The dialectic of theory and practice: SFL as an appliable linguistics

1. The dialectic of theory and practice: SFL as an appliable linguistics Chang Chenguang School of Foreign Languages Sun Yat-sen University 24 September 2010

2. Introduction • Systemic Functional Linguistics has always stressed the dialectic interaction between theory and practice. • Halliday’s vision is to construct an appliable theory that can be helpful to people who are engaging with language in their work. • an appliable theory: the emphasis of SFL on social accountability • Martin: neo-Marxist theory that is ideologically committed to social action • It can continue growing as the dialectic of theory and practice.

3. Huang (2000): spread and development of SFL in China • There are many reasons why SLF has been developing rapidly in China, and one of the most important factors is its practicality and appliability. • …because SFL emphasizes studying language in use… and it is a theory particularly suitable for discourse analysis… • Appliability: one of the attractions of the theory

4. 26 March 2006, the official launch of the Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies • Halliday’s inaugural lecture: Working with meaning: towards an Appliable Linguistics: • Webster: Professor Halliday's theoretical approach, with its focus on modeling meaning and emphasis on social accountability, provides the basis for the Halliday Centre's research in appliable linguistics. • Halliday examined how the scientific study of language helps solve communication problems in many aspects of modern life, including education, culture, health and safety. … He has investigated many activities in which an effective outcome depends on applying a theoretical understanding of language to solving problems…

5. December, 2006, Sun Yat-sen University • Symposium on Functional Linguistics and Discourse Analysis • Theme: Systemic Functional Linguistics as Appliable Linguistics • Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen (2006): Systemic Functional Linguistics — appliability: areas of research”

6. Systemic Functional Linguistics — appliability: areas of research • Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen • Linguistics, Macquarie University; Systemic Meaning Modelling Group; Halliday Centre • cmatthie@mac.com

7. October, 2007, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, 10th National Functional Linguistics Conference • Hu Zhuanglin: Halliday’s Appliable Linguistics • Other interpretations: • Some misunderstanding: “Halliday’s new shift”

8. Halliday (2008: 189) • Complementarities in Language（《语言系统的并协与互补》 • I am committed to working towards a coherent account of language which is “appliable”, in the sense that it can be helpful to at least some of the large numbers of people who are in some way or other engaging with language in the course of their work.

9. Complementarities in language include those between: • lexis and grammar • language as system and language as text • two modes of speaking and writing • Halliday (2008: ii)：The complementarities in language are highlighted here with the aim of achieving a coherent account of language which is “appliable”.

10. Lexis and grammar • In SFL, language is seen as a complex semiotic system, having various levels or strata: semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology/phonetics. (Halliday 2004a: 24)

11. Levels or strata of language (Eggins 1994: 21)

12. Halliday (2004: 25)

13. Lexicogrammar as a continuum or cline. • Halliday (2004: 43): • Because the two ends of the continuum are organized differently, when it came to describing them different techniques evolved: dictionary and thesaurus for lexis…, the ‘grammar book’ …for grammar. Either of these techniques may be extended all the way along the cline – but with diminishing returns… • Halliday (2008: 31): • the grammarian’s dream was to take over the whole of the territory, reducing everything treated as ‘vocabulary’ to a part of the grammar • “lexis as most delicate grammar”

14. Halliday (2004: 44)

15. Halliday (2004a: 44): verbs of saying – imperating • tell • order • ask • urge • instruct • command • forbid • implore, beg • require • Differentiated by the delicate verbal process type systems

16. PROCESS FORCE AUTHORITY LOADING • tell neutral (1) neutral (1) neutral (1) • ask toned down (3) neutral (1) neutral (1) • forbid toned up (2) personal (2) negative (3) institutional (3) • implore, beg toned down (3) personal (2) neutral (1) • require toned up (2) institutional (3) positive (2) Halliday (2004a: 44)

17. The lexicologist’s dream: building the grammar out of the lexis • Extending lexicological method to the “grammar” end • Francis (1993): words have their own grammar • Verbs like adore, dislike, enjoy, hate, like, love, need, want often occur in the pattern “what or all + pronoun + verb + be + noun”… • Hunston & Francis (2000): pattern grammar: “words that share meaning share patterns” • take + pride/pleasure/delight + in + …ing • waste/squander/spend + time/energy/money + on/in + …ing

18. How do we describe patterns of this kind? • Halliday (2004a: 45): In systemic theory they appear as moderately delicate choices in the grammar, typically in transitivity and its related systems, having complex realizations involving both grammatical and lexical selections.

