Dear Rosemary, David [and just read your follow up to W.], William & list
membersː
Just to take up the issue of metafunctions again after some further
thinking on this fundamental but slippery concept, I think that if this
notion is to be empirically defensible, or rather if the theoretical
category of metafunction when translated into descriptive categories as
part of a framework for a specific modality is to be empirically
defensible, we need first of all to look outside language, <<without
assuming that the 3 x 3 stratification / metafunction model necessarily
applies in the case of other semiotic systems>>.
My starting point here would be that every semiotic system depends on its
affordances, which shape the kinds of meanings it most easily or typically
expresses. But in approaching this issue, I think I would now be inclined
to take the opposite trajectory to Ruqaiya - and David K. - and come in *from
*the whole set of semiotic systems *to *language, as opposed to, in the
usual Social Semiotics Kress & van Leeuwen method, *from *language *to *other
semiotics. The problem with this, of course, to borrow Archimedes'
formulation, how do I find a place where I can stand so I can move the
earth**: in other words, where do we find a reference point that is not
already influenced by our understanding of language?
My recent paper for LC&T, The Signifying Voice: Materiality and sociality
in language and music, maps out one way of doing this, by taking two
systems - language and music - whose default expression plane is the human
voice and seeing how they exploit this differently. I have been hugely
influenced in my thinking on these two systems bya little book now out of
print which has almost the same name as Theo's 1999 book on music, i.e.
David Burrows' 1990 Sound, Speech, Music, which sets out from a basic
phenomenological starting point to characterise the differing affordances
and meanings of the two systems. I have also been deeply influenced by my
own personal and professional experience as a language learner and language
teacher, and likewise by my personal experience as a music learner (piano
and voice) and my professional experience as a vocal accompanist /
repetiteur. So when I think and particularly when I write about these
issues, always in the back of my mind is the nagging thought "How is this
going to be useful to performers", by which term I include learners and
teachers and users of language and music.
In this regard, members of this and other lists may have noticed that I
seem to talk about my own experience a lot. But I hope they will also have
noticed that I do so not to stress the particularity of my experience but
rather its representativeness. I don't think my own experiences are
special: I just think we're all far more affected by our own experience in
the process of developing our academic thinking than we often like to
admit. For example, in observing and reflecting on how people take up and
adapt ideas of all kinds, including theories of language, I have become
convinced that, whatever may be the purposes for which such ideas end up
being used, the reasons for which they're taken up are far more likely to
be interpersonal than ideational: because people you admire hold them, or
because they're held by a group you want to join, or because they're being
used for a practical / political / ideological project with which you're
aligned.
So if I think we always need to look outside language in order to
understand language - "What can they know of England / Who only England
know" in Kipling's words quoted by me recently - equally I think we need to
look outside SFL in order to understand what we are doing within SFL. The
days of the grand all-encompassing theory, the Theory of Everything which I
note the physicists are still struggling towards, for me are well over,
even if you put aside the historical accident that it was a man deeply
UNinterested in language as she languages, i.e. Old Noam, who was
responsible for the best known of such theories in our current academic
ecology. How can one theory be social, cognitive, pure, applied, etc etc
all at the same time? It seems to me that it would be far more helpful -
not to mention more feasible - for (at least) two complementary theories
that start out from completely different premises to somehow manage to meet
in the middle, and that this is what those of us working within SFL should
be working towards creating a space for, a space that needs to be both
practical and intellectual, both ideational and interpersonal. Just to
mention some of the history of our beloved Michael and Ruqaiya that David
has been filling in for us so fascinatingly: Marxism (Vygotsky, Voloshinov,
Bakhtin etc etc). anthropology (Malinowski and others - I note that one of
Malinowksi's successors was a gentleman also surnamed "Firth"), ethnography
(Boaz, Sapir, Whorf etc etc), mathematics (Hockett, Chomsky, Lamb etc etc),
sociology (Bernstein, Bourdieu, etc etc) education (Comenius, Buehler, etc
etc). literary theory (Coleridge, Raymond Williams, etc etc) not to mention
all the multimodality and multiliteracy people whom we're probably more
familiar with.
I have no doubt annoyed or even offended some of you by leaving out your
favourites - or by misclassifying them - in which case I would encourage
you to get in here and contribute your two cents worth. From the point of
view of the practical challenges we all face in our own lives and work, not
to mention our societies and our whole beleaguered world, this may seem to
you like an enormous waste of time, so I would like to end by sharing two
of my favourite quotations that I used to stir up students in my Research
Methods classes, which I present exactly as they were articulated in their
own (arguably more sexist) times:
John Maynard Keynes, economist, (1883-1946) " Practical men, who believe
themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the
slaves of some defunct economist."
