Scarica Systemic Functional Grammar Riassunto e più Dispense in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity!
Language and social man: (p.27)
Language is thus a functional tool for development, so it grows through the accumulation of everyday experiences. Experiences can be communicated only by language, in fact language shapes experiences and helps people to connect and establish relationships with other people and the rest of the world.
Language can and should be studied in context, as an inter-organism phenomenon. This means that language needs to be analysed in specific examples, as occurring in a specific place and at a specific time and produced by a speaker. Halliday’s point of view does not dispense with the possibility that language could be analysed outside a context, he in fact claims that the two perspectives are complementary.
The study of language as knowledge “is the study of how we understand and speak language, but this knowledge is not like having a grammar, in fact we do not simply “know” our mother tongue, we also know how to use it in any context. Our way of using language needs to be in tune with circumstances, purposes and with the other people involved in communication.
The language is thus the key factor in determining the acquisition of a social role on the part of each individual. However, individuals do not occupy just one role during their lives and it is through language that all these roles may be taken up by individuals. The development of these multiple roles is what Halliday calls “personality”, which is thus acquired in consequence of being member of society.
The central notion of Halliday’s thinking is that “language is functional”, in the sense that he looks at what speakers can do with language, in fact language is primarily seen as a form of interaction as it so learnt through interaction. Each person during his life acquires not just one role, but several ones, some of them permanent, others semi-permanent or temporary. From this point of view, language is functional. Halliday’s theories aren’t focused on the way in which brain works, but on what we can do with language. According to Halliday, some characteristics of language are innate but, at the same time, we acquire the full potentialities of language in the adulthood.
Language is learnt by the acquisition of a range of possibilities of language made available by language itself, what H. calls “meaning potential”. The full potentialities of language, however, can be accessed in adulthood.
Behaviour potential and meaning potential: (p.33)
Halliday views language as social behaviour. In social terms the speaker has the potential to act; he or she ‘can do’. In linguistic, this behavioural potential is realized as ‘can mean’, so what the speaker ‘can say’.
There are 3 metafunctions of language: -Ideational; - Interpersonal; - Textual.
Everyone uses a different portion of what the system allows, and this depends on several different personal, social and cultural variables. What is said or written acquires meaning when contrasted with what could have been said or written. The background against which language is used gains special importance; for example, the different number of listener may change, the role and position of the speaker will influence the way the speaker addresses the audience; the organization of space is also important, like for example for the acoustics.
Register: (p.36)
The language we use depends on the situation type. We have to consider -What kind of communicative event is taking place; -Who is taking part; -What role is played by language. These factors belong to the register. Register may be subdivided into three different categories:
-Field of discourse: refers to the setting in which communication takes place, which involve participants and the topic.
-Mode of discourse: is intended as the medium used. This distinction refers to the spoken or written mode. (Furthermore, speech and writing cannot be considered as opposing each other but as operating along a “continuum”, or in Halliday’s terms, along a “cline”).
-Tenor of discourse: refers to the relationships established among participants. The tenor may refer to variations in the cline of formality.
Each situation calls up a different register, as register is a variety established by use.
Halliday also referred to dialects, he considers them as central to the relationship of language. Dialects, unlike registers, are varieties established by the user. Halliday also argue that dialect can also become a part of register.
Context of culture and context of situation: (p.40)
C. of C. Culture affects people’s behaviour and is reflected in language they speak. (same reality, different ways of perceveing).
C. of S. It depends on the three factors of the register (field, mode, tenor).
Language is organized into clusters of systems with strong internal interconnections but with weak external interconnections. These clusters are what Halliday called “Metafunction”:
-Ideational: has been defined as the ‘understanding’ component, or a function which helps construct our experience.
-Interpersonal: it enacts social roles and relationships, operating the interpersonal intercourse that constitutes human social experience. Since the ideational metafunction displays the ‘understanding’ component and the interpersonal the ‘doing’ component, the two metafuncion are interconnected.
-Textual: it creates a relationship between the first two. This is concerned with the creation of discourse in terms of organization and structuring of information in a text.
In language, metafunctions are interconnected and work together to produce meanings.
Basic notions on the experiential metafunction: (p. 47)
The experimental metafunction is concerned with the topic or message of each clause. The experiential metafunction is about our experience of the world, both in its external manifestation and in our inner dimension. It refers to things in the world and how these things are related. From a functional perspective a clause is called “Process”. A process involves Participants and Circumstances.
Putting together the experiential and interpersonal analyses, the ‘actor’ will coincide with the ‘subject’ and the ‘goal’ with the ‘object’. Any clause usually includes a verbal group, which indicates what type of
They express ways of ‘saying’. Like behavioural verbs they are hybrids because they share some characteristics with material processes and other with mental processes, because ‘saying’ is a physical action which reflects mental reflection. They are important for construing narratives and may be used to construct fictional dialogues.
