Academic literature on the topic 'Hallidayan text linguistics'

This paper puts the case that viewing text dynamically can be valuable in the practice of semantic description. Using, as its case study, the statistically significant occurrence of Subject ellipsis across consecutive clauses in a corpus of newspaper football reports, the paper demonstrates a systematic difference between the lexicogrammatical characteristics of clauses containing such patterned use of ellipsis and the clauses of their surrounding co-text. The lexicogrammatical features in question, which are analysed in detail in the paper, are: clause length in words, number of clause elements, amount of syntactic embedding, and patterns in Hallidayan transitivity process-types. Given the nature of these lexicogrammatical features, the argument is made that Subject ellipsis across consecutive clauses can iconically express an increase in pace – something only observable when the text is viewed dynamically.

Abstract The paper focuses on the institutional website as a complex genre with a relatively discontinuous inner structure, which is, however, coherent and cohesive, and unified by a common communication goal(s). The website is viewed as a discourse colony consisting of independent but related components realized in an array of subgenres, some of which are typical of the academic/institutional environment while others come from different discourse domains and are employed as embedded genres. The paper focuses on the blog as an embedded genre, its forms and functions within university websites, and particularly on its potentially multimodal character, i.e. the interplay of the verbal content of the blog and the non-verbal elements, esp. photographs, which co-create the producer’s message to the addressee. Drawing upon the recently developed field of multimodal discourse analysis within Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly Martinec and Salway’s model, the paper explores the level to which the modes are integrated and the ways they contribute to meaningmaking in the genre.

To study the translation of public notice is in effect seeking insights which take us beyond translation itself towards the whole relationship between language activity and the social context in which the translation is intended to function. Social context is an important aspect in the study of language and translation because the three are inextricably linked. This paper attempts to investigate the text types, text functions and the translations of public notices functioning in the social context of Macao SAR of China. It tries to deduce about the contexts in which the ST and TT were produced, the purpose for which they were produced and the target reader for whom they were produced. The study is carried out in the light of Reiss’s theory of text typology (2000) and the Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics. It is hoped that this study will identity differences in public notice translation and explore the reasons behind the differences, and also be a test case for examining the role of functional theories of language in explaining some phenomena of translation. Texts for the analysis are extracted from the database for a research project undertaken by the present writer, and the analysis is conducted in terms of three text types and functions: informative, expressive and operative. The results of this study reveal that although one of the language functions might be dominant in a single text in a public notice, overlapping or combining functions are very often bestowed upon most texts. They also show that although invariance in the transfer of content could be achieved in the translation of informative texts, and an analogous form in the translation could be found in the transfer of an expressive text, there are more differences than similarities in the translation of texts with operative functions. Possible reasons behind the differences between the source and target texts are discussed. It is argued that the differences are most possibly caused by differences in cultural values, different religious backgrounds and different expectations between readers of the source and target texts.

Considered as the universal language, music has been historically a means of communication and personal expression about the inner and outer world of its creator, it is present in almost every social activity of human beings as in the habitual religious celebration of Christmas across the largely Catholic countries. Therefore, the present paper will provide a descriptive text analysis of ten traditional Latin American Christmas folk songs on the base of the transitivity system informed by the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics theory. To reach this goal, both a quantitative and qualitative research method approach was applied. Findings indicated that among the six analyzed transitivity process types, the material processes (32%) dominate the construal of the musical pieces, followed by the mental (23%), behavioral (18%), and relational realizations (13%) whereas the verbal and existential processes are relatively low all together representing an overall frequency of 14%. This reveals the singers’ attempt to represent the Christmas season as a nostalgic time leap, an immediate enjoyment, and a rewarding exchange.

In homage to the work of Uroš Mozetič, the paper takes as its starting point previously developed suggestions about how the language of “Eveline” conveys a picture of the heroine as a passive, paralysed character. Using Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics as a model of stylistic analysis, it investigates the contribution of both the ideational and the interpersonal metafunctions to the meaning of the text. The results extend and amend some ideas from the literature, such as the supposed prevalence of stative verbs, and suggest that while the short story as a whole predominantly uses material processes, their potential for change is mitigated by Joyce’s aspect, tense, and usuality choices. Eveline as the main character crucially has the role of a Senser, observing and internally reacting to the world around her, and even the processes in which she acts upon things and people are modalised and shown to be either hypothetical or instigated by others.