Kurt Lewin, social psychologist, (1890-1947): "There is nothing so
practical as a good theory."
plus a bonus one by the same gentleman I just discovered which nicely
reverses Marx's maxim that another David is fond of quoting:
- "If you want truly to understand something, try to change it."
- best to all
- Ed
- ** in Archimedes' Doric Greek (long a's instead of long e's)
δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω
*Dôs moi pâ stô, kaì tàn gân kinásō*
'Give me where I-may-stand and the earth I-will-move'
or an alternative version
Πᾷ βῶ, καὶ χαριστίωνι τὰν γᾶν κινάσω πᾶσαν
*Pā bō, kai kharistiōni tan gān* *kinasō* *pāsan*.
'Where I-may-go and with-lever the earth I-will-move whole'
-
McCain KW. “Nothing as practical as a good theory” Does Lewin's Maxim
still have salience in the applied social sciences? *Proceedings of the
Association for Information Science and Technology. *2015;52(1):1-4.
doi:10.1002/pra2.2015.145052010077
On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 2:44 PM William Armour <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Dear Colleagues
Reading these discussions about the metafunctions, I’m wondering if anyone
has engaged with Cope, Bill and Kalantzis, Mary (2020) Making Sense:
Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning and
Adding Sense Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning both
published by CUP? From what I understand, they have created *a
transpositional grammar* (pp. 74 and 75 in Making Sense sets it out as a
kind of system network) redesigning Halliday (from whom they draw on
extensively)
Function of Reference (what is it about?) = ideational
Function of agency (who or what is doing it?) = interpersonal
Function of Structure (what holds it together?) = textual
+
Function of Context (what else is it connected to?)
Function of Interest (what’s it for?)
Reviews of these two volumes seem positive, so I’d be interested in
reading comments from anyone who has engaged with them. You can hear them
talk about their ideas on the podcast Scholarly Communication Episode No. 1
of All We Mean – What is ‘Meaning’? part of the New Books Network. From my
understanding of this podcast, while the meaning of meaning wasn’t really
explained that clearly (as well as meaning being the domain of us humans),
their aim is to take Halliday’s vision further to account for the
affordances offered by not just written and spoken texts but everything
else (what others have been talking about in this thread – the multimodal)
as well as meanings that are still unknown but could become known. For
those who know of Cope and Kalantzis’s work on multiliteracies as well as
help found the New London Group (including Gunter Kress), then they have
certainly had some impact on education theory over the past 30 years.
--
Regards,
Dr. William S. Armour
Honorary Senior Lecturer
School of Humanities and Languages
Arts, Design and Architecture
UNSW Sydney
https://hal.arts.unsw.edu.au/
We see things as we are, not as they are. *Anonymous*
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep
going back and beginning all over again. *André Gide*
(cited in Cornwell, Neil (2006) *The absurd in literature.* Manchester
and New York: Manchester UP, p. 9)
*From: *sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on
behalf of Rosemary Huisman <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Date: *Monday, 20 November 2023 at 10:50 am
*To: *sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Subject: *[sys-func] Re: Metafunctions
I enjoy your "verbosity", Ed.
It gives me the impression of someone who immerses themselves in
experience (rather than standing back and "detachedly" observing, superior
to the objects of "gaze").
Rosemary.
------------------------------
*From:* sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on
behalf of Edward McDonald <laomaa63@xxxxxxxxx>
*Sent:* Monday, 20 November 2023 9:58 AM
*To:* sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*Subject:* [sys-func] Re: Metafunctions
Hi Chris and David:
I think I'd agree with David on this one:
language is "prototypical" but only in the Eleanor Rosch sense and not in
the historical sense. That is, language is central and dominant among
socio-semiotic systems but not originary or primeval.
I've read the Halliday / & Matthiessen claims before, and to me they read
like just what you'd expect linguists to say: to me they come across as
axiomatic claims and not conclusions based on empirical evidence.
For me, it's the experience of being a practising - and trained - musician
that makes me doubtful about awarding any such primacy to language. When I
was learning piano, which I did from ages 8-21 with a number of different
teachers, I learned in the appropriate "classical" style which was based on
two things: 1. interpreting the notation - i.e. the process of turning the
notated score into actual musical performance, and 2. explaining the
technique - i.e. the process of what you do with your fingers, hands, arms,
(torso, legs etc etc) in order to achieve certain sounds and musical
effects. Now the presence of notation in the Western classical tradition
means that 1. inevitably involves language - the musical notation is
clearly dependent on the prior existence of a writing system for language -
the very earliest examples of notation in Europe, devised for the vocal
music we now call "Gregorian chant", consisted of "intonation-style
graphics" written over the top of the verbal text - and every feature of
the notation has its appropriate linguistic label. But not all styles even
of Western music depend on notation - perhaps most folk and pop musicians
can't "read" - and in the absence of 1., 2. can be carried out largely by
demonstration, although the presence of a labelling system, i.e. a
technical vocabulary, is very useful for transmission, although not for
performance, which in such traditions is largely equivalent to improvising
on the basis of fixed "formulae".
