From this point of view then, this supposed "naturalness",at least in the way
it's framed in the Halliday quote above, comes toseem more "culture-bound" than
"self-evident".And if we recognise this as basically an Indo-European model,
thatthen raises the question of whether there is some kind ofcross-linguistic
"naturalness" we can invoke, andwhere exactly we might locate that: in the
social slashcognitive contexts, or in some kind of
in-betweenSaussurean-Voloshinovian (sic) realm of "social psychology?
Hi Ed, a distinction which you mightfind useful, or not.
The theorising about language, whichruns back to Aristotle's arriere grand
pere, and taken up by almostevery indo-european thinker and his cousin, is not
necessarilyrelated to cross-linguistic naturalness or not.
Just because Aristotle plagued somemillenia with his 'line of thought' does not
mean that language is ashe would have it be, for any language, indo-european or
otherwise. Iwould have thought that cross linguistic 'naturalness' or
otherwise,would be matters of language, whereas Aristotle errors or
otherwise,as with his indo-european acolytes, are metalanguage errors
orotherwise.
On Sunday, 13 February 2022, 13:16:45 GMT, Edward McDonald
<laomaa63@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear func'ers:
I'm never quite sure if there's a statute of limitations on these postings, but
I since I suspect - like most intellectuals I always believe people must be
talking about *me* - that in referring to "a list discussion on the question of
what Halliday meant by a natural relation between wording and meaning" Chris
was having a dig at - I mean respectfully engaging with - this little throw
away line I dropped a few postings back:
Talking about a "natural relationship between semantics and lexicogrammar" is
an axiomatic postulate, not a research program.
that I felt I should briefly respond before the week was up.
I've been intrigued by the idea of a "natural" relationship between wording and
meaning ever since I encountered it as an undergraduate in the Preface to IFG.
For a long time I just accepted it as self-evidently true, and the links
between clause functions and word classes as commonly cited provided the
clearest evidence for it.
More recently, however, since I've been reading and writing much more on
history of linguistics, it's come to seem, well not exactly a circular argument
but with hints of circularity about it, shall we say. The clause function /
word class hook-up goes back to the beginnings of theorising about language in
the Ancient Greek tradition, and more or less reflects the three-way split in
the linguistic "model" Greek inherited from Proto-Indo-European between the two
major sets of inflected word classes, nominal and verbal, on the one hand, and
the uninflected set Aristotle referred to as syndesmoi or 'linkers', which
include what later scholars would distinguish as adverbs, prepositions,
conjunctions, etc.
From this point of view then, this supposed "naturalness", at least in the way
it's framed in the Halliday quote above, comes to seem more "culture-bound"
than "self-evident". And if we recognise this as basically an Indo-European
model, that then raises the question of whether there is some kind of
cross-linguistic "naturalness" we can invoke, and where exactly we might locate
that: in the social slash cognitive contexts, or in some kind of in-between
Saussurean-Voloshinovian (sic) realm of "social psychology?
Questions much more than answers...
best to all
Ed
On Mon, Feb 7, 2022 at 8:33 AM Dr ChRIS CLÉiRIGh <c.cleirigh@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
Some time ago, there was a list discussion on the question ofwhat Halliday
meant by a natural relation between wording and meaning.The following quotes
clarify that he means a non-arbitrary relation between classes of grammatical
form and the experiential meanings they realise.
Halliday (1985: xvii, xviii, xix):
The relation between the meaning and the wording is not, however, an arbitrary
one: the form of the grammar relates naturally to the meanings that are being
encoded. A functional grammar is designed to bring this out; it is a study of
wording, but one that interprets the wording by reference to what it means. …
What this means is that both the general kinds of grammatical pattern that have
evolved in language, and the specific manifestations of each kind, bear a
natural relation to the meanings they have evolved to express. … the
distinction into word classes of verb and noun reflects the analysis of
experience into goings-on, expressed as verbs, and participants in the
goings-on, expressed as nouns; and so on. …
… the relation of grammar to semantics is in this sense natural, not arbitrary
…
--
dr chris cléirigh
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
— George Bernard Shaw
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