Assignment 5: Systemic Functional Linguistics

Rega Detapratiwi

2201409057

405-406

Summary of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Systemic, or Systemic-Functional, theory has its origins in the main intellectual tradition of European linguistics that developed following the work of Saussure. It is functional and semantic rather than formal and syntactic in orientation, and its immediate source is as a development of scale-&-category grammar. In systemic theory the system takes priority; the most abstract representation at any level is in paradigmatic terms. Syntagmatic organization is interpreted as the realization of paradigmatic features.

Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language centered around the notion of language function. SFL starts at social context, and looks at how language both acts upon, and is constrained by, this social context. A central notion is 'stratification', such that language is analysed in terms of four strata: Context, Semantics, Lexico-Grammar and Phonology-Graphology. Systemic semantics includes what is usually called 'pragmatics'. Semantics is divided into three components:

•          Ideational Semantics (the propositional content);

•          Interpersonal Semantics (concerned with speech-function, exchange structure, expression of attitude, etc.);

•          Textual Semantics (how the text is structured as a message, e.g., theme-structure, given/new, rhetorical structure etc.

SFL grew out of the work of JR Firth, a British linguist of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, but was mainly developed by his student MAK Halliday. Australian Systemics is especially influential in areas of language education. Some of Halliday's early work involved the study of his son's developing language abilities. This study in fact has had a substantial influence on the present systemic model of adult language, particularly in regard to the metafunctions. SFL has been prominent in computational linguistics, especially in Natural Language Generation.

SFL treats language and social context as complementary levels of semiosis, related by the concept of realization. The interpretation of social context then includes two communication planes:

·         Genre (context of culture)

The context of culture can be thought of as deriving from a vast complex network of all of the genres which make up a particular culture. Genres are staged, goal oriented social processes in which people engage as members of the culture.

·         Register (context of situation)

The genres occur in particular situation types and it is the characteristics of this situation type that influence the forms of language that realize the genre. So the context of situation (register) is the second aspect of social context that influences the linguistic realization of the genre.

(Martin, 1992:495)

The context of situation of a text has been theorized by Halliday (Halliday and Hasan, 1985:12) in terms of the contextual variables of:

·         Field: 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?

·         Tenor

·         Mode

Language bridges from the cultural meanings of social context (the social hierarchies and role relationships, the institutional activities, and the related distribution of language use within these) to sound or writing. It does this by moving from higher orders of abstraction to lower ones. These orders of abstraction are organized into three levels or strata:

·         Semantics is the interface between language and context of situation (register). Semantics is therefore concerned with the meanings that are involved with the three situational variables Field, Tenor and Mode.

·         Lexicogrammar is a resource for wording meanings, for example realizing them as configurations of lexical and grammatical items.

·         Phonology (or graphology)

Ideational (experiential and logical) meanings construing Field are realized lexicogrammatically by the system of Transitivity. This system interprets and represents our experience of phenomena in the world and in our consciousness by modeling experiential meanings in terms of participants, processes and circumstances.

Interpersonal meanings are realized lexicogrammatically by systems of Mood and Modality and by the selection of attitudinal lexis. The Mood system is the central resource establishing and maintaining an ongoing exchange between interactants by assuming and assigning speech roles such as giving or demanding goods and services or information. Modality is the resource concerned with the domain of the negotiation of the proposition or proposal between the categorical extremes of positive or negative. The negotiation may be in terms of probability, usuality, obligation or inclination.

Textual meanings are concerned with the ongoing orchestration of interpersonal and ideational information as text in context.

Lexicogrammatically textual meanings are realized by systems of Theme and Information.

Assignment 4: Discourse Analysis

Rega Detapratiwi

2201409057 

405-406

Summary of Discourse Analysis

According to m Stubbs (1983:1), discourse analysis is defined as concerned with language use beyond the boundaries of a sentence/utterance, the interrelationships between language and society and the interactive or dialogic properties of everyday communication.