As for language being able to "re-express" musical meanings, my reading of
many reviews of performances, as well as screeds of scholarly expositions
of musical styles and meanings, has left me deeply sceptical of any such
possibility. Certainly aspects of a particular semiotic system can be
"re-realised" (?) in another semiotic - as the custom of setting words to
music clearly shows - but even in such cases, the musical tends to express
meanings that language doesn't, or at least doesn't do so easily, and vice
versa.
To sum up with another quotation from my in-draft textbook, talking about
the process of creating an (instrumental) score and (vocal) soundtrack for
each episode of a Boys' Love series: in this episode, the instrumental text
falls under the genre I have called "reverie":
In characterising this reverie [titled “Walking alone through the campus”],
you may have noticed that although I’ve indicated the overall kind of
movement involved, I’ve been rather vague about exactly *what* action the
music is accompanying and just *whose* mood it is expressing. This
reflects my understanding of the nature of musical meaning as *concrete* but
*general*. Musical meanings are *concrete*, again in my opinion but
informed by a wide range of research across a number of disciplines,
because they express our human *embodiment*: music represents a kind of
semiotic transformation of our experience of our own and other people’s
bodies moving through space and time. At the same time, musical meanings
are *general*, because, to borrow the insight of one philosopher of
music, music is like body language: when we observe someone’s body
language, including their gait, posture, facial expression, and gaze, we
can “read off” its meaning, but only in general terms. We can tell that
someone is sad, but not why; we can pick up that someone is highly
agitated, but we don’t know the circumstances that gave rise to that
agitation – unless we use *language* to ask them about it. So language,
in contrast to music, is more * abstract*, more detached from our
embodied experience, but at the same time because it supplies us with a
system of categories we can apply to that experience, linguistic meanings
are more *specific*. So from this point of view, we can see that soundtrack
/ expression music – “songs *with* words” – and score / mood music –
“songs *without* words” – take on, as you might expect, the general
semiotic characteristics of the systems of language and music with which
they are mostly closely identified in each case.
I hope these - as always far too verbose - reflections are of some help.
best to all
Ed
On Sun, 19 Nov 2023 at 4:42 pm, Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh <c.cleirigh@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Halliday & Matthiessen have a couple of things to say that may be of
interest here.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 509-10):
Language is set apart, however, as the prototypical semiotic system, on a
variety of different grounds: it is the only one that evolved specifically
as a semiotic system; it is the one semiotic into which all others can be
"translated"; and (the least questionable, in our view) it is the one
whereby the human species as a whole, and each individual member of that
species, construes experience and constructs a social order. In this last
respect, all other semiotic systems are derivative: they have meaning
potential only by reference to models of experience, and forms of social
relationship, that have already been established in language. It is this
that justifies us in taking language as the prototype of systems of meaning.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 606):
Socio-semiotic systems that are parasitic on language, in the sense that
they depend on the fact that those who use them are articulate ('linguate')
beings. These include the visual arts, music and dance; modes of dressing,
cooking, organising living space and other forms of meaning-making
behaviour; and also charts, maps, diagrams, figures and the like. … These
systems enter into relation with language in two ways. On the one hand,
they are metonymic to language: they are complementary, non-linguistic
resources whereby higher-level systems may be realised (e.g. ideological
formations realised through forms of art; theoretical constructs realised
through figures and diagrams). On the other hand, they relate
metaphorically to language: they are constructed, stratally
and metafunctionally, in the image of language itself, and hence can be
modelled on language as prototype, being described "as if" they had their
own grammar and semantics …
ChRIS
On Sun, 19 Nov 2023 at 14:02, Edward McDonald <laomaa63@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear list members:
Sorry for the late follow up. I've read with great interest and
appreciation the various contributions - linguistic, philosophical,
psychological, political, zoological etc etc - to our picture of
metafunctions. What I want to do here is just discuss some general
principles I've found useful in making sense of such necessarily
multiperspectival descriptions of semiotic ( ++) phenomena.
(the ++ means that semiotic phenomena are always also material, social,
cognitive etc etc)
I apologise for again quoting from my own works, but after all - as I
think I may have remarked to David Caldwell once or twice - I've been
banging on about these issues for years, but in so many different contexts
and forums that I can never assume people are familiar with the arguments.
