Introducing Functional Grammar

Geoff Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135983208
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Introducing Functional Grammar, third edition, provides a user-friendly overview of the theoretical and practical aspects of the systemic functional grammar (SFG) model.

No prior knowledge of formal linguistics is required as the book provides:

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• An opening chapter on the purpose of linguistic analysis, which outlines the differences between the two major approaches to grammar - functional and formal.

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• An overview of the SFG model - what it is and how it works.

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• Advice and practice on identifying elements of language structure such as clauses and clause constituents.

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• Numerous examples of text analysis using the categories introduced, and discussion about what the analysis shows.

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• Exercises to test comprehension, along with answers for guidance.

The third edition is updated throughout, and is based closely on the fourth edition of Halliday and Matthiessen's Introduction to Functional Grammar. A glossary of terms, more exercises and an additional chapter are available on the product page at: https://www.routledge.com/9781444152678.

Introducing Functional Grammar remains the essential entry guide to Hallidayan functional grammar, for undergraduate and postgraduate students of language and linguistics.

1

The purposes of linguistic analysis

1.1 Starting points

A man is driving through a part of the country he doesn’t know, and he gets lost in what looks to him like the middle of nowhere, completely deserted. Finally, he sees an old man working in a field, and he stops the car and calls out to him, ‘Excuse me, how do I get from here to …?’ (the town depends on which country you hear the story in). The old man thinks for a while, and then he says, ‘Well, if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.’

What I want this story to highlight is the fact that where you can get to – in language description as in anything else – depends a great deal on where you start from; and that starting from the wrong place may make it much more difficult to get to the desired kind of destination. In the second half of the last century, there built up an immensely influential view of what the study of language should involve which insists that there is only one proper place to start – from a view of language as an abstract set of generalized rules detached from any particular context of use. It would be possible to ignore this view and simply start with the approach that I will be setting out in the book – based on a view of how language functions as a system of human communication. However, a comparison of different possible approaches will help us to understand better not only the destinations that each approach allows us to head for but also the reasons why we might choose one of the approaches in preference to another. Therefore, in this chapter I will briefly outline the approach that was dominant, attempting to show why it was so attractive but also showing why an increasing number of linguists have come to feel that it does not make it easy for us to talk about many of the most central features of language. I will then go on to introduce an alternative approach which takes full account of those features, and which offers a more appropriate place to start from if we are interested in language in use.

We can begin by looking informally at a bit of language, selected more or less at random. This comes from an advertisement aimed at attracting people to take up nursing as a career. Before reading on, can you decide what aspects of the sentence you might want to consider in providing a linguistic description of it?

Of course, you’re unlikely to be attracted to nursing because of the money.

When I have asked students to do this kind of preliminary analysis, some (often those who have learnt English as a foreign language and therefore have more background in traditional grammatical parsing) break it up into its components as far as they can (this is in fact trickier than it might look). They label the parts of the sentence using terms like Subject and Verb, or non-finite verb and prepositional phrase. They may comment on the fact that ‘to be attracted’ is a passive form, and that the understood Subject is ‘you’, carried over from the Subject of the preceding verb ‘(a)re’. Some mention that the structure ‘be unlikely to be attracted’ is not possible in their own language and that, in a way, it is an illogical structure (since it is not ‘you’ who are ‘unlikely’, but ‘you being attracted to nursing’). What they are essentially focusing on is what the different parts of the sentence are and how they fit together – in other words, the form.

Most students for whom English is their mother tongue, on the other hand, focus on issues such as who exactly ‘you’ is (since the writer is not addressing anyone face to face), and why the writer assumes this about ‘you’ so confidently (‘Of course’). Some pick up on ‘you’re unlikely to’, which softens the possible arrogance of the writer telling ‘you’ about ‘your’ own feelings; others comment on the implication that ‘you’ are likely to be attracted to nursing for other reasons apart from money; and a few wonder why the writer decided not to say ‘nursing is unlikely to attract you’. What all these points have in common is that they are concerned with the function of the sentence, what the writer’s purpose is in writing the sentence – in other words, with the meaning. Underlying the points, though not usually made explicit, is also the idea of choice: that there are potentially identifiable reasons why the writer is expressing the message in this particular way rather than in other possible ways.

Both of these ways of looking at the sentence tell us something useful about it, and, in the informal descriptions given here at least, there is a good deal of potential overlap. Any full analysis of the sentence will inevitably need to take account of both the meaning and the form (and of the links between them). However, in order to make the analysis fairly rigorous rather than just an unordered list of points about the sentence, we need to decide on a reasonably systematic method; and in practice this involves choosing between form and meaning as our starting point. This may at first seem simply a difference in emphasis, but, if carried through consistently, each approach in fact ends up with a strikingly different kind of description of language.

1.1.1 Going in through form

The most fully developed and influential version of the approach through form is that proposed by Noam Chomsky and his followers, originally known as the TG (Transformational–Generative) approach, although a number of variations have developed from that starting point. Chomsky insisted that linguistics should go beyond merely describing syntactic structures, and aim to explain why language is structured in the way it is – which includes explaining why other kinds of structures are not found. He argued that, in order to do this adequately, it was essential to make language description absolutely explicit. Although the aim of TG was not to produce a computer program that could generate language, it was computers that provided the driving metaphor behind the approach. A computer is wonderfully literal: it cannot interpret what you mean, and will do exactly – and only – what you tell it to do. Therefore instructions to the computer have to be explicit and unambiguous: this includes giving them in exactly the right order, so that each step in an operation has the required input from preceding steps, and formulating them so as to avoid triggering any unwanted operations by mistake. TG set out to provide rules of this kind for the formation of grammatically correct sentences. (Note that the following outline describes TG in its early form. The theory has changed radically since the 1960s, becoming more abstract and more powerful in its explanatory force; but the basic concerns, and the kind of facts about language that it attempts to explain, have remained essentially the same.)

