On Matthiessen's Paradigmatic And Syntagmatic Analyses Of Text

Fawcett (2010: 144, 144n):

Indeed, there are, so far as I know, still no published analyses of texts whatsoever that are truly systemic, other than the few that use the Cardiff Grammar, such as the example in Figure 10 in Section 7.8. ²²

²² The one exception to this generalisation that I know of in a published work is where Matthiessen shows the features for his examples of the analysis of 'modality' in texts (1995: 507f.). But his analyses of all other types of meaning simply shows structural analyses of the IFG type. However, he has used features for the analysis of text in public lectures, e.g., at the 25th International Systemic Functional Congress. Cardiff 1998. There he showed a simplified version of the relevant system networks, and then placed figures on the features that had been chosen in the text being analysed to indicate the frequency with which they had been chosen. This interesting technique can be used to show how the probabilities have been skewed under the influence of a register variable (or some other variable) in the text. Interestingly, however, an analysis of that type skips over the logically necessary intermediate stage, i.e., the systemic representation of the features chosen in each clause, e.g., as illustrated in Figure 10 of Section 7.8. (Compare the interesting study in Matthiessen 1999, which offers TRANSITIVITY probabilities for English as a whole, based on a study of 2,000 clauses).

Blogger Comments:

[1] See previous post.

[2] To be clear, analysing a text in terms of its systemic features is analysing it in terms of the paradigmatic axis, whereas analysing a text in terms of its structures is analysing it in terms of the syntagmatic axis.

[3] This is misleading, in a trivial way. In order to carry out a statistical analysis of the features selected in clauses of an entire text, it is necessary to identify the selected features in each clause of the text, as Fawcett acknowledges to be demonstrated in Matthiessen (2005: 508-9).

[4] As previously noted, Fawcett's Figure 10

• confuses systemic features (paradigmatic axis) with structural elements (syntagmatic axis) by aligning features with specific elements of structure, and 
• provides no systems for the features he proposes.