Halliday’s Theory
Written by: Luh Ketut Sri Widhiasih
I.
Introduction
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M.A.K.
Halliday) was born in 1925. He is a British linguist who developed an internationally influential
grammar model, the systemic
functional grammar (which also goes by the name of systemic
functional linguistics.
Halliday was born and
raised in England. He took a BA Honours degree in Modern Chinese Language and
Literature (Mandarin) at the University of London. He then lived for
three years in China, where he studied under Luo Changpei at Peking University and under Wang Li at Lingnan
University,
before returning to take a PhD in Chinese Linguistics at Cambridge. Having taught Chinese for a number of years, he changed his field of
specialization to linguistics, and developed systemic functional grammar, elaborating
on the foundations laid by his British teacher J. R. Firth and a group of European linguists of the early
20th century, the Prague School. His seminal paper on
this model was published in 1961. He became the Professor of Linguistics at the
University of London in 1965. In 1976 he
moved to Australia as Foundation Professor
of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained
until he retired. The impact of his work extends beyond linguistics into the
study of visual and multimodal communication, and he is considered to have
founded the field of social semiotics. He has worked in various regions of language
study, both theoretical and applied, and has been especially concerned with
applying the understanding of the basic principles of language to the theory
and practices of education. He received the status of emeritus professor of the
University of Sydney and Macquarie University, Sydney, in 1987. With
his seminal lecture “New Ways of Meaning: the Challenge to Applied Linguistics”
held at the AILA conference in Saloniki (1990), he became one of the pioneers
of eco-critical discourse analysis (a discipline of ecolinguistics).
Halliday
describes himself first and foremost as a grammarian. The first in his recently
published 10 volumes of Collected Works is titled On Grammar. He adopted the
term ‘systemic-functional’ for his linguistic approach to describe two
dimensions of language. Language is ‘systemic’ because it is ‘paradigmatically organized’. What this means is
that any ‘piece’ of language on any
scale can be described as the output of a system of choices. For instance, a
major clause must display some structure that is the formal realization of a
choice from the system of ‘voice’, i.e. it must be either
‘middle’ or ‘effective’, where ‘effective’ leads to the further choice
of ‘operative’ (otherwise known as ‘active’) or ‘receptive’ (otherwise known as ‘passive’).
II.
Content
Halliday
and Hasan’s approach to text
A very comprehensive study of text is displayed in Halliday and Hasan’s
(1976) treatment of features of English texts. In their work Cohesion in
English, Halliday and Hasan (1976) define the notion ‘text’ by saying:
Text is used in
linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length,
that does form a unified whole […]. A text is a unit of language in use.
It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence; and it is not
defined by its size. A text is sometimes envisaged to be some kind of
super-sentence, a grammatical unit that is larger than a sentence but is
related to a sentence in the same way that a sentence is related to a clause, a
clause to a group and so on […]. A text is best regarded as a SEMANTIC unit; a
unit not of form but of meaning.
Halliday
and Hasan (1985) define text as:
[A] language
that is functional. […] Language that is doing some job in some context, as
opposed to isolated words or sentences […]. So any instance of living language
that is playing some part in a context of situation, we shall call it a text.
It may be either spoken or written, or indeed in any other medium of expression
that we like to think of.
For Halliday and Hasan, a text is a semantic unit. Halliday stresses the
importance of language as an instrument of social interaction among the members
of any speech community. He believes that text cannot be approached without its
situational context in which it is embedded.
Halliday argues that although text is made of words and sentences, when
being written down, “it is really made of meanings” because meanings have to be
expressed or coded in words and structures in order to be communicated; “but as
a thing in itself, a text is essentially a semantic unit […]. It is not
something that can be defined as being just another kind of sentence, only
bigger” (Halliday, 1985). Halliday believes that because text is basically a
semantic unit a componential analysis of the text must be approached from a
semantic perspective. The phonological, lexical, and syntactic structures
should be analytically studied as being functionally contributing to the
explication of the text’s semantic significance. In this context, Halliday
brings in yet another notion, that is, text is both “a product and a process”.
A text is a product in the sense that it is an output, a palpable manifestation
of a mental image that can be studied and recorded, having a certain
construction that can be represented in systematic terms. It is a process, on
the other hand, in the sense that it is a continuous movement through the
network of meaning potential which involves a lot of choices and decision making.
Halliday believes that text is not only a semantic unit but also an
instance of social interaction. In its social-semantic perspective, text is an
object of social exchange of meanings. Halliday merges semiotic with both
sociology and linguistics. Accordingly, text is a sign representation of a
socio-cultural event embedded in a context of situation. Context of situation
is the semio-socio-cultural environment in which the text unfolds. Text and context
are so intimately related that neither concept can be comprehended in the
absence of the other.
Halliday and Hasan (1985) maintain that:
There is a text
and there is other text that accompanies it: text that is ‘with’, namely the
con-text. This notion of what is ‘with the text’, however, goes beyond what is
said and written: it includes other non-verbal signs-on-the total environment
in which a text unfolds.
