the readership of IFG. Indeed, many of Halliday's other publications are also addressed to readers who wish to use his theory for one of various fields of 'applied linguistics' or to inter-disciplinary audiences. Typically the intended reader is someone who wishes to use the theory to describe texts, for any of a wide variety of possible purposes. Indeed, Halliday describes IFG as "a grammar for [...] text analysis" (1994:xv). For such purposes there is an undeniable initial attractiveness about a model in which (1) a text requires analysis at one level rather than two (even if it turns out that there are several structures at the one level) and (2) the 'multifunctionality' of language is 'reified' in those structures.
Blogger Comments:
[1] As previously explained here, Fawcett's notion of a 'text-descriptive aspect of theory' conflates the focus on instances of language ('text') with the practice of describing particular languages ('descriptive').
[2] To be clear, the paper "Systemic theory" (Halliday 1993) is a five-page entry in a linguistics encyclopædia that succinctly explains the architecture of the theory to anyone unfamiliar with SFL Theory.
[3] To be clear, Fawcett's argument here is that one reason why the three metafunctional structures of the clause — as exemplified in IFG (Halliday 1994) — are "so widely assumed to be to be a central part of the theory" is that text linguists find them attractive. The first of Fawcett's attractions is the attraction of doing half as much work, while the second is the attraction of theoretical consistency.
On the first point, the number of levels of analysis required depends on the purpose of the analysis, but the rank scale provides the possibility of four levels of analysis within the lexicogrammatical stratum, and the analysis of grammatical metaphor requires identifying the incongruent relations between two strata: lexicogrammar and semantics.
On the second point, to the extent that 'reify' just means 'realise', in this context, the structures do "reify" the 'multifunctionality' of language systems.
[2] To be clear, the paper "Systemic theory" (Halliday 1993) is a five-page entry in a linguistics encyclopædia that succinctly explains the architecture of the theory to anyone unfamiliar with SFL Theory.
[3] To be clear, Fawcett's argument here is that one reason why the three metafunctional structures of the clause — as exemplified in IFG (Halliday 1994) — are "so widely assumed to be to be a central part of the theory" is that text linguists find them attractive. The first of Fawcett's attractions is the attraction of doing half as much work, while the second is the attraction of theoretical consistency.
On the first point, the number of levels of analysis required depends on the purpose of the analysis, but the rank scale provides the possibility of four levels of analysis within the lexicogrammatical stratum, and the analysis of grammatical metaphor requires identifying the incongruent relations between two strata: lexicogrammar and semantics.
On the second point, to the extent that 'reify' just means 'realise', in this context, the structures do "reify" the 'multifunctionality' of language systems.
No comments:
Post a Comment