Systemic Functional Linguistics

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SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS

Introduction

            Systemic, or Systemic-Functional, theory has its origins in the main intellectual tradition of European linguistics that developed following the work of Saussure. It is functional and semantic rather than formal and syntactic in orientation, takes the text rather than the sentence as its object, and defines its scope by reference to usage rather than grammaticality.

            In systemic theory the system takes priority; the most abstract representation at any level is in paradigmatic terms. Syntagmatic organization is interpreted as the REALIZATION of paradigmatic features.

            Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language centred 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.

            A central notion is 'stratification', such that language is analyzed in terms of four strata: Context, Semantics, Lexico-Grammar and Phonology-Graphology.

            Context concerns the Field (what is going on), Tenor (the social roles and relationships between the participants), and the Mode (aspects of the channel of communication, e.g., monologic/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.

            The Lexico-Grammar concerns the syntactic organization of words into utterances. Even here, a functional approach is taken, involving analysis of the utterance in terms of roles such as Actor, Agent/Medium, Theme, Mood, etc.

History of Systemic

            SFL grew out of the work of JR Firth, a British linguist of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, but was mainly developed by his student MAK Halliday. He developed the theory in the early sixties (seminal paper, Halliday 1961), based in England, and moved to Australia in the Seventies, establishing the department of linguistics at the University of Sydney. Through his teaching there, SFL has spread to a number of institutions throughout Australia, and around the world. Australian Systemics is especially influential in areas of language education.

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. Ruqaia Hasan has also performed studies of interactions between children and mothers.

Systemic and Computation

SFL has been prominent in computational linguistics, especially in Natural Language Generation (NLG). Penman, an NLG system started at Information Sciences Institute in 1980, is one of the three main such systems, and has influenced much of the work in the field. John Bateman (currently in Bremen, Germany) has extended this system into a multilingual text generator, KPML. Robin Fawcett in Cardiff have developed another systemic generator, called Genesys. Mick O'Donnell has developed yet another system, called WAG. Numerous other systems have been built using Systemic grammar, either in whole or in part.

One of the earliest and best-known parsing systems is Winograd's SHRDLU, which uses system networks and grammar as a central component. Since then, several systems have been developed using SFL (e.g., Kasper, O'Donnell, O'Donoghue, Cummings, Weerasinghe), although this work hasn't been as central to the field as that in NLG.

Communication Planes

            From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics the oral and written texts we engage with and produce have their particular linguistic form because of the social purposes they fulfill. The focus is not on texts as decontextualized structural entities in their own right but rather on the mutually predictive relationships between texts and the social practices they realize.

Level of Social Context

•         The form of human language is as it is since it co-evolves with the meanings which co-evolve with the community's contexts of social interaction (Hasan, 1992:24).

•         SFL then, treats language and social context as complementary levels of semiosis, related by the concept of realisation. The relationship between language and social context has been represented using the image of co-tangential circles as in Figure 4.1 (Halliday and Martin, 1993:25).

•         The interpretation of social context then includes two communication planes, genre (context of culture) and register (context of situation) (Martin,1992:495).

The context of culture can be thought of as deriving from a vast complex network of all of the genres which make up a particular culture. Genres are staged, goal oriented social processes in which people engage as members of the culture. These genres include all of those routines from everyday experience such as purchase of goods (food, clothing etc), medical consultation, eating in a restaurant etc to the genres of particular forms of social life including church services, TV interviews, getting arrested etc.

•         The FIELD OF DISCOURSE refers to what is happening, to the nature of the social action that is taking place: what is it that the participants are engaged in, in which the language figures as some essential component?

More Information:

•         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 realized 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.