Selasa, 08 November 2011

Halliday’s Theory


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.
 Rahmawan, Ardian Z. 2010. Jenis-Jenis Text (Genre) dalam Bahasa Inggris. http://www.ardianrisqi.com/2010/04/12-genre-bahasa-inggris.html

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