Abstract
In this chapter, we examine some conceptual issues in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). We first interpret the meaning of “systemic” and “functional”. We then examine the phases of development of SFL and comment on the different names of the theory in the course of its evolution. We also discuss the theoretical aspects of SFL, delineate the term “metafunction”, and introduce the multilingual version of Introduction to Functional Grammar, which Christian Matthiessen is develo**. Finally, Halliday’s unfinished works on systemic functional theory and Halliday’s conventions of technical terms are introduced.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Blevins (2006), who includes: “Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, Archibald Hill, Charles Hockett, Eugene Nida, Kenneth Pike, Henry Smith, George Trager, and Rulon Wells”. But it’s helpful to recognize some of them, at least Ken Pike, as being more directly related to the Boas-Sapir tradition of anthropologically oriented linguists.
- 2.
In Matthews’s (2001: p. 142) assessment discussing structuralism: “Its heyday lasted from the 1930s, when it was named, to the end of the 1950s; and, throughout that period, linguistics was dominated by it. But structuralism in America is said to have been overturned by Chomsky, and by the 1970s his hegemony was world-wide.”.
- 3.
I remember Jan Svartvik commenting in class in the second half of the 1970s that Halliday advised against mixing class and function labels — hence P for Predicator rather than V for Verb. We find the mixed labels in the literature on “word order”, of course, where the interpretation of S is particularly open to question.
- 4.
- 5.
The term “corpus-driven” seems to have become fashionable and frequently turns up in various titles of contributions to corpus linguistics; according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, occurrences of this term began to increase significantly around the mid-1990s. However, it is important to emphasize the limitations of the “corpus-driven” approach. In a recent introduction to corpus linguistics Zufferey (2020: 8) writes: “This corpus-based research approach is opposed to an approach which considers corpus data as the only point of reference, both in a theoretical and a methodological sense. In this approach, linguists begin their research without an a priori and simply let hypotheses emerge from corpus data (this is called a corpus-driven approach). This approach is almost unanimous among linguists working with an empirical methodology. On this point, we agree with Chomsky’s metaphorically explained opinion where he states that working with linguistics in this way would be the equivalent for physicists of ho** to discover the physical laws of the universe by looking out of their window. Observing data without a hypothesis often leads to not being able to make sense of data”. The point about the fundamental importance of theory, say in the form of hypotheses, in the observation and then the analysis and interpretation of data has been part of systemic functional research methodology from the start. And if researchers approach corpora empowered by a holistic theory of language, they will also be able to show explicitly what regions of the overall system of language can actually be investigated using current tools and techniques in corpus linguistics — and it will turn out to be “low-level” regions.
- 6.
One difficulty here is terminological. While the fundamental distinction between theory and description has been articulated and highlighted again and again in SFL, there will inevitably be contributors who make the mistake of characterizing the description of a particular language as theory — e.g., treating the description of the system of transitivity in English as part of the theory, or the description of the system of appraisal in English as part of the theory. They are not; they are systems postulated in the description of a particular language.
- 7.
- 8.
We can take WALS as a frame of reference; here samples vary in size (and so in typological representativeness) from a few hundred languages to around 1,400.
- 9.
An instructive example comes from the work on the typology of “word order” (i.e., the sequence of elements in different grammatical units). Greenberg’s (1966b) “universals” were based on a sample of around 35 languages. Some of them have held up, like the correlation between the sequence of “V” and “O” in clauses and the adposition and its complement in adpositional phrases, but the correlation that Greenberg had found between “V” and “O” in clauses and “N” and “A” in nominal groups proved not to hold up, as shown by Dryer (2013) based on a sample of 1,316 languages.
- 10.
The term “reactances” relates to Benjamin Whorf’s concept of cryptogrammar. There are certain grammatical meanings or feature oppositions that are not overtly marked in a language but once we probe the system we can find latent indicators of the hidden meanings. An example is the distinction between attributive and identifying clauses in English. While there is no overt marking for this distinction, identifying clauses allow an inversion between Token and Value (e.g., The man is the teacher; The teacher is the man) while attributive clauses do not allow this inversion (e.g., The man is a teacher; *A teacher is the man). These latent indicators of grammatical meanings and feature oppositions are referred to as reactances.
- 11.
This is an obvious point. Similar conventions used in linguistics in general have proved to be very helpful, e.g., the convention that technicalized grammatical items in interlinear glossing such as perf, neg, acc should be written in small caps. This helps research students in training to master the skill of glossing grammatical items using terms from a technical vocabulary, and it also helps readers “decode” interlinear glosses more quickly, getting a sense of grammatical patterns.
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Matthiessen, C.M., Wang, B., Ma, Y., Mwinlaaru, I.N. (2022). Some Conceptual Issues in Systemic Functional Linguistics. In: Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8713-6_4
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