19. a metafunctional perspective (Halliday 2008: 45-65) • Ideationally, the lexicogrammar sorts out the complex world of our surroundings… there are particular things… sorted out into classes,… classes of classes, or taxonomies….As well as things there are happenings… both things and happenings display certain very general features… • The lexicogrammar adopts two contrasting perspectives for construing all this complexity. The one is specific and open-ended….the other is general and systemic… The two perspectives are complementary; any phenomenon can be looked at in terms of either…

20. Halliday (1998, 2008: 3-4)：the grammar of pain • In English, there is a lexical inventory of different kinds of pain… based on the items hurt, pain, ache, sore, tender etc, … and terms in simile or as metaphors: burning, throbbing, stabbing etc. Also lexicalized are the parts of the body where pain is found to be located. • The relation between the pain and the sufferer is grammaticalized: transitivity, voice, etc • A combination of the lexical and the grammatical resources: it hurts, it’s hurting, I hurt, it hurt me, I hurt myself, my leg hurts, I have a headache, my head aches

21. Interpersonally, the same two perspectives come into play. • Some interpersonal meanings are highly generalized, like the enactment of dialogic roles (speech function). (Martin & White 2005: INTERpersonal) • InterPERSONAL? • With options in the way something is evaluated or contended, the borderline is shaded over; systems of APPRAISAL represent more delicate options within the general region of evaluation. (Martin & White 2005: 130-135; Martin & Rose 2007: 48-51; Halliday 2008: 49)

22. (Halliday 2008: 49): In the interpersonal domain, the organization of meaning is less polarized, there is not such a clear demarcation between the general and the particular in the management of human relationships.

23. Language as system and language as text • Halliday (2008: 84): • The complementarity of grammar and lexis is one of focus, based on the scale or vector of delicacy. System and text, on the other hand, form a complementarity of angle, based on the vector of instantiation. • Halliday (1994: xxii): • the grammar is at once both a grammar of the system and a grammar of the text. • Discourse analysis has to be founded on a study of the system of the language. At the same time, the main reason for studying the system is to throw light on discourse… Both system and text have to be in focus of attention.

24. Weather and climate analogy • Halliday (2002) • System: language seen from a distance, as semiotic potential • Text: language seen from close up, as instances derived from that potential

25. Martin & White (2005: 23-4) • … weather being the capricious flux we experience day to day, and climate the relatively comforting inertia we try to use to plan. Critically, weather and climate are the same thing, looked at in different ways; climate is a generalisation of weather patterns, and weather is an instance of climatic trends. In SFL the concept of instantiation is used to explore the metastablity of systems – how they change globally in ways that matter (e.g. global warming) and how they vary locally in ways that apparently don't (e.g. daily temperature variations). Theoretically speaking local variation is always nudging the system as a whole in one direction or another…

26. For Halliday, the potential of language is a meaning potential. This meaning potential is the linguistic realization of the behaviour potential; “can mean” is “can do” when translated into language… realized in the language system as lexicogrammatical potential, which is what the speaker “can say”. (CWH 10: 46) • Halliday (2008: 192) • Discourse analysis itself is sometimes counted among the “applications” of linguistics; I would consider it, rather, as a proper part of linguistics, the part that consists in the description of particular instances of language.

27. Matthiessen & Halliday (2009: 80) • …the task of grammatics is not just to describe the system, it is also to relate the system to the instance – or rather (since there is no distinct steps) to describe the system as it relates to actual instances of language (referred to as text) • …our concept of system is valid only because it is instantiated in text: each instance keeps alive the potential, on one hand reinforcing it and on the other hand challenging and changing it. This dialectic of text and system is what we understand by a living language.

