“assignment 5”
INTRODUCTION
History
Systemic Functional approaches to
genre
have contributed richly to how genre
is understood and applied in textual analysis and language teaching over the
last twenty-five years.
Theory
Functional
Linguistics (SFL) operates from the premise that language structure is
integrally related to social function and context. Language is organized the way it is within a
culture because such an organization serves a social purpose within that
culture. “Functional”
thus refers to the work that language does within particular contexts.
“Systemic” refers to the structure or organization of language so that it can
be used to get things done within those contexts. “Systemic” then refers to the
“systems of choices” available to language users for the realization of meaning
(Christie, “Genre Theory” 759; emphasis added).
Systemic-Functional
Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language centered around the notion of language function. While SFL accounts for the
syntactic structure of language, it places the function of language as central
(what language does, and how it does it), in preference to more structural
approaches, which place the elements of language and their combinations as
central.
SFL starts at social context, and looks at how
language both acts upon, and is constrained by, this social context.
- Context concerns the Field (what is going on),
- Tenor (the social
roles and relationships between the participants),
- The Mode (aspects of the channel of communication, e.g., monologue
/dialogic, spoken/written, +/- visual-contact, etc.)
Systemic
semantics includes what is usually called 'pragmatics'. Semantics is divided
into three components:
- Ideational Semantics (the propositional content);
- Interpersonal Semantics (concerned with
speech-function, exchange structure, expression of attitude, etc.);
- Textual Semantics (how the text is structured as
a message, e.g., theme-structure, given/new, rhetorical structure etc.
Child language
development
Some of Halliday's early work involved the study of
his son's developing language abilities. This study in fact has had a substantial influence on the present
systemic model of adult language, particularly in regard to the metafunctions. This work has been
followed by other child language development work, especially that of Clare
Painter. Ruquaya Hasan has also performed studies of interactions between
children and mothers.
Language and social context
A great deal of the work in SFL can be traced
to Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic, in which Halliday describes how “the network of meanings” that
constitute any culture, what he calls the “social
semiotic,”
is to a large extent encoded in and
maintained by its discourse-semantic system, which represents a culture’s “meaning potential” (100, 13). This is why, as Halliday argues,
language is a form of socialization, playing a role in how individuals become
socialized and perform meaningful actions within what he calls “contexts of situation.”
In an updated version of the Teaching
Learning Cycle that attempts to address some of these concerns, Feez and Joyce
add a separate categorycalled “Building
the Context” which precedes
text modeling. The context building stage of the cycle employs ethnographic
strategies for “learners to experience and explore the cultural and situational
aspects of the social context of the target text” (Feez 66). Such strategies
include research, interviews, field trips, role-playing, and cross-cultural comparisons.
On the theoretical front, critics have
raised concerns about SFL’s view of genre and its trajectory, moving as it does
from social purpose/ text structure to register analysis to linguistic
analysis. While Martin is careful to note that genre realizes ideology, which
he defines as the “system of coding orientations engendering subjectivity—at a
higher level of abstraction than genre” (“Analysing” 40), and while Christie and
Martin have acknowledged the role of genre “in the social construction of
experience” (Genres and Institutions 32), the SFL model, critics note,
does not examine the ways in which genres not only realize but also help
reproduce ideology and social purpose. That is, bytaking “genres at their
word,” such a view of genre also takes social purposes at their word, thereby
ignoring why certain social purposes exist in the first place as well as what
institutional interests are most served through these purposes and their
enactments.
These orders of
abstraction are organised into three levels or strata - semantics, lexicogrammar
and phonology (or graphology).
·
Semantics is the interface between language
and context of situation (register). Semantics is therefore concerned with the
meanings that are involved with the three situational variables Field, Tenor
and Mode. Ideational meanings realise Field, interpersonal meanings realise
Tenor and textual meanings realise Mode.
·
Lexicogrammar is a
resource for wording meanings, ie. realising them as configurations of lexical
and grammatical items. It follows then, that lexicogrammar is characterised by
the same kind of metafunctional diversification discussed above. This takes us
back to our discussion in section three where we showed that functional grammar
included three separate analyses, each describing the construction of one of
three different kinds of meaning which all operate simultaneously in each clause.
·
Ideational (experiential
and logical) meanings construing Field are realised lexicogrammatically by the
system of Transitivity. This system interprets and represents our experience of
phenomena in the world and in our consciousness by modelling experiential
meanings in terms of participants, processes and circumstances. Resources for
chaining clauses into clause complexes, and for serialising time by means of
tense, address logical meanings.
·
Interpersonal meanings are realised lexicogrammatically
by systems of Mood and Modality and by the selection of attitudinal lexis. The
Mood system is the central resource establishing and maintaining an ongoing
exchange between interactants by assuming and assigning speech roles such as
giving or demanding goods and services or information.
·
Textual meanings are
concerned with the ongoing orchestration of interpersonal and ideational
information as text in context. Lexicogrammatically textual meanings are realised
by systems of Theme and Information. Theme selections establish the orientation
or angle on the interpersonal and ideational concerns of the clause whereas
Information organises the informational status or relative newsworthiness of
these concerns.
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