Firstly, a recommendation for a different kind of "trinocular" analysis of
"texts" of all kinds from my paper in the Semiotic Margins collection:
(1) The need for triangulation: textual, social, theoretical
(McDonald 2011):
[I]t seems to me that what is needed for a social-semiotic treatment of
any particular modality is a kind of triangulation between the analysis of
its texts, the theoretical frameworks that have been applied to it, and the
social meanings it has for its communities of users. It is not enough to
have just one or two of these: the theoretical and social without the
textual leaves the analysis ungrounded, with no way of understanding in
detail how analysts have come up with their interpretations; the social and
the textual without the theoretical traps analysts in the (unexamined)
presuppositions of their commonsense (or ‘intuitive’) viewpoints; the
textual and theoretical without the social makes analyses ultimately only
personal ones – insightful, perhaps, but in the end only one individual
interpretation.
Secondly, a recommendation for an obligatory multi-semiotic theoretical
approach whichever semiotic system we're examining.
(2) What can they know of [metafunctions] who only [language] know
Given that those of us working in SFL, whatever else we are, are almost
inevitably linguists, we can take it that we will always be "aware of"
language - but at the same time we need, I believe, to acknowledge that
other semiotic systems may not necessarily show the same configuration of
stratification and metafunction as we take to be characteristic of
language. To quote from a couple of recent works, (a - *Grammar West to
East *(Springer 2020) and a still-in-process-of-drafting textbook aimed
at, to quote the subtitle:
(b) *Understanding {Boys' Love Dramas through {Discourse Analysis*
* {Discourse Analysis {Boys' Love
Dramas*
(a - McDonald 2020: 246)
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) wrote at the opening of one of his most famous
and controversial poems:
Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro –
What should they know of England who only England know? –
Using the conceit of asking the winds of the four quarters to report on
what they see going on under the “English Flag” all around the world,
Kipling “attacked what he saw as the blindness of the English to their
Empire and the men that served and
defended it” (Kipling 1891; McGivering).
NB Despite the common caricature of Kipling as a jingoistic imperialist,
he was a far more complex thinker than that, and having been born in India,
and spent two highly formative periods of young childhood and early
adulthood there, he was far more aware of the situation and needs of the
Empire's "colonial subjects" than most British writers of his time, even
though he was unable to envisage, at least in his explicit statements, a
situation where they would no longer be "subjects" (there's a wonderful
discussion of this by Edward Said in his *Culture and Imperialism*).
(b - McDonald, *Understanding BL dramas / discourse analysis*... in draft)
Although I said that a social semiotic perspective is a useful one here,
in practice I find much of the actual analysis carried out within social
semiotic frameworks inadequate for the purpose [of accounting for the text
*as
a whole*, in all its complexity but at the same time coherence], largely
because scholars have struggled to free themselves from the theoretical
influence of linguistics, and from the analytical practice of continually
invoking the meanings of language in order to explain those of other
semiotic systems....My general criticism would be that while the social
semiotic frameworks currently in use are very good at dealing with the
“combination”, of delineating the whats and hows of the multimodal text *as
a whole*, they are less good at accounting for the “contribution”, at
capturing the basic duality of each semiotic system, what I like to call
interpretation and expression, *without constant resource to language as
the ground of explanation*.
(3) Do the metafunctions "exist" cross-semiotically? Can language be taken
as the model / interpretant of all other semiotic systems
•a system like language or music acts as a semiotic mediation between two
kinds of contexts:
1.the material context of sound or gesture as perceptible expression
2.the social context of language or music …as interpretable behaviour
•A semiotic system like language or music hence has two poles
1.expression (vis-à-vis material context)
2.interpretation (vis-à-vis social context)
•“arbitrariness” = variation in ways in which different speech or music
communities make internal links between interpretation and expression
•variation becomes functional as marker of community membership and
personal identity
(McDonald, in draft) (McDonald 2013, Embodiment and meaning: moving beyond
linguistic imperialism in social semiotics)
The need to understand the relation of interpretation(s) to expression(s)
*independently
for each semiotic system* is one that for me follows naturally from
Saussure’s understanding of meaning in language, whose implications have
been usefully explored by a number of scholars like media and communication
studies scholar David Machin already mentioned above, and literature and
philosophy of language scholar Horst Ruthrof (McDonald 2013):
[F]rom the point of view of a general semiology, it is the very difficulty
of accounting for the largely symbolic, unmotivated nature of linguistic
signs that makes a clear understanding of linguistic meaning very hard to
attain. At the same time, whether or not we regard language as functioning
as the (potential) interpreter of all other semiotic systems, it is
undeniable that it tends to be used that way by many semioticians,
especially Social Semioticians, very often in the same breath as denying
that language has any special status. A refocusing on communication as
multimodal may well be being forced on us by developments in communicative
technologies, as Machin suggests, but it also represents a long overdue
recognition of the importance of embodied semiotics in much human
interaction, as Ruthrof shows.… Much multimodal work in the Social Semiotic
tradition seems curiously visually-biased, and at the same time largely
unproblematically ‘analogising’ concepts from linguistics for the analysis
of other semiotic systems, without seemingly feel much need, as Machin
notes, to engage with existing scholarship in those areas.
