Exploring English Grammar

From formal to functional

Caroline Coffin, Jim Donohue, Sarah North

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135692353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This engaging textbook bridges the gap between traditional and functional grammar. Starting with a traditional approach, students will develop a firm grasp of traditional tools for analysis and learn how SFG (Systemic Functional Grammar) can be used to enrich the traditional formal approach.

Using a problem-solving approach, readers explore how grammatical structures function in different contexts by using a wide variety of thought-provoking and motivating texts including advertisements, cartoons, phone calls and chatroom dialogue. Each chapter focuses on a real world issue or problem that can be investigated linguistically, such as "mis"-translation or problems arising from a communication disorder. By working on these problems, students will become equipped to understand and analyze formal and functional grammar in different genres and styles.

With usable and accessible activities throughout, Exploring English Grammar is ideal for upper undergraduate and postgraduate students of English language and linguistics.

one

From formal to functional grammar

1.1 Introduction

This book sets out to show that it is useful to know about grammar. Each chapter aims to illustrate how knowledge about grammar can be used to achieve real-world goals and solve real-world communication problems. Although this may seem uncontroversial, it is not the way that grammar is always perceived. Not all those who write about grammar would make such a claim, and not all those who have studied grammar have experienced such benefits.

The grammar that will be presented here is functional grammar. Functional grammar focuses on how language is used – that is, on the functions of language. It is sometimes contrasted with formal grammar. Formal grammar focuses on how language is formed – that is, on the forms of language.

It would be possible to present formal and functional grammar as entirely different from each other. Instead this book seeks to explore the connections between formal and functional grammar. In order to start the process, you are asked to consider what it means to know about grammar and, in particular, what you know about grammar.

It could be said that grammar is something that everybody knows but not everybody knows about. To consider that distinction, read the following:

Mary in Glasgow work

If asked about this string of words, people who have been brought up speaking English – and many who haven't – would probably think there is ‘something wrong’ with it. If they have never been introduced to grammatical terminology, they might say something like:

You can't have work at the end. It has to go after Mary. And you need an s on the end of work.

They can impose grammatical order on these words because they know grammar intuitively as language users – having been immersed in English all their lives.

The comments above can be contrasted with the following:

If this is a sentence, the verb should come directly after the subject. And because the subject of the verb is the third person singular, the form of the verb should agree with the subject and have an s on the end.

For the moment, it is not important to understand fully the terminology used in this response. What should be clear is that it is a different kind of explanation to the previous one and shows some of what we have called ‘knowledge about grammar’ – the grammatical principles and grammatical terminology of a language observer. These are the comments of someone who has not just learned to use the grammar of the language, but also how to talk about it.

Scenario

The scenario that follows is designed to focus your awareness on yourself as an observer of language. It is based on a real-world issue – problems in a child's language development. The child, who is three years, five months old, has been diagnosed as having the language level of a child of eighteen months and is undergoing a period of speech therapy. The extract below comes from a session near the beginning of that period of therapy.

Activity 1.1

Describe the difficulties that the child (Paul) has in this extract and what the speech therapist (T) seems to be doing in order to deal with these difficulties.

Text 1.1 Speech therapy

Speech therapist (T); Child (P); Child's father (D)

T:		The horse is/(pause)
P:		jumping
T:		yes/you say it
P:		jumping
T:		no/say the whole thing
P:		whole thing/– horse is jumping
…
T:		the big horse is jumping/you can say that one for me
P:		no
T:		yes/go on/
P:		can't say it/
D:		you can say it/
T:		you can
P:		okay
T:		goon/
P:		horse is – jumping/
T:		good boy/the horse is jumping/the big horse is jumping/
P:		big horse jumping/
…

(Crystal, D., Fletcher, P. and Garman, M. (1989 2nd edition) Grammatical analysis of language disability, pp. 153–4, London: Whurr)

In order to explain what is happening in this therapy session, it would – just about – be possible to give an explanation that simply used the 1 language from the transcript. You could say:

The therapist is trying to teach Paul to say the big horse is jumping. Paul has difficulty doing this and at different times leaves out the horse is, the, and is. In the end, Paul almost says the big horse is jumping but he leaves out is.

However, this is a limited explanation. It is highly specific to this session. Why is the therapist trying to do this? What does Paul achieve by the end of the session? To talk about the language in Text 1.1 in a more general way, some grammatical terminology is useful. Think back to your own explanation and notice which grammatical terminology you used in it.

Your terminology may have been more, or less, specialised. A certain amount of grammatical terminology is in common, everyday use: word and sentence are examples. Some other grammatical terms are probably less commonly used, but have some kind of meaning for many people: verb, noun, adjective, subject, and clause are examples that may have occurred in your explanation. Other grammatical terms can be seen as more specialised and less commonly used: structure, noun phrase, determiner, verb phrase, auxiliary, and aspect are examples of less common terms that could be us...