The Routledge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Tom Bartlett, Gerard O'Grady, Tom Bartlett, Gerard O'Grady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315413877
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Semantica linguistica

The Routledge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics

brings together internationally renowned scholars of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to provide a space for critical examination of the key tenets underpinning SFL theory. Uniquely, it includes description of the three main strands within contemporary SFL scholarship: Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar, Martin's discourse semantics and Fawcett's Cardiff Grammar.

In five sections and thirty-eight interdisciplinary chapters, this is the first handbook to cover the whole architecture of SFL theory, comprising:

• the ontology and epistemology of SFL;
• SFL as a clause grammar;
• lexicogrammar below the clause, and SFL's approach to constituency;
• SFL's vibrant theory of language above the clause; and
• SFL as a theory of praxis with real-world applications.

With a wide range of language examples, a comprehensive editors' introduction and a section on further reading, The Routledge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics is an essential resource for all those studying and researching SFL or functional grammar.

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1

Introduction

Reading systemic functional linguistics

Tom Bartlett and Gerard O’Grady

We are very pleased to present the current volume of work bringing together forty chapters that, between them, present a critical overview of the ‘extravagant architecture’ of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). SFL is unique amongst linguistic theories in attempting to account for the structural, social and developmental features of language within a single coherent – though far from simple – framework, and in the current volume our overriding concern was to provide an overview of this theoretical architecture in as much breadth and critical depth as possible, allowing full chapters for areas that are often treated as subsections in other collections. But there are many ways into the theory and many interconnections between the concepts to be explained. This makes the editors’ job of imposing a schematic structure on the book a daunting task and one that is based, ultimately, on a somewhat arbitrary decision. The particular direction we have chosen largely follows the hierarchical arrangement of Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (1994) in considering language from within, below and above the cause, with sections on general theoretical issues and applications framing these descriptions within the wider contexts of linguistics and social life. The approach we have taken is, we believe, a distinctive and productive one, and in this brief introduction we first describe the ways in which we think the book is an original contribution to the literature, then suggest alternative ways of navigating the highways and by-ways of the theory.

Distinctive features of this Handbook

The last decade or so has seen the appearance of a great many handbooks bringing together chapters by respected authors on various aspects of specific linguistic theories, issues and topics, and SFL has been the focus of several excellent recent volumes. So why another Handbook of SFL? That is certainly the question that we, the editors, asked ourselves before committing ourselves to such an extensive task; in response, we decided that we would encourage the following features that we feel make the Handbook distinctive and hence complementary to, rather than competing with, the existing works.

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1 We decided to include the volume within the theoretical handbook series rather than its applied counterpart. For SFL, given Halliday’s (1978) conception of language as a social semiotic, there is no sharp distinction between theory and application: they are just different ends of a cline of instantiation from the system as a meaning potential to the selection of resources in specific contexts of use. However, we felt that there had been an emphasis on SFL as an appliable linguistics in most compendium volumes and that it would therefore be timely to produce a complementary volume with a distinctly theoretical edge. In this way, we also hope to reach out to linguists from a wider range of theoretical persuasions than has perhaps been the case to date with SFL publications. Part I of the book is particularly aimed at such an audience, locating the SFL approach with respect to other linguistic theories (Bateman), outlining the principle theoretical concepts that drive SFL (Asp; Berry), and discussing alternative formulations and elaborations of central concepts (Fawcett). The three parts following then develop individual elements of the theory in terms that should make sense to specialists from other areas of linguistics, with applications and their connection to these theoretical chapters addressed in Part V.

2 The chapters in the book provide more than just an overview of the current state of the art in SFL, as is the remit of many handbooks, and authors were encouraged to take a critical stance to their topics, and to suggest what areas of research are needed to strengthen and expand the theory and, in so doing, potentially to connect aspects of SFL to seemingly incompatible elements of other theories. One of the perceived failings of SFL has been that the emphasis on application has meant that, while some aspects of the overall model have been continuously developed and refined, some theoretical concepts and description dating back half a century have become reified and beyond critique. Generally, those areas that have shown least development are the nuts and bolts of the grammar, so it is hoped that the distinctive emphasis on these areas in the current volume might inspire new work in the field.

3 The three different models of SFL – which we refer to as the ‘IFG model’ (after Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar), the ‘Sydney Model’ (after Martin’s home university) and the ‘Cardiff Model’ (after Fawcett and Tucker’s institution) – are all treated in some depth. While the IFG approach is privileged in this volume, the chapters specifically on the Cardiff Model (Fawcett; Huang; Neale) and the Sydney Model (Tann; Oteíza; Gardner) allow various aspects of these approaches to be developed on their own terms rather than as a simple bolt-on chapter in which the main differences from IFG are set out. Other chapters (McDonald; Tucker; Quiroz; Caffarel-Cayron; Taverniers) refer to more than one model in their linguistic descriptions, and debate the merits and pitfalls of each.