In fact my conclusion from the same paper, although as I said written more
than a decade ago and in relation to the analysis of opera, I believe still
very much applies to the contemporary challenge of dealing with the genre
of Boys’ Love dramas and thus to the whole social semiotic “enterprise”
that I have been engaged in here (McDonald 2013):
If social semiotic approaches are to free themselves from their current
reliance on linguistic models, they will need to understand the nature of
semiosis, in other words, to explicitly theorise the iconic and/or
indexical and/or symbolic referential processes involved in recognising the
links between expression and interpretation in the case of each modality,
before they will be able to understand how modalities combine in
‘‘performance’’. Until we have, not a *Semantics and the Body*, to use
the title of Ruthrof’s 1997 work, but a *semantics of the body*, the
challenge of accounting for a multimodal text like opera in a semiotically
democratic way will remain a question in search of an answer.
I hope that at least [some of] this flood of words speaks to [some of] the
concerns that have been raised in this thread.
best to all
Ed
On Mon, Nov 13, 2023 at 7:21 PM Derek IRWIN <Derek.Irwin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Dear all,
Just an addendum that the work done at Glendon College/York University
under Bill Greaves and Jim Benson argued that many of the discourse moves
by the bonobos were realized multimodally, so that lexigrams were one
potential source, as were vocalizations (whether polar or as an attempt at
rudimentary ‘pronunciations’: Bill led a lot of work with PRAAT to see what
kinds of formants might be evident in the spectrogram results from bonobo
vocalizations to determine if there were potential vowel differences, but
as Rob notes below there are issues with bonobo vocal tracts that make this
work a challenge). Gesture is also quite common in their data,
particularly indexical as a response to caretaker questions of location,
for example, and we know that other apes such as Koko have had considerable
success with sign-based communication.
Jim and Bill’s book, *Functional Dimensions of Ape-Human Discourse *(Equinox,
2009) includes as its final chapter “The multistratal dimension: a
methodology for phonemic analysis of vocalizations of language competent
bonobos” with Meena Debashish, Jennifer Lukas, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and
Jared Taglialatela, which explicitly deals with how sound system
discrimination makes it possible to potentially distinguish “words” in the
non-human sounds that a language enculturated ape such as Kanzi might
make. Not uncontroversial, of course, but many observers of the recorded
data interpreted meaningful utterances that were difficult to discern
because of the high pitch.
Best,
Derek
*From:* sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> *On
Behalf Of *Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh
*Sent:* Sunday, November 12, 2023 9:38 AM
*To:* sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [sys-func] Re: Metafunctions
Robert,
Thanks for putting me right on bonobo phonetics!
ChEeRS,
ChRIS
On Sun, 12 Nov 2023 at 12:34, Robert Spence <r.spence@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I’m currently at the beginning of introducing two groups of students (most
of them trainee teachers, and native speakers of German) to English
phonetics and phonology, via an SFL perspective. The obligatorily
horizontal knowledge structures of “humanities” subjects (“I don't know
much about it but I reckon Linguistics should be part of the natural
sciences!” — Neil Halliday) force me, in the absence of decent hierarchical
knowledge structures, to surf around subterrains of Saussure, of “Sydney
School” SFL, and of orthodox Halliday/Matthiessen SFL, trying not to bore
the majority while attempting to stimulate the theoretically not-yet-jaded,
and ever fearful that one of the latter will protest at the emerging
contradictions.
I’ve been fascinated by David’s expositions of Halliday’s Hegelianism,
which I had long “felt", subliminally, without being able to label it so
succinctly; and now yet another “H” has been added to the mix, in the form
of Aristotle’s “hylomorphism”. This has helped hone my understanding of
Saussure and Hjelmslev. “Language is a form, not a substance” — but it’s
projected onto the purport, outwardly in both directions, to produce the
phonetics and the semantics. (Will the students understand this? Their
Linguistics professor is a hardcore Chomskyan, who starts "right in the
middle", with formal syntax; so .. maybe … _something_ will resonate … at
least, faintly … )
To conclude:
David: Thank you!
Chris: Bill Greaves did, indeed, talk about bonobo phonology — or at least
bonobo phonetics — at a number of ISFC events. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh used
to describe the problems that bonobos had in lowering the fundamental
frequency of their own, intraspecies vocalisations into a range that was
acoustically accesible to humans (so that “eek” becomes “egg” as an answer
to the question “”What do you want on your pizza?”), and Bill Greaves would
often imitate the bonobo vocalisations and explain the acoustics behind
them. Lexigrams were merely a first attempt; and Susan Savage-Rumbaugh is
on record as saying that next time around she would probably just use the
orthographic shapes of the handwritten English words rather than going to
all the trouble of inventing lexigrams.