28. Halliday (2008: 15): • The system depends on memory: on what each speaker has inscripted in the brain; and specifically on shared memory, such that enough is in common to viable number of different speaker-brains to ensure that there is no break in continuity. What is shared includes not only the networks of grammatical and phonological systems but also quantitative patterns – the probability profiles which are …an inherent property of the systems themselves…It takes time, and also a good deal of input – of textual experience, to accumulate a memory of this kind…

29. Halliday (2008: 16): • The complementarity between system and text is not just an artefact of our description; it is a complementarity that is built up in every individual’s “language brain” as it constantly shifts its focus between the instantial activity of the moment and the long-term patterns that are being drawn on in processing this activity – that is in the production and understanding of discourse.

30. SFL and corpus linguistcs • SFL has always emphasized the analysis of naturally occurring language data, so is in this sense always corpus-based。 • Halliday (2006): in principle, a corpus may be of any size – the origin of the term … was the philologists’ corpusinscriptionum, which was sometimes very small… • Malinowski (1935): record of conversations with the Trobriand Islanders on the cultivation of their gardening plots: Corpus Inscriptionum Agriculturae Kiriwiniensis。

31. Halliday (2006): corpus as object, and corpus as instrument • corpus as object: a single text studied as object – valued as a discourse in its own right (relating it to the system) • corpus as instrument: text as a window on to the system, then scale matters (the larger the corpus, the more effectively it will reveal the system)

32. The large-scale corpus constitutes a comparable thickening of the data; …not simply an accumulation of more of the same. (Halliday 2006) • …it encompasses more variation, dialectal, diatypic and diachronic • … it also extends the scope, and hence the power of quantitative methods of analysis. • Hoey (2006): the pursuit of corpus linguistics in no way excludes or conflicts with the intensive study of individual texts. Text analysis adds to the conceptual depth of the categories studied, and … to the riches of the description as a whole.

33. Halliday (2004b) ： • I can so no place for an opposition between theory and data, in the sense of a clear boundary between “data-gathering” and theory construction. • [linguistics] will be greatly hindered if we think of data and theory as realms apart, or divide the world scholarship into those who dig and those who spin.

34. Halliday (2004a: 29): as grammarians we have to be able to shift our perspective, observing now from the system end and now from that of the text; and we have to be aware at which point we are standing at any time. This issue has been strongly foregrounded by the appearance of the computerized corpus…But the corpus does not write the grammar for you, any more than the data from experiments in the behaviour of light wrote Newton’s Opticks for him; it has to be theorized. • We would argue for a dialectical complementarity between theory and data: complementarity because some phenomena show up best if illuminated by a general theory (i.e. from the “system” end), others if treated as patterns within the data (i.e. from the “instance end)…

35. Halliday (2004a: 35) cautions against “anti-theoretical ideology” • … new data from the corpus pose problems for any theory, systemic theory included – as Jones said, “a science without difficulties is not a science at all.” (Jones, 1999: 152). But such data will not contribute towards raising our understanding unless cultured by stock from within the pool of theoretical knowledge. • A corpus-driven grammar is not one that is theory-free. • Tognini-Bonelli: “If the paradigm is not excluded from this [corpus-driven] view of language, it is seen as secondary with respect to the syntagm. Corpus linguistics is thus above all a linguistics of parole”. • Halliday: “I don’t think corpus-driven linguistics is a linguistics of parole … Once you are ‘doing linguistics’, you have already moved above the instantial realm.” • A corpus-driven grammar needs a grammar-driven corpus.

36. Speaking and writing • Halliday: emphasis on speech • 1950-60s • Quirk: Survey of English • Francis and Kučera: Brown corpus • Halliday: recording and analysing natural speech

37. Halliday (2004a: 34) … it is in the most unself-monitored spontaneous speech that people explore and expand their meaning potential. It is here that we reach the semantic frontiers of language and get a sense of the directions in which its grammar is moving.

38. Halliday (2008: 141): when we are observing and investigating language, our vision is essentially trinocular • from above (in terms of its function in various contexts) • from below (in terms of the various modes of expression) • from round about (from its own level)

39. from above (in terms of its function in various contexts) • In origin, speech and writing display a functional complementarity: writing, though parasitic on speech, evolved in the service of distinct functions in society, concerned with the development of agriculture and the growth of permanent settlement. • … writing is at one and the same time both more constraining and more enabling than speaking.

