Before I make my summary, I'd like to paste our outline of the presentation.
“Functional grammar is concerned with the identification, classification, and functioning of significant units. It precedes a study of the lexicon, i.e., an examination of each significant unit, not taken care of in the grammar, in its relations to the analysis of man’s experience.”(Martinet, 1994)
“Systemic-functional grammar, … is concerned primarily with the choices that are made available to speakers of a language by their grammatical systems. These choices are assumed to be meaningful and relate speakers' intentions to the concrete forms of a language.” (Wikipedia)
Prague School
- Vilem Mathesius, the senior founder
- Based on anti-atomistic views
- Synchronic analysis of language and its function
- Phonology, syntax (esp. by L. Tesniere), semantics (by R. Jokobson)
- A new approach to the development of language, stylistics, issues of standard language, etc.
Karl Bühler (psychologist)
Organum (Greek) means “tool”
Assumption: utterances are psychophysical elements
Speech Act Theory
By the British ordinary language philosophers Austin, Searle, Strawson, Grice, and others
“Speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of behavior” (Searle, 1969:12).
Utterance & Act
Locutionary act:
Producing a recognizable grammatical utterance in the given language.
Illocutionary act:
A certain way in which the speaker is using the language, e.g. “promising”, “warning”, “greeting”, “demanding”, etc.
Five basic categories: (Searle, 1973)
Representatives
Directives
Commissives
Expressives
Declarations
Appropriateness Condition
Asking a Question:
Speaker does not know the answer
Speaker believes it is possible hearer knows the answer
It is not obvious that hearer will provide the answer at the time without being asked
Speaker wants to know the answer
Halliday’s Categories
Adult speech acts
Interpersonal (instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal)
Ideational (heuristic, imaginative, representational)
Textural
Choice
„How are you?“
All possible utterances:
Help!
You're stupid.
Where do I find eggs?
Fine, thanks!
Don't touch the stove, it's hot!
I love you.
Last weekend we went to Hamburg.
...
"Meaning takes place in an environment, not in solitude"
Determinants (Halliday 1975, 65)
Being Part
Context of the situation --> type
Context of the culture“ --> system
Doing Part
Predictability
Utterances are predicatble
Halliday
"A text is meaningful not so much because we do not know what the speaker is going to say, (...) as because we do know."
Considering the characteristics of the ideational and interactional parts
Hymes: „form and content of the message, setting, participants, ends (intent and effect), key, medium, genre and interactional norms“ (Halliday 1975, 129)
Interpretable on social and linguistic level
Halliyday, McIntosh & Strevens (130):
Field --> ongoing activity – subject matter
Tenor --> role relationships – style
Mode --> symbolic/rhetoric channel – genre/instrumentalities
Conclusion
“In the functional paradigm a language is conceptualized as an instrument of social interaction among human beings, used with the intention of establishing communicative relationships. Within this paradigm one attempts to reveal the instrumentality of language with respect to what people do and achieve with it in social interaction. A natural language, in other words, is seen as an integrated part of the communicative competence of the natural language user.” (Dik, 1989)
We started our presentation with an example of communicative failure, which I experienced myself. In China, sometimes we greet each other by asking "Have you had your dinner/meal?"
In this presentation, I learned a "Golden Finger" from Prof. Gibbon, i.e. a research method: when we have two definitions or concepts about one item, we'd better compare them first. While during process of preparing for the presentation, I found I still need to read a lot to gain a rough idea about what language is indeed.
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