It’s wonderful to be able to evesdrop on these conversations! I’m sorry
that I can’t negotiate the interpersonal spaces as elegantly as is
evidenced, of course, in the contributions of the famous Mr. Ed.
sys-funcʃn̩lɪ yours,
Rob Spence
--------------------------
*Dr. Robert Spence*
Saarland University
Mobile: +49 175 526 3506
On 11. Nov 2023, at 23:07, Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh <c.cleirigh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
David,
Of the 728 posts on the blog *Informing Thoughts*
<https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/VlnnCyojxQT751DMEUZQ4_K?domain=informingthoughts.blogspot.com/>,
only 3 feature comments on Neoplatonism,
and each is a very brief note relating such ideas to Chomskyan Formal
Linguistics.
Not one of them is concerned with Aristotle's notion of hylomorphism.
Evidence:
· The Metaphysical Thoughts Of Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus In
Formal Linguistics
<https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/PXG_CzvkyVCGo1D2vfXtMd-?domain=informingthoughts.blogspot.com>
· The Subjectivist Thoughts Of Plotinus In Formal Linguistics
<https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/7urnCANpgjCZAQ0WMu9PXNO?domain=informingthoughts.blogspot.com>
· The Neoplatonist Thoughts Of John The Scot In Formal Linguistics
<https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/ZU9ACBNqjlCD5Gq43fjfHOh?domain=informingthoughts.blogspot.com>
It is unlikely that Bill Greaves went on about Bonobo phonology,
since the bonobos that were on the project express linguistic meaning
by pointing to lexigrams, not by controlling the vocal tract.
(Bill invited me to work on that project as well.)
Getting back to SFL Theory, tomorrow's post is on the meaning of
'functional' in systemic functional grammar.
ChRIS
On Sat, 11 Nov 2023 at 20:32, 데이브드켈로그/_교수_영어교육과 <dkellogg60@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
You did write a fair amount about neoplatonism, Chris. To the extent that
neoplatonism isn't pure idealism (or Thomist Christianity), it's
hylomorphic. Aristotle was a very keen student of Plato, and I think
hylomorphism was a failed attempt to make Platonism compatible with natural
science (and hence phonology, which is still the most natural-science part
of linguistics).
Halliday develops. Of course, in his most Marxist moment, he was broadly
materialist. But take a look at the clip of one of Halliday's late
plenaries (I think it's the one on "Outlooks", not the one on "Language
Evolving", which I think is perfectly materialist). He does say that
Meaning and Matter are co-equal, and that's not monism--it's not even
hylomorphism. He said much the same thing when I first met him in Tokyo (in
the early oughts, I think) and it was one reason why we really didn't get
on very well (the other was Saussure, who is also hylomorphic).
God, I miss Bill Greaves. He went on a bit about Bonobo phonology, but he
had a mastery of the INDEXICAL qualities of phonology like nobody else.
dk
2023년 11월 10일 (금) 오전 9:34, Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh <c.cleirigh@xxxxxxxxx>님이 작성:
David,
Of Aristotle's hylomorphism I am totally ignorant, and have not written
about it on any blog.
But thanks for alerting me to it. I'll investigate.
On Halliday's "dualism" and saying that 'meaning and matter are not
reducible to each other',
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 609) write:
we are prepared to acknowledge a broadly materialist position
On Halliday & Greaves (2008), Bill Greaves was one of the examiners of my
PhD thesis on phonology,
and he invited me to be a co-author on what became Halliday & Greaves
(2008).
ChRIS
On Thu, 9 Nov 2023 at 20:21, 데이브드켈로그/_교수_영어교육과 <dkellogg60@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Ed--
I meant Aristotle's hylomorphism. But it's not part of this thread (hence
my parenthesis). It's just something Chris sometimes writes on his blog.
In defense of Chris, though, Halliday is pretty obviously being dualistic
in exactly the same way, when he says that meaning and matter are not
reducible to each other. Jews are pretty monistic. Contra Aristotle and
even contra Chris and Halliday, I dare to think that consciousness is just
one property--late arising, of course--of matter. I am perfectly happy with
the idea that my mind is just sentient meat, just so long as I get to think
of my culture as downloadable software to my sloppy messy wetware.
Chris--the real juice on topic prominence is in Halliday and Greaves 2008,
of which the IFG is really just a quiet echo. I will never forget playing
hooky from the plenaries at ISFC 40 in Guangzhou to attend Bill
Greaves's workshop on topic prominence (Ruqaiya Hasan did the same thing,
and that's how I first met her....)
dk
2023년 11월 9일 (목) 오전 6:40, Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh <c.cleirigh@xxxxxxxxx>님이 작성:
Thanks David.