In setting up its rules, TG started from another deceptively simple insight: that every verb has a Subject, and that understanding a sentence means above all identifying the Subject for each verb. In English, Subjects normally appear in front of the verb, so it might be thought that identifying them would be too easy to be interesting. However, there are many cases where the Subject does not appear in the ‘right’ position – or does not appear at all (we have already seen that the Subject of ‘to be attracted’ has to be carried over from a different verb). We are so skilled at understanding who does what in a sentence that we typically do not even notice that in such cases we have to interpret something that is not explicitly said. One well-known example used by Chomsky was the pair of sentences:

John is eager to please. John is easy to please.

These appear, on the surface, to have the same structure; but in fact we understand that in the first case it is John who does the pleasing (i.e. is the understood Subject of ‘to please’), while in the second it is an unnamed person or thing (and ‘John’ is understood as the Object of ‘to please’). This game of ‘hunt the Subject’ can become even more complex and exciting – the kind of (invented) sentence that made TG linguists salivate with delight is the following:

Which burglar did the policeman say Mary thought had shot himself?

Here, we understand that the Subject of ‘had shot’ is ‘which burglar’ – even though there are two other possible nouns that are candidates for the Subject role (‘the policeman’ and ‘Mary’) in between. Adding to the excitement is the fact that we also understand that ‘himself’ refers to the burglar, even though ‘the policeman’ is closer in the sentence; whereas, if we replaced it with ‘him’, it might refer to the policeman or another male person, but it could not refer to the burglar.

But how do we understand all this? And how can the linguist show, in an explicit way, what it is that we actually understand? One problem is that, in order to label part of the sentence as ‘Subject’, we have first had to identify that part as having a particular relation to the verb (the ‘doer’ of the verb rather than the Object or ‘done-to’): in other words, we have actually jumped over the initial stage. That means that our description is not in fact fully explicit. We need to work with labels that tell us what each constituent is in itself, not what it does in the sentence. At the same time, we also need to show where each constituent fits in the basic structure. Chomsky’s famous first rule captured this:

S→ NP

VP

This is a non-verbal (and thus apparently less ambiguous) way of saying that every sentence in a language consists of a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase – if it does not show these features it is not a grammatically acceptable ‘sentence’. It has to be borne in mind that S actually refers to a clause rather than what is traditionally called a sentence (in some later versions of the approach, the label ‘IP’, standing for inflectional phrase, was used instead); and VP here includes everything in the clause apart from the first NP. Translated into over-simple functional terms, it means in effect that every clause must have a verb and every verb must have a Subject. Using this rule, the underlying meanings of our ‘burglar’ example can be set out as follows, with each of the three clauses in the sentence labelled as an S (the inverted commas round the words signal that we are dealing with the abstract concepts that the words refer to rather than the words themselves):

S1→	NP	VP
	[‘the policeman’]	[‘did say’ (something)]
S2→	NP	VP
	[‘Mary’]	[‘thought’ (something)]
S3→	NP	VP
	[‘which burglar’]	[‘had shot himself’]

Note that this analysis also begins to elucidate why ‘himself’ refers to the burglar. When the Object of a verb refers to the same entity as the Subject, a reflexive pronoun is normally used: compare ‘Mary washed her’ and ‘Mary washed herself’.

As the final S above suggests, the VP element does not only include the verb but any other elements that depend on the verb. We can therefore go on splitting the clause elements into their component parts until we reach the basic constituents (essentially words, though with some exceptions). This splitting up must, however, be done in the correct sequence in order to show the dependencies between different parts of the clause correctly. For example, two (simplified) further rules are:

VP→V	NP
NP→Det	N

The first rule allows us to show that some verb phrases consist of a verb and a noun phrase (a noun phrase in this position is traditionally called the Object). This accounts for the VP in S₃ above:

VP →	V	NP
	[‘had shot’]	[‘himself’]

The second rule allows us to analyse within the noun phrase, and to show that it may consist of a determiner (e.g. ‘the’) and a noun (e.g. ‘policeman’).

However, we have not yet dealt with the VP in S₁ or S₂. This will allow us to show how S_1–3 combine into the sentence as we actually see it. Although the operation is immensely complex in practice, it is simple in theory: it turns out that we can identify not only a finite set of explicit rules governing the possible combinations (the complexity comes especially from the interaction between the rules), but, more crucially, an even more restricted set of underlying regularities in the type of rules that are possible. The crucial rule that we need to add is:

VP → V

S

This rule means that verb phrases may include not only a verb (V) but also another S (this is technically known as recursion: a clause appears where the Object might be). This may be easier to grasp if we revise the analysis of our example to take these new rules into account:

S1→	NP	VP → [V	S]
	[‘the policeman’]	[[‘did say’]	[‘S2’]]
S2→	NP	VP → [V	S]
	[‘Mary’]	[[‘thought’]	[‘S3’]]
S3→	NP	VP→ [V	NP]
	[‘which burglar’]	[‘had shot’]	[‘himself']

I have concentrated so far on the Subject in the clauses, but exactly the same kind of analysis can be done for Objects and other clause constituents that appear in the ‘wrong’ place or that govern the form and interpretation of other constituents (as ‘which burglar’ governs the interpretation of ‘himself’). What are the S_1–3 underlying this version of the example?

Which burglar did the policeman say Mary told him she had shot?

It is perhaps surprising that, using such apparently marginal examples, the approach should have thrown so much light on how sentences are structured; and yet the insights gained have been extensive and in some ways revolutionary. For our present purposes, however, it is less important to look at these discoveries in any detail than to c...