It is difficult to track the philosophy foundation and epistemology of systemic functional grammar (SFG) formulated by Halliday in the 1980s as this kind of grammar views language as a systemic resource for meaning. Besides, it has had global impacts on linguistics and flourished in contemporary linguistic theory. Anyone who is familiar with Halliday’s work realizes that his SFG is an approach designed to analyze English texts. Halliday (1994: xv) explicitly states that “to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English.” The aim of this study is not about the applicability of SFG to text analysis as many researchers and scholars do. Our efforts are made to clarify the philosophical foundation of Halliday’s SFG. The paper presents on triangle: (i) language, mind and world; (ii) and empiricism in Halliday’s SFG.

It is difficult to track the philosophy foundation and epistemology of systemic functional grammar (SFG) formulated by Halliday in the 1980s as this kind of grammar views language as a systemic resource for meaning. Besides, it has had global impacts on linguistics and flourished in contemporary linguistic theory. Anyone who is familiar with Halliday’s work realizes that his SFG is an approach designed to analyze English texts. Halliday (1994: xv) explicitly states that “to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English.” The aim of this study is not about the applicability of SFG to text analysis as many researchers and scholars do. Our efforts are made to clarify the philosophical foundation of Halliday’s SFG. The paper presents on triangle: (i) language, mind and world; (ii) and empiricism in Halliday’s SFG.

It is difficult to track the philosophy foundation and epistemology of systemic functional grammar (SFG) formulated by Halliday in the 1980s as this kind of grammar views language as a systemic resource for meaning. Besides, it has had global impacts on linguistics and flourished in contemporary linguistic theory. Anyone who is familiar with Halliday’s work realizes that his SFG is an approach designed to analyze English texts. Halliday (1994: xv) explicitly states that “to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis: one that would make it possible to say sensible and useful things about any text, spoken or written, in modern English.” The aim of this study is not about the applicability of SFG to text analysis as many researchers and scholars do. Our efforts are made to clarify the philosophical foundation of Halliday’s SFG. The paper presents on triangle: (i) language, mind and world; (ii) and empiricism in Halliday’s SFG.

This paper highlights a brief theoretical and methodological investigation of the most widespread specific features of Translation Studies touching the development of the discourse approach in adequate conveying of modality in translation. The category of modality is examined from the point of view of an interdisciplinary approach that combines results obtained in logic, and traditional linguistics. Modality, originating in the logical philosophical tradition, is one of the most important characteristics of the utterance. It reflects cognitive activity of a person, thus expressing the connections of the objective world. As a functional-semantic category, it contains a number of evaluative means characterizing the attitude of a statement to reality, its objective significance, and the means that characterize the attitude of a speaker to the statement, which reflects its subjective side. Further studies can help to fully attain substantial progress in the analysis of the multimodal systemic functional approach to investigating the variability of expressing the means of modality in translation which may be another step towards a fuller understanding of the nature of this still poorly investigated sphere of translation. This rather interdisciplinary analysis is anchored in Hallidayan systemic functional grammar where "a text is the product of ongoing selection in a very large network of systems – a system network". Thus, a text is analyzed from the point of view of creativity and expression of various modal meanings.

Abstract The ability to construe and to interpret cause–effect relations is critical to the task of knowledge building in science. It is essential to understanding investigative processes and to interpreting claims. However, in the discourses of science the linguistic construal of cause and effect can be far removed from that of its everyday, commonsense expression. Studies in systemic functional linguistics have found that scientific causality is often realized inside a clause rather than between clauses (Halliday, M. A. K. 1998. Things and relations. In J. R. Martin and R. Veel [eds.], Reading science: Critical and functional perspectives on discourses of science, 185–235. London & New York: Routledge). This paper aims to further understand the challenge of making meanings of scientific causality from a linguistic perspective. I analyze the language of biology in five research articles, which are students’ key reading texts in a core undergraduate biology course at a leading Australian university. I argue that a discourse semantic understanding of “cause inside the clause” is critical for revealing the diverse language resources for constructing scientific causality.