On tonic prominence, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 116) explain its
textual function as follows:
Within the tone group, one foot (and in particular its first syllable)
carries the main pitch movement: the main fall, or rise, or the change of
direction. This feature is known as tonic prominence, and the element
having this prominence is the tonic element (tonic foot, tonic syllable).
… The element having this prominence is said to be carrying information
focus. The tonic foot defines the culmination of what is New: it marks
where the New element ends.
Tonic prominence marks an element of clause structure as New information.
This can be, for example, a participant (ideational), a Finite operator
(interpersonal), or a cohesive Adjunct (textual).
A frequently heard example of young children demonstrating their capacity
for using tonic prominence is an exchange like:
'YOU are!'
'I am NOT!'
ChRIS
On Wed, 8 Nov 2023 at 17:10, 데이브드켈로그/_교수_영어교육과 <dkellogg60@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Thanks, Chris.
David Butt, who was my supervisor at Macquarie, used to say that both the
logical and the experiential metafunctions are "world-building" functions.
David is a literatus and not a developmentalist like me. So like many of
the things David told me, I found this too general to be very useful in my
own work--after all, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions are
also world-building.
But if we take Chris's clue (cue?) seriously, David's remark becomes more
useful: the world built by the experiential and logical metafunctions is
not one of socially negotiated roles or semotically generated messages:
it's one of ideal representations, and these can be either logical and
univariate (more abstract and less bound to sensory data) or experiential
and multivariate (more general and inclusive of sensory data).
Chris is also (doubtless) right in his remark on Halliday's experiential
(multivariate) vs logical (univariate) analyses of the group/phrase. These
are (doubtless) meant to be complementary: the experiential analysis is
clearly better at describing phrases (e.g. the prepositional phrase in
English and the co-verbal phrase in Korean) and those cases where Thing and
Head are not conflated, but the logical analysis makes more sense when we
look at verb groups and adverbial groups.
I think that Halliday, for purposes of exposition, sometimes
over-privileges the synoptic mode (for my taste). Yes, the three
meta-functions are always present, at least in some form. But that's a
little like saying that consciousness is present in some form in bacteria,
or that sexuality is present in some form in very small children.. It
doesn't preclude saying that higher-order consciousness arises
significantly later than, say, metabolism or reproduction, or that sexual
reproduction emerges later than, say, circulation, respiration, or
perception. There must be a reason why Theme is the least "layered" of the
great metafunctions, and why some languages (e.g. English) have
historically tended away from a purely ideational or interpersonal ordering
of Theme and Rheme towards a more textual one once they become written down.
Tonic prominence surely has some textual function, but it seems to me that
this textual function isn't yet clearly differentiated from ideational
meaning (because it is typically assigned to lexical and not grammatical
meanings and it's iterative and componential in its structuring principle)
or from interpersonal meaning (because it's used to negate and contradict
and because it's prosodic in its structuring principle). I don't think
tonic proiminence in small children varies independently until the
emergence of literacy in schooling.
To all those who are thinking of unsubscribing: I get it, and like you I
do cull my own subscriptions pretty ruthlessly from time to time. But I
think this is one of the very few places where I can actually ask a
question like that and be intelligible, much less get an intelligent answer.
Thanks again, Chris! (But you are still too soft on Aristotle...)
dk
2023년 11월 7일 (화) 오후 5:03, Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh <c.cleirigh@xxxxxxxxx>님이 작성:
David,
On Halliday's reason for grouping of the experiential and logical
metafunctions,
the clue lies in the superordinate term:
he classifies them both as types of ideational meaning,
and the logico-semantic relations of expansion and projection
underlie distinctions in the experiential grammar,
such as those in relational processes and circumstantiation.
On the multivariate structure of a nominal group being a more delicate
version of the univariate structure,
how would this work for a nominal group in which the Thing and Head are
not conflated?
On the relation between the textual and other metafunctions, Halliday &
Matthiessen (1999: 398) write:
The textual metafunction is second-order in the sense that it is concerned
with semiotic reality: that is, reality in the form of meaning. This
dimension of reality is itself constructed by other two metafunctions:
the ideational which construes a natural reality, and the interpersonal,
which enacts an intersubjective reality. The function of the textual
metafunction
is thus an enabling one with respect to the rest; it takes over the semiotic
resources brought into being by the other two metafunctions and as it
were operationalises them
On Halliday's reasons for starting with the textual metafunction, he
(1994: 36) writes:
<1.png>
On the emergence of the textual metafunction, I'm not sure how to measure
the full emergence of the various metafunctions, but the textual obviously
begins with language, since 'All uses of language involve the creation of
text' (Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 528), and my guess is that it first
manifests itself with the first tonic prominence that distinguishes New
from Given information, which presumably could precede the first
experientially and interpersonally structured clause.
my 2c,
cc
On Mon, 6 Nov 2023 at 19:28, 데이브드켈로그/_교수_영어교육과 <dkellogg60@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I think that the key insight here is freedom vs. necessity, it is what
Halliday meant when he said that any speaker can construe any
(experiential) topic, enact any (interpersonal) spin, at any (logical)
length, and in so doing enable any kind of (textual) discourse. The word
"any" suggests how independent the various metafunctions must be: the topic
does not depend on or constrain your speech role, and neither one
constrains or depends on the logical length or the textual mode. .