4 There are several chapters that deal with the specifics of languages other than English (LOTE) rather than only a single chapter discussing the phenomenon of cross-linguistic difference.¹ These chapters (Arús Hita; Teruya; Caffarel-Cayron; Li) not only apply SFL methods to new languages (although Chinese was, of course, the grammar on which Halliday sharpened his theoretical and descriptive teeth), but also test the theory in doing so, forcing us to consider what are theoretical and universal categories, and what are descriptive and language-specific categories – a distinction that fifty years of emphasis on descriptions of English has, at times, blurred. As well as these language-specific profiles, the contributions from Quiroz and Oteíza include discussions of LOTE and the implications of these for different aspects of the theory, while Kunz and Teich demonstrate how computational approaches can be used for language typology and comparison.

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The ‘extravagant architecture of SFL’, or ‘different ways to read this book’

As the French linguist Meillet (1937: ix) said, ‘une langue est un système où tout se tient’ (a language is a system where everything hangs together)– an aphorism that applies in spades to the complexity of SFL, as the extravagance of its architecture is a function not only of the scope of the theory, covering the phenomenon of language from morphemic contrasts to the analysis of text as discourse, but also of the several different functional relationships that are theorised to hold between the different elements within the model. Unlike other linguistic theories, SFL does not focus exclusively on relations of constituency or on meaning-to-form algorithms, but posits a number of theoretical relations between different elements. In the remainder of this chapter, we will give a brief outline of the ‘extravagant architecture’ of SFL so as to provide what David Butt (2007: 103) refers to as the ‘semiotic addresses’ of the different elements covered in the various chapters and, in so doing, outline the essential connections between these concepts.² To cover this multidimensional diversity in the linear format of a book entails imposing a structure of categorisation and sequencing, and so privileging one relational category over the others. In this Handbook, we have opted for a largely hierarchical approach, but to see this as a defining principle of SFL rather than as a simple editorial artefact would be to misunderstand the theory. One purpose of this chapter (and the many cross-references throughout the book) is thus to signal what other readings of the architecture are possible.

Stratum and rank

Starting from the notion of hierarchy, then, SFL relies on two key notions: stratum and rank (see Berry’s chapter in this volume for full account). Of these, stratum is most distinctive to SFL, providing the theoretical means for modelling the relationship between linguistic form, utterance meaning and social interaction. To account for the relations between these phenomena, the IFG architecture comprises five strata: phonetics, phonology, lexicogrammar, semantics and context. There is a non-arbitrary relationship between strata with, for any pair of adjacent strata, the lower stratum construing the higher, while the higher stratum activates the lower (with the bidirectional concept of realisation conflating both processes). So, for example, lexicogrammatical elements, with their own meaning, combine to construe the semantics of the text, with the various semantic features construing the context as a form of social action. Conversely, the context activates semantics, which then activate lexicogrammatical form. Thus one way of following the architecture of the theory is via the realisation of one category by another. From this perspective, the chapters in Part IV, above the clause, include social phenomena (Bartlett; Bowcher; Gardner) realised through the semantics (Clarke; Moore; Oteíza), with the semantics in turn realised by the lexicogrammatical (Davidse; Butt and Webster; Andersen; Forey and Sampson) and intonational (O’Grady) features of the clause (Part II), which are in turn realised by phonemic and phonological features (Tench) below the clause (Part III).

In general, however, the hierarchical relationship between the phenomena in Parts II (at clause rank) and III (below the clause) is rather different from interstratal realisation, and is closer to the notion of constituency in more formal theories of linguistics. Rank refers to levels of structure within a single stratum; thus, for the lexicogrammar, SFL posits a number of functional-structural units intermediate between the word and the clause, and refers to these as groups. (McDonald offers an etic overview of group theory in SFL, while Fontaine, Tucker and Quiroz outline applications to the grammar of English.) The elements that constitute a group, and the meanings they bring with them, is an area of significant cross-linguistic difference; for this reason, the chapters by Caffarel-Cayron and Li provide examinations of French and Mandarin, while Quiroz includes a contrastive discussion of Spanish and English in her general overview of the verbal group. Rank is also an area of intra-theoretical difference, with the IFG and Cardiff Models differing significantly on this question (Fawcett; Quiroz; Caffarel-Cayron). Within Part III (below the clause), we also include the concept of metaphor (Taverniers), the phenomenon by which, for example, processes in the semantic stratum are realised as nominal groups in the lexicogrammar, thus combining the meanings associated with both strata in a complex blend.