This study brings together two approaches to linguistic variation, Hallidayan systemic-functional grammar and Labovian variation theory, and in doing so brings together a functional interpretation of language and its empirical investigation in its social context. The study reports on an empirical investigation of the concept of text. The investigation proceeds on the basis of a corpus of texts gathered in sociolinguistic interviews with fifty adult speakers of Australian English in Sydney. The total corpus accounted for in terms of text type or genre numbers 420 texts of varying length, 125 of which, produced in response to four narrative questions, are investigated in greater detail in respect both of the types of text they constitute as well as of some of their linguistic realisations. These largely narrative-type texts, which represent between two and three hours of spoken English and total approximately 53000 words, are presented in a second volume analysed in terms of their textual or generic structure as well as their realisation at the level of the clause complex. The study explores in some detail models of register and genre developed within systemic-functional linguistics, adopting a genre model developed by J.R. Martin and others working within his model which foregrounds the notion that all aspects of the system(s) involved are related to one another probabilistically. In order to investigate the concept of text in actual discourse under conditions which permit us to become sufficiently confident of our understanding of it to proceed to generalisations about text and its contextual conditioning in spoken discourse, we turn to Labovian methods of sociolinguistic inquiry, i.e. to quantitative methods or methods of quantifying linguistic choice. The study takes the sociolinguistic interview as pioneered by Labov in his study of phonological variation in New York City and develops it for the purpose of investigating textual variation. The question of methodology constitutes a substantial part of the study, contributing in the process to a much greater understanding of the very phenomenon of text in discourse, for example by addressing itself to the question of the feasibility of operationalising a concept of text in the context of spoken discourse. The narrative-type texts investigated in further detail were found to range on a continuum from most experientially-oriented texts such as procedure and recount at one end to the classic narrative of personal experience and anecdote to the increasingly interpersonally-oriented exemplum and observation, both of which become interpretative of the real world in contrast to the straightforwardly representational slant taken on the same experience by the more experientially-oriented texts. The explanation for the generic variation along this continuum must be sought in a system of generic choice which is essentially cultural. A quantitative analysis of clausal theme and clause complex-type relations was carried out, the latter by means of log-linear analysis, in order to investigate their correlation with generic structure. While it was possible to relate the choice of theme to the particular stages of generic structures, clause complex-type relations are chosen too infrequently to be related to stages and were thus related to genres as a whole. We find that while by and large the choice of theme correlates well with different generic stages, it only discriminates between different genres, i.e. generic structures in toto, for those genres which are maximally different. Similarly, investigating the two choices in the principal systems involved in the organisation of the clause complex, i.e. the choice of taxis (parataxis vs. hypotaxis) and the (grammatically independent) choice of logico-semantic relations (expansion vs. projection), we find that both those choices discriminate better between types more distant on a narrative continuum. The log-linear analysis of clause complex-type relations also permitted the investigation of the social characteristics of speakers. We found that the choice of logico-semantic relations correlates with genre and question, while the choice of taxis correlates with a speaker's sex and his membership of some social group (in addition to genre). Parataxis is favoured by men and by members of the group lowest in the social hierarchy. Age on the other hand is not significant in the choice of taxis at all. In other words, since social factors are clearly shown to be significant in the making of abstract grammatical choices where they cannot be explained in terms of the functional organisation of text, we conclude that social factors must be made part of a model of text in order to fully account for its contextual conditioning. The study demonstrates that an understanding of the linguistic properties of discourse requires empirical study and, conversely, that it is possible to study discourse empirically without relaxing the standards of scientific inquiry.