In contrast, experiential functions like process type clearly do constain
and even determine things like participant (and the fit between process and
medium is, if anything, even tighter). Interpersonal functions like subject
and finite, and even mood and modality are related in obvious ways,
different logico-semantic choices do impinge on each other (as you can see,
I am extending here and not elaborating or enhancing), and as I write this
I am very conscious that there are definite limits to how much I can
maneuver within a text type (although I think Martin and genre theory
exaggerates these constraints, perhaps in the interests of making their
pedagogy easily reproducible).
So my question is why Halliday tells us to group the logical and the
experiential together. On the one hand, there doesn't seem to be any
comparable sub-metafunctions in the other metafunctions (and Ruqaiya Hasan
seems to have had rather different views about the proximity of their
interdependence). On the other, Halliday does have both a logical and an
experiential take on (e.g.) the structure of the nominal group, and they do
seem to relate to each other (the multivariate structure can be read as a
somewhat more delicate version of the univariate logical nominal group
structure)..
Perhaps there is something comparable with although not within the other
metafunctions. Perhaps there is some sense in which the
experiential-logical (ideational) and the interpersonal-social
(historico-cultural, to use the Vygotskyan idiom) metafunctions are related
in the textual metafunction in a way that is comparable to the way in which
the logical and the experiential are related in the ideational
metafunciton.
That would explain why Halliday always seems to begin, analytically, with
the textual metafunction (in the IFG and elsewhere), even though it is,
ontogenetically, the last of the great metafunctions to fully emerge (with
literacy). Historically, the process of development is more about
differentiation, separation, and re-linking than about incremental growth.
dk.
2023년 11월 6일 (월) 오전 6:00, Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh <c.cleirigh@xxxxxxxxx>님이 작성:
Dear Scholars,
The following clarifications of the metafunctions might be helpful to some.
Halliday (2003 [1994]: 435-6):
The shift to a paradigmatic orientation led to the finding that the content
plane of a language is organised in a small number of functionally defined
components which Halliday labelled 'metafunctions'.
According to this theory the grammar of natural languages evolved in
simultaneously (a) 'construing' human experience (the 'experiential'
metafunction) and (b) 'enacting' interpersonal relationships (the
'interpersonal' metafunction), both these being underpinned by (c) the
resources of (commonsense) logic (the 'logical' metafunction; (a) and (c)
are grouped together as 'ideational'). The strata! role of the
lexicogrammar lies in mapping these semantic components into a unitary
construct, one that is capable of being linearised; in doing this, the
grammar (d) 'creates' its own parallel universe in the form of discourse
(the 'textual' metafunction).
These metafunctions define the dimensions of semantic space; and since
they tend to be realised by different structural resources —experiential
meanings segmentally, interpersonal meanings prosodically, logical
meanings in iterative structures, and textual meanings in wave-like patterns
— they also determine the topological formations that are characteristic
of human speech.
--
dr chris cléirigh
*go raibh maith agat*
(be) good on-you
'thank you'
====================================
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--
David Kellogg
Sangmyung University
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David Kellogg
Sangmyung University
New article with Maria Nicholas in *Social Semiotics:*
Guided to Guider: the “∼ed” and “∼er” roles in Professional Development
Materials for Guided Reading
50 free online copies available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FDB7J9YZBRJPCXITZHHM/full?target=10.1080/10350330.2023.2258362
<https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/ZICbC5QPXJiMLJ8GOCkKAf1?domain=tandfonline.com>
--
David Kellogg
Sangmyung University
New article with Maria Nicholas in *Social Semiotics:*
Guided to Guider: the “∼ed” and “∼er” roles in Professional Development
Materials for Guided Reading
50 free online copies available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FDB7J9YZBRJPCXITZHHM/full?target=10.1080/10350330.2023.2258362
<https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/ZICbC5QPXJiMLJ8GOCkKAf1?domain=tandfonline.com>
--
David Kellogg
Sangmyung University
New article with Maria Nicholas in *Social Semiotics:*
Guided to Guider: the “∼ed” and “∼er” roles in Professional Development
Materials for Guided Reading
50 free online copies available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FDB7J9YZBRJPCXITZHHM/full?target=10.1080/10350330.2023.2258362
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