Inferring Meaning From Syntax

Fawcett (2010: 149-50, 150n):

The representation of the syntax is sufficiently rich for all aspects of its multifunctional meaning to be shown in it — or to be directly inferable from it. Thus a text analyst who is equipped with an appropriate handbook can work out, from the evidence of the items and the functional structure, what the associated semantic features are. For example, even though the structure does not show that there is a 'Theme' that is conflated with the Subject and Agent, we can infer directly from the structural analysis that the item We is the type of Theme called here a "Subject Theme". (If it had been an 'empty Subject', as in It's nice to see you, it would not have a Participant Role conflated with it.)

In a computer model of text analysis there is a broadly equivalent component (called the 'semantic interpreter'). In a similar way this reconstructs, on the evidence of the analysis of the functional syntax, the features that must have been chosen in generating that particular structure.²⁴

²⁴ See O'Donoghue (1994) for a description of the semantic interpreter that has been developed for the Cardiff Grammar, its task being to turn a syntactically analysed clause into its set of selection expressions.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Again, this demonstrates that the Cardiff Grammar's theoretical orientation is the opposite of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, since it proceeds from form to meaning, rather than from meaning to form. Halliday (1985, 1994: xiv):

[2] Fawcett's Functional Syntax Handbook (forthcoming 2011a) is still unpublished, the latest due date being November 2021. Fawcett's Functional Semantics Handbook (forthcoming 2011b) is still unpublished.