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While the clause is generally considered the largest structure on the rank scale in terms of the lexicogrammar, the concept of constituency has also been applied within the semantics. From the IFG perspective, a text is the largest semantic unit, with cohesion (Clarke; Moore) the defining feature of a text comprising multiple clauses, and various intermediate ranks have been suggested (Cloran 1995: 399). Within the Sydney architecture, however, semantic realisations are modelled in terms not of textual relations between clauses, but of ideational, interpersonal and textual relations (see ‘Metafunctions’ below) across the text as a whole, in what is referred to as the ‘discourse semantic stratum’ (Tann). Berry and Bartlett suggest different ways in which the stratum of context might be layered.

Metafunctions

As well as the vertical relations of stratum and rank, SFL theorises a three-way horizontal relationship across the strata, collectively known as the ‘metafunctions’. In describing the lexicogrammar, Halliday found that the features clumped into three tightly intraconnected, but loosely interconnected, groupings corresponding to ideational (Davidse; Butt and Webster), interpersonal (Andersen) and textual (Forey and Sampson) functions of different sorts (hence metafunctions), with these responsible in a relatively autonomous way (although see Taverniers on metaphor) for the construal of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings at the semantic stratum (Moore). Following from Halliday’s (1978: 4) famous dictum that ‘language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people’s lives’, this suggests that the three metafunctions correspond in a significant, but non-absolute, way to distinct aspects of social activity, labelled field, tenor and mode (Bowcher). This relationship is known as the ‘context–metafunction hook-up hypothesis’ or, more recently, ‘context–metafunction resonance’ (Hasan 2014), and is a central pillar in SFL’s concept of social life as a semantic construct.

Axis and delicacy

Two further closely interconnected dimensions that are crucial to SFL theory and description are axis and delicacy. Axis relates to the fundamental distinction in SFL between system and structure (Asp), which derives from Halliday’s reformulation of his Scale and Category Grammar into SFL. In this earlier model, Halliday drew on his teacher Firth’s concept that meaning is function in context to develop a structural model of language in which the inclusion of an element of structure at one level (rank) opened up a limited set of structural options (a system) at the rank below, the meaning of which was their function within that unit as determined in opposition to the functions of the other choices available (following the Saussurean concept of valeur). In this model, therefore, meaning derived from the structures chosen. In Halliday’s later approach, which became SFL and which was based on the idea of language as a meaning potential, choices in meaning were given primacy and structure theorised as the output of the meaning choices made in a particular context (Fontaine, Bartlett and O’Grady 2013; O’Grady, Bartlett and Fontaine 2013). Such an approach was not designed to dismiss the importance of structure, however, because – following from Halliday’s basic tenet that meaning and the lexicogrammar are coevolutionary – no options in meaning can be postulated without a reactance in the grammar and, conversely, every distinction in the grammar must represent a reactance to a change in meaning. Thus, for example, three moods (functional categories) can be recognised in English on the basis of structural variation, while structural variations such as passive and active clauses have to be accounted for not merely as structural alternatives, but as reflective of differences in meaning of some kind. The lexicogrammar, therefore, is modelled as a series of functional choices, each of which is realised through a structural reactance in what is known as the ‘system–structure cycle’. Importantly, once a functional choice is made, the related structure is inherited (there are no transformations) as further systems of options are selected from, each with their own structural realisations.³

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To illustrate: the choice of major clause in English is realised by the inclusion of a finite verb (F); once this choice has been made, further choices exist as to the mood of the clause, with the choice of indicative leading to the insertion of a subject (S) alongside the inherited F. Both S and F are then inherited as the choice of indicative opens up a further choice between declarative and interrogative, which lead to the structural sequences S^F and F^S respectively (where ^ signals compulsory ordering). This increasingly detailed description of the grammar as more choices are made is referred to as the ‘cline of delicacy’, with more delicate options related to less delicate ones through the concept of inheritance. Within this model, less delicate options are realised by grammatical variants, while the most delicate options are realised as lexis. Thus the relationship between lexis and grammar is seen not as categorical, but as a cline – a conception that accounts for the grouping of individual processes (lexis) into process types according to similar grammatical patterns in transitivity (Davidse). Similarly, group structures are the result of a simultaneous cluster of choices that become available midway along the cline of delicacy from clause to lexeme as, for example, when a subject or complement is more delicately classified as a participant with all the attendant possibilities that choice opens up. In this way, the structural hierarchy of rank can be related to the semantically oriented concept of delicacy – a demonstration of the interconnectedness of the various SFL categories.

It should be noted here that the meaningful options at the lexicogrammatical (...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics
• Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Reading Systemic Functional Linguistics
• Part I A theoretical Overview
• Part II At Clause Rank
• Part III Below the Clause
• Part IV Above The Clause
• Part V SFL in Practice: An Appliable Theory
• Further Reading
• Index