This study brings together two approaches to linguistic variation, Hallidayan systemic-functional grammar and Labovian variation theory, and in doing so brings together a functional interpretation of language and its empirical investigation in its social context. The study reports on an empirical investigation of the concept of text. The investigation proceeds on the basis of a corpus of texts gathered in sociolinguistic interviews with fifty adult speakers of Australian English in Sydney. The total corpus accounted for in terms of text type or genre numbers 420 texts of varying length, 125 of which, produced in response to four narrative questions, are investigated in greater detail in respect both of the types of text they constitute as well as of some of their linguistic realisations. These largely narrative-type texts, which represent between two and three hours of spoken English and total approximately 53000 words, are presented in a second volume analysed in terms of their textual or generic structure as well as their realisation at the level of the clause complex. The study explores in some detail models of register and genre developed within systemic-functional linguistics, adopting a genre model developed by J.R. Martin and others working within his model which foregrounds the notion that all aspects of the system(s) involved are related to one another probabilistically. In order to investigate the concept of text in actual discourse under conditions which permit us to become sufficiently confident of our understanding of it to proceed to generalisations about text and its contextual conditioning in spoken discourse, we turn to Labovian methods of sociolinguistic inquiry, i.e. to quantitative methods or methods of quantifying linguistic choice. The study takes the sociolinguistic interview as pioneered by Labov in his study of phonological variation in New York City and develops it for the purpose of investigating textual variation. The question of methodology constitutes a substantial part of the study, contributing in the process to a much greater understanding of the very phenomenon of text in discourse, for example by addressing itself to the question of the feasibility of operationalising a concept of text in the context of spoken discourse. The narrative-type texts investigated in further detail were found to range on a continuum from most experientially-oriented texts such as procedure and recount at one end to the classic narrative of personal experience and anecdote to the increasingly interpersonally-oriented exemplum and observation, both of which become interpretative of the real world in contrast to the straightforwardly representational slant taken on the same experience by the more experientially-oriented texts. The explanation for the generic variation along this continuum must be sought in a system of generic choice which is essentially cultural. A quantitative analysis of clausal theme and clause complex-type relations was carried out, the latter by means of log-linear analysis, in order to investigate their correlation with generic structure. While it was possible to relate the choice of theme to the particular stages of generic structures, clause complex-type relations are chosen too infrequently to be related to stages and were thus related to genres as a whole. We find that while by and large the choice of theme correlates well with different generic stages, it only discriminates between different genres, i.e. generic structures in toto, for those genres which are maximally different. Similarly, investigating the two choices in the principal systems involved in the organisation of the clause complex, i.e. the choice of taxis (parataxis vs. hypotaxis) and the (grammatically independent) choice of logico-semantic relations (expansion vs. projection), we find that both those choices discriminate better between types more distant on a narrative continuum. The log-linear analysis of clause complex-type relations also permitted the investigation of the social characteristics of speakers. We found that the choice of logico-semantic relations correlates with genre and question, while the choice of taxis correlates with a speaker's sex and his membership of some social group (in addition to genre). Parataxis is favoured by men and by members of the group lowest in the social hierarchy. Age on the other hand is not significant in the choice of taxis at all. In other words, since social factors are clearly shown to be significant in the making of abstract grammatical choices where they cannot be explained in terms of the functional organisation of text, we conclude that social factors must be made part of a model of text in order to fully account for its contextual conditioning. The study demonstrates that an understanding of the linguistic properties of discourse requires empirical study and, conversely, that it is possible to study discourse empirically without relaxing the standards of scientific inquiry.

The inaugural Australian Curriculum: English (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2010a) included functional grammar as a necessity to account for the increasing number of multimodal texts with which students are engaging. As texts become increasingly multimodal, students continue to require critical literacy skills that allow for the analysis of these texts. Alongside changes in the curriculum, researchers raised concerns about teachers’ knowledge in functional grammar Love and Humphrey (2012); (Love et al., 2015). With limited support for the development of grammar pedagogy, educators have relied more on traditional approaches (Harper & Rennie, 2009; Snyder, 2008). Consequently, there is a need for research on functional grammar pedagogy that accounts for multimodal texts and critical literacy. A qualitative case study methodology with a teacher-researcher was used to investigate the overarching research question How can functional grammar develop students’ critical literacy when creating multimodal texts? This research explored the teaching and learning of functional grammar for critical literacy during multimodal text creation in the primary school. The research consisted of a sequence of twelve lessons, conducted in a Year 5 classroom in the Australian Capital Territory during Terms 3 and 4, 2020. Data were collected through audio and video recordings during the lessons, student work samples and semi-structured interviews following the sequence of lessons. Four students were selected as cases in this study. Student and classroom data were analysed using a Bernsteinian (2000) theorisation of pedagogy and Hallidayan (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) theorisation of grammar. Bernstein’s (2000) theory of framing was adapted as an analytical tool to explore the selection, sequencing, pacing and criteria used within the sequence of lessons. Halliday’s (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) functional grammar metalanguage was used to investigate the case study students’ exploration, creation and reflection of multimodal texts during the sequence of lessons. The findings demonstrated that the case study teacher wove across a range of pedagogical frames, moving from open inquiry to explicit instruction. Through these lessons, students engaged in critical literacy through a variety of functional grammar resources. Students enacted functional grammar knowledge in different ways to explore, create and reflect on multimodal texts. Use of functional grammar resources was not equal between the student cases, with some students using resources without evidence of reflection whereas others primarily explored texts using functional grammar resources. Findings reveal some students’ ability to engage with complex multimodal texts using functional grammar. Implications from this research highlight what is possible when a teacher has a high level of functional grammar knowledge for multimodal texts in primary classrooms.
Thesis (Masters)
Master of Education and Professional Studies Research (MEdProfStRes)
School Educ & Professional St
Arts, Education and Law
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