According
to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (fourth
edition), the term ‘context’, in its simple form, refers to what comes before
and after a word, phrase, statement, etc., helping to fix the meaning; or
circumstances in which an event occurs. We may sometimes be able to make
inferences about the context of situation from certain words in texts. These
texts, short or long, spoken or written, will carry with them indications of
their contexts. We need to hear or read only a section of them to know where
they come from. Given the text, we should be able to place it into the context
that is appropriate to it. In other words we construct the situation. Hence,
when discussing text, one should initially bear in mind two important points:
context of situation and context of culture. These are highlighted in the
following sections:
A.
Text context of situation
According to Halliday and Hasan (1985), texts cannot be approached
without reference to the situation as the context “in which texts unfold and in
which they are to be interpreted”. They distinguish three situational parameters
that help communicants make predictions about the kinds of meaning that are
being exchanged. These are: field, tenor and mode of discourse.
1.
Field of discourse
Field of discourse refers to “what is happening, to the nature of the
social action that is taking place: what is it that the participants are
engaged in, in which the language figures as some essential component?”
Field of discourse plays a vital role in the context of text. It is one
of the three basic elements in the textual internal world and external world.
Fields of discourse can be non-technical, as is the case with the general
topics that we deal with in the course of our daily life. Or they can be
technical or specialist as in linguistics, law, engineering, physics, computer
science and many other fields.
In specialist fields lexical mutuality of text, specific structures and
certain grammatical patterns belonging to the field of discourse are employed
in an appropriate way, for example, terms like plasmodium, anthelmintics,
antimalarials and prophylactics in medicine; terms like hydrogen, neutron and
molecule in physics; terms like generic, diachronic, phylogentetic and
archiphoneme in linguistics.
2.
Tenor of discourse
According to Halliday and Hasan, tenor of discourse refers to “who is
taking part, to the nature of the participants, their statuses and roles: what
kinds of role relationship obtain among the participants, including permanent
and temporary relationships of one kind or another, both the types of speech role
that they are taking on in the dialogue and the whole cluster of socially
significant relationships in which they are involved?” (Halliday and Hasan,
1985)
Tenor of discourse indicates the relationship between discourse
participants (e.g. speaker/writer and hearer/reader) as manifested in language
use. Participants’ relationship varies from one group to another. It may be
that of a patient and a doctor, a mother and her child, a teacher and a
student, etc.
As far as addresser and addressee are different in terms of categories,
one would always expect the language used between them to vary from one set or
group to another. Language which is used between husband and wife is
usually expected to be informal whatever the subject matter, whereas the language
which is employed by a politician making a speech in a conference is nearly
formal.
3.
Mode of discourse
Mode of discourse is a terms that refers to “what part the language is
playing, what it is that the participants are expecting the language to do for
them in that situation: the symbolic organisation of the text, the status that
it has, and its function in the context, including the channel (is it spoken or
written or some combination of the two?) and also the rhetorical mode, what is
being achieved by the text in terms of such categories as persuasive,
expository, didactic, and the like” (Halliday and Hasan, 1985).
Mode of discourse is the third basic strand of register. It is the
formal strand in which language is used, or to put it in Halliday’s terms, it
refers to what part the language is playing.
Mode can take spoken as well as written forms, each of which divides
into different sub-divisions. Speaking can be non-spontaneous, as in acting or
reciting, or spontaneous, as in conversing.
As far as writing is concerned, there are various categories such
as material written to be read aloud as in political speeches, material written
to be spoken (e.g. in acting), and material written to be read which covers a
wide range of writings includes newspapers, books of various sorts, journals,
magazines, etc.
B. Text context of culture
Like context of situation, context of culture is an
important element through which one can comprehend texts. Halliday and Hasan
(1985) point out that:
The context of situation, however, is only
the immediate environment. There is also a broader background against which the
text has to be interpreted: its context of culture. Any actual context of
situation, the particular configuration of field, tenor, and mode that has
brought a text into being, is not just a random jumble of features but a
totality- a package, so to speak, of things that typically go together in the
culture. People do these things on these occasions and attach these
meanings and values to them; this is what culture is.
Beside those two important
points, there
are also five
other terms that can be used to analyze text like a news article:
a)
Cohesion
Structure in text is provided by grammar therefore cohesion is
considered to be outside of the structure. Cohesion refers to the
“non-structural text-forming relations” (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).
