Relation To Other Branches of Grammar
Halliday's theory sets out to explain how spoken and written texts construe meanings and how the resources of language are organised in open systems and functionally bound to meanings. It is a theory of language in use, creating systematic relations between choices and forms within the less abstract strata of grammar and phonology, on the one hand, and more abstact strata such as context of situation and context of culture on the other. It is a radically different theory of language from others which explore less abstract strata as autonomous systems, the most notable being Noam Chomsky's. Since the principal aim of systemic functional grammar is to represent the grammatical system as a resource for making meaning, it addresses different concerns. For example, it does not try to address Chomsky's thesis that there is a "finite rule system which generates all and only the grammatical sentences in a language". Halliday's theory encourages a more open approach to the definition of language as a resource; rather than focus on grammaticality as such, a systemic functional grammatical treatment focuses instead on the relative frequencies of choices made in uses of language and assumes that these relative frequencies reflect the probability that particular paths through the available resources will be chosen rather than others. Thus, SFG does not describe language as a finite rule system, but rather as a system, realised by instantiations, that is continuously expanded by the very instantiations that realise it and that is continuously reproduced and recreated with use.
Another way to understand the difference in concerns between systemic functional grammar and most variants of generative grammar is through Chomsky's claim that "linguistics is a sub-branch of psychology". Halliday investigates linguistics more as a sub-branch of sociology. SFG therefore pays much more attention to pragmatics and discourse semantics than is traditionally the case in formalism.
The orientation of systemic functional grammar has served to encourage several further grammatical accounts that deal with some perceived weaknesses of the theory and similarly orient to issues not seen to be addressed in more structural accounts. Examples include the model of Richard Hudson called word grammar.
Read more about this topic: Systemic Functional Grammar
Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation, branches and/or grammar:
“A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)