40. from below (in terms of the various modes of expression) • speech happens, as ongoing transitory disturbances in the air, that we recognize as sound waves; writing exists, as simultaneous and relatively permanent visible marks, on stone or metal or vegetable matter processed into paper (Halliday 2008: 140)

41. from round about (at the lexicogrammatical stratum) • Halliday (2008: 158-164): a complementarity in the kinds of complexity they entail • Grammatical intricacy: The complexity of the spoken language is…choreographic: it can build up structured clauses, and string these out in equally elaborate clause complexes, giving a commonsense picture of the world that is intricate but not dense…not very densely packed • Lexical density: The complexity of the written language could be described as crystalline: its clauses tend to be rather simple in structure, but they can be extremely dense • These are two ways of managing complexity: different strategies for transforming complex phenomena into edifices of meaning.

42. Interpersonally, the most significant variable in this context is that of personality, the different personae being taken on by the writer and the speaker • Writing departs further from the dialogic foundations of language … • If you are writing, your addressee is typically virtual, • The writer’s personal intrusion into the discourse may be less apparent, but present in lexicalized systems of appraisal… • whereas if you are speaking your addressee is typically actual, and this imposes constraints on the meaning-making process… more a matter for negotiation…

43. The complementarity of grammar and lexis is one of focus, based on the scale or vector of delicacy. • System and text, on the other hand, form a complementarity of angle, based on the vector of instantiation. • Speaking and writing form a complementarity of state, opposed in the manner of realization • Spoken language is liquid and transitory; written language is solid and permanent. • Speech unfolds in time… writing extends in space…

44. The dialectic of theory and practice • A further complementarity: that of theory and practice, or theory and application.

45. The dialectic of theory and practice • Halliday’s “appliable linguistics” is consistent with his thinking all along. • Firth’s influence: “Meaning viewed as the function of linguistic item in its context of use” • Butler (1985: 3): Halliday’s primary interest is in language as a central attribute of “social man” and his main aim is to account for the ways in which speakers and writers interact with their hearers and readers in social situations.

46. The dialectic of theory and practice • Thompson & Collins (2001): Interview with M.A.K. Halliday. DELTA 17: 1 • Now as regard the social practice, again I would feel that what I have explored has been a development of these interests. Again, it goes back to Firth, whose view was … that the important direction for the future lay in sociology of language.

47. Halliday sees language essentially as “a system of meaning potential.” • ... this semantic system is itself the realization of something beyond, which is what the speaker can do – I have referred to that as the “behavior potential”. • In an interview with Parret, Halliday (1978: 36) points out: • the instrumentality of linguistics and its autonomy are not contradictory…the two perspectives are complementary… • Probably most people who have looked at language in functional terms have had a predominantly instrumental approach…for understanding something else – the social system, for example.

48. Butler (1985: 3): Halliday has also inherited Firth’s concern with the practical applications of linguistic theory: indeed his main interest now appears to be the ways in which linguistics can contribute to such applied fields as stylistics, language in education, and artificial intelligence. • Halliday (2008: 203) • complementarity of theory and practice, or theory and application.

49. Matthiessen 2006 language development: case studies of learning how to mean educational: literacy, language and content, second/ foreign learning language evolution: phases of evolution clinical: speech pathology, aphasiology; therapy; consultation theory and meta- theory; modelling SFL community: half-way houses multilingual studies: typology, translation forensic: interrogations, electronic scams language description corpus studies computational: text generation, text classification, dialogue discourse analysis: positive, critical, strategic; multimodal ...

50. Halliday: appliable theory that can be helpful to people who are engaging with language in their work. • Thompson & Collins (2001): Interview with M.A.K. Halliday. DELTA 17: 1 • I never saw myself as theorist; I only became interested in theory, in the first place, because, in the theoretical approaches that I had access to, I didn’t find certain areas developed enough to enable me to explore the questions that I was interested in.