The concept of cohesion in text is related to semantic ties or “relations of
meanings that exist within the text, and that define it as a text”. Within
text, if a previously mentioned item is referred to again and is dependent upon
another element, it is considered a tie. Without semantic ties, sentences or
utterances would seem to lack any type of relationship to each other and might
not be considered text. Halliday and Hasan refer to this intertextual link as
“the presupposing” and “the presupposed”. Using the authors’ example, “Wash and
core six cooking apples. Put them into a fireproof dish.”: The word “them”
presupposes “apples” and provides a semantic tie between the two sentences,
thus creating cohesion. Cohesion creates interdependency in text.
b)
Lexical Cohesion
Lexical cohesion differs from the other cohesive elements in
text in that it is non-grammatical. Lexical cohesion refers to the “cohesive
effect achieved by the selection of vocabulary” (Halliday and Hasan). The two
basic categories of lexical cohesion are reiteration and collocation. Reiteration
pertains to the repetition of a lexical item, either directly or through the use
of a synonym, a
super ordinate or a generally related word. Collocation pertains to lexical items that are likely to
be found together within the same text. Collocation occurs when a pair of
words is not necessarily dependent upon the same semantic relationship but rather they tend to occur within the
same lexical environment
(ibid: 286). The closer lexical items are to each other between sentences, the stronger
the cohesive effect.
c)
Referencing
Referencing functions to retrieve presupposed information in
text and must be identifiable for it to be considered as cohesive. In written
text, referencing indicates how the writer introduces participants and keeps
track of them throughout the
text. (Eggins 1994) There are three general types of referencing: homophoric referencing, which refers to shared
information through the context of culture, exophoric referencing, which refers to information from the
immediate context of situation, and endophoric referencing, which refers to information that can be “retrieved”
from within the
text. It is this endophoric referencing which is the focus of cohesion theory. Endophoric
referencing can be divided into three areas: anaphoric, cataphoric, and esphoric.
Anaphoric refers to any reference that “points backwards” to previously mentioned information in text.
Cataphoric refers to any reference that “points forward” to information that will
be presented later
in the text. Esphoric refers to any reference within the same nominal group or phrase which
follows the presupposed item. For cohesion purposes, anaphoric referencing is
the most relevant as it “provides a link with a preceding portion of the text” (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).
Functionally speaking, there are three main types of cohesive
references: personal,
demonstrative, and comparative. Personal reference keeps track of function through the
speech situation using noun pronouns like “he, him, she, her”, etc. and
possessive determiners like “mine, yours, his, hers”, etc. Demonstrative reference
keeps track of information through location using proximity references like “this, these, that, those, here,
there, then, and the”. Comparative reference keeps track of identity and
similarity through indirect references using adjectives like “same, equal, similar,
different, else,
better, more”, etc. and adverbs like “so, such, similarly, otherwise, so, more”, etc.
d) Substitution and Ellipsis
Whereas referencing functions to link semantic meanings within
text, substitution and
ellipsis differs in that it operates as a linguistic link at the lexicogrammatical level.
In Bloor and
Bloor (1995), substitution and ellipsis is used when “a speaker or writer wishes to avoid the
repetition of
a lexical item and is able to draw on one of the grammatical resources of the language to replace
the item”. The three types of classification for substitution and ellipsis: nominal, verbal and clausal, reflect
its grammatical function. When something in text is being substituted, it
follows that the substituted item maintains the same structural function as the
presupposed item.
In nominal substitution, the most typical substitution words are “one and ones” and they
substitute nouns. In verbal substitution, the most common substitute is the
verb “do” and is sometimes used in conjunction with “so” as in “do so” and substitute verbs. Halliday and
Hasan point out that “do” often operates
with the reference items “it” and “that” but still have the main function as a verbal
substitute because of its grammatical role. In clausal substitution, an entire
clause is substituted and though it may seem to be similar to either nominal or
verbal substitution, the difference is the presupposed anaphoric reference.
Though substitution and ellipsis are similar in their function
as the linnguistic link for cohesion, ellipsis differs in that it is
“substitution by zero”. Ellipsis refers to a presupposed anaphoric item
although the reference is not through a “place-marker” like in substitution.
The presupposed item is understood through its structural link. As it is a
structural link,
ellipsis operates through nominal, verbal and clausal levels. Halliday and Hasan further classify
ellipsis in systemic linguistic terminology as deictic, numerative, epithet, classifier, and qualifier.
e) Conjunction
Halliday and Hasan indicate that “conjunctive relations are not tied to any
particular sequence in the
expression”. Therefore, amongst the cohesion-forming devices within text,
conjunction is the least directly identifiable relation. Conjunction acts as a
semantic cohesive tie within text in four categories: additive, adversative,
causal and temporal. Additive conjunction acts to structurally coordinate or
link by adding to the presupposed item and are signaled through “and, also,
too, furthermore, additionally”, etc. Additive conjunction may also act to
negate the presupposed item and is signaled by “nor, and...not, either,
neither”, etc. Adversative conjunctions act to indicate “contrary to
expectation” (ibid: 250) and are signaled by “yet, though, only, but, in fact,
rather”, etc. Causal conjunction expresses “result, reason and purpose” and is
signaled by “so, then, for, because, for this reason, as a result, in this
respect, etc.” The last conjunctive category is temporal and links by signaling
sequence or time. Some sample temporal conjunctive signals are “then, next,
after that, next day, until then, at the same time, at this point”, etc.
References
Brown, Gillian, George Yule. Discourse
Analysis. Cambridge Textbooks Universities.
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