An important characteristic of Verbal clauses is that they can project other clauses, as the Ideal clauses, pertaining to the Mental one, do.
Apart from the ‘Sayer’ the verbal clause displays 3 other participants: -Receiver 8to whom something is said);
- Verbiage (what is said); -Target (entity target by saying).
C.6. (^) Existential processes: (p.62)
They represent something which simply ‘is’ or ‘exists’. They are not very frequent, but they play an important role, especially in narratives, where they serve the purpose of introducing the story.
The participants have the name of ‘Existent’ and the process is called ‘Existential’.
Basic notions on the interpersonal metafunction : (p.66)
The most common way of engaging in an interaction is establishing a dialogue for example with questions and answers. Questioning and answering thus involve two people in having a meaningful exchange. The participants respond to the other’s input and interact for example demanding the other to do something. So, the speaker may be either ‘giving’ information or ‘demanding’ information. We can make a distinction of what can be given or demanded, namely ‘goods-and-services’ or ‘information’.
When language is used to exchange information, the clause become a ‘preposition’, on the contrary the exchange expressed by ‘goods-and-services’ is a ‘Proposal’.
Mood: (p.69)
Mood is when, for example, we have the small questions that often come at the end of sentences in speech, sometimes also in informal writing. Question tags can be used to check whether something is true or to ask agreement. Mood is formed by a Subject, made up of a nominal group, followed by a Finite operator which is part of a verbal group. The verbal component makes the clause something that can be accepted or rejected.
Polarity and modality: (p.74)
Polarity has the basic function of expressing a positive or negative statement. However, between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ there are several intermediate choices running along a cline of possibilities, which go by the name of ‘Modality’: the general heading of modalization has two different kind of intermediate possibilities: 1. Degrees of probability; 2. Degrees of usuality.
Appraisal: (p.76)
Appraisal is a strategy to express someone or something qualities, successes or needs.
Appraisal is a way to understand if the speaker believes something is good or bad, positive or negative. The way in which we construct the scale and degree of evaluation tells us something about what we value or not in our culture.
Basic notion on the textual metafunction: (p.79)
There is a need for a third metafunction, which is concerned with how meanings are arranged in the clause. In English the foregrounded element in the clause is called “Theme”. Theme is the element which goes first in a clause and what comes after the theme is the Rheme.
In some clauses, usually Subject and Theme are similar. According to Halliday, when the theme is other than the subject, we will call it “marked theme” which is usually an adverbial group or a prepositional phrase.
An introduction to multimodal studies: (p.103) Chapter 2
No text is monomodal. This means that all kinds of text present features that cannot be associated with just one semiotic resource.
Multimodality is an inter-disciplinary approach that understands communication and representation to be more than about language.
Multimodality assumes that representation and communication always draw on a multiplicity of modes, all of which contribute to meaning. It focuses on analyzing and describing the full repertoire of meaning-making resources that people use (visual, spoken, gestural, written, three-dimensional, and others, depending on the domain of representation) in different contexts, and on developing means that show how these are organized to make meaning.
People orchestrate meaning through their selection and configuration of modes, foregrounding the significance of the interaction between modes. Thus all communicational acts are shaped by the norms and rules operating at the moment of sign making, and influenced by the motivations and interests of people in a specific social context.
According to Kress, affordance is what is possible to express through a semiotic resource, and provenance is where a semiotic resource ‘comes from’.
Text and textuality: (p.112)
A text may be spoken, written or made up of any other semiotic resource. There is a close and reciprocal relationship between a text and the context in which it is produced. Text and context re contextualize meanings across resources: for example, a film may be a recontextualization of a novel. A movie is a text made up of verbal language, soundtrack, moving images etc, and a web page is a text made up of visual and verbal clusters.
Resource integration principle: texts are never monomodal and resources work together to produce meanings.
A website is a text from a multimodal standpoint, in the sense that it deploys a set of meaning-making resources to produce its ‘intended meanings’ to its ‘intended audience’.
Personal emails are exchanged daily on a global scale and constitute a major part of what is exchanged in written form on the web for work and leisure. An email’s structure is rather fixed: it presents a space TO where the sender writes the address, option for CC (carbon copy) and BCC (blind carbon copy) and the SUBJECT, where a short title is inserted. The body of the email is, according to Crystal, concise in informal emails, while in formal and institutional emails the length tends to be doubled or tripled.
Some common features of email messages are: clear, brief, relevant and concrete subject description. The speed and spontaneity of email messages make the process of editing and revision difficult and often not required. Misspellings, grammar mistakes and general errors are very common, but they are normally not takes as indicators of a writer’s poor education.
New traveller’s website: (p.195)
Travellers websites are a relatively web 2.0 recent phenomenon. Their goal is to enhance the experience of travel and to put travellers in contact, encouraging them to share their travel experiences, through written and visual contributions, such as, blog’s posts, articles, comments, photos taken during their journeys. It is more appropriate to consider these websites as social networks for specific purposes.