The differences between text analysis and discourse analysis are:

Text Analysis

Discourse Analysis

1.       Needs linguistic analysis 2.       Interpretation is based on linguistic evidence 3.       Text analysts need the right ‘knife’ to cut the right ‘bread’ 4.       Different ‘knives’ for different ‘bread’ 5.       The study of formal linguistic devices that distinguish a text from random sentences. (Nunan:1993)

1.       How texts relate to contexts of situation and context of culture 2.       How texts are produced as a social practice 3.       What texts tell us about happenings, what people think, believe etc. 4.       How texts represent ideology (power struggle etc.) 5.       Study these text-forming devices which has goal to show how the linguistic elements enable language users to communicate. (Nunan:1993)

The definition of Discourse analysis is the study of how stretches of language used in communication assume meaning, purpose and unity for their users: the quality of coherence. The coherence itself derives from an interaction of text with given participants (context: participants’ knowledge and perception of paralanguage, other texts, the situation, the culture, the world in general and the role, intentions and relationships of participants).

Several approaches in Discourse Analysis are:

1.       Speech Act Theory (Austin 1955, Searle 1969)

It is a logico-philosophic perspective on conversational organization. Focus on interpretation rather than the production of utterances in discourse. Every utterance can be analyzed as the realization of the speaker’s intent (illocutionary force) to achieve a particular purpose. Principal problems: the lack of a one-to-one matchup between discourse function (IF) and the grammatical form.

2.       Interactional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982, Goffman 1959-1981)

It is centrally concerned with the importance of context in the production and interpretation of discourse which analyze grammatical and prosodic features in interactions unit.

It is focused on quantitative interactive sociolinguistic analysis, esp. discourse markers (defined as ‘sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk) and the unit analysis is turn. (Schiffrin: 1987).

3.       Ethnography of Communication (Dell Hymes (1972b, 1974)

It is concerned with understanding the social context of linguistic interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where. Why, and how’. The unit of analysis is speech event which comprises components. Analysis of these components of a speech event is central to what became known as ethnography of communication or ethnography of speaking, with the ethnographer’s aim being to discover rules of appropriateness in speech events.

4.       Pragmatics (Grice 1975, Leech 1983, Levinson 1983)

It is formulates conversational behavior in terms of general “principles” rather than rules. At the base of pragmatic approach is to conversation analysis is Gricean’s co-operative principle (CP). This principle is the broken down into specific maxims: Quantity (say only as much as necessary), Quality (try to make your contribution one that is true), Relation (be relevant), and manner (be brief and avoid ambiguity.

5.       Conversational Analysis (Harold Garfinkel 1960s-1970s)

It is used to understand how social members make sense of everyday life. There are two grossly apparent facts: a) only one person speaks at a time, and b) speakers change recurs. Thus conversation is a ‘turn taking’ activity. Models conversation as infinitely generative turn-taking machine, where interactants try to avoid lapse: the possibility that no one is speaking. The contribution of CA is the identification of ‘adjacency pairs’ (fisrt and second pair parts): conversational relatedness operating between adjacent utterances.

6.       Variation Analysis (Labov 1972a, Labov and Waletzky1967

Variationists’ approach to discourse stems from quantitative of linguistic change and variation. Although typically focused on social and linguistic constraints on semantically equivalent variants, the approach has also been extended to texts.

7.       SFA (Structural-Functional Approaches)

Discourse analysis can turn out into a more general and broader analysis of language functions. Or it will fail to make a special place for the analysis of relationships between utterances. It refers to two major approaches to discourse analysis which have relevance to the analysis of casual conversation (the Birmingham School and Systemic Functional Linguistics).

 

Assignment 3: Communicative competence

Rega Detapratiwi

2201409057

405-406

Communicative competence: A pedagogically motivated model with content specifications

Celce-Murcia, Dőrnyei, Thurrell (1995)

The relationship between models of communicative competence and pedagogical specification of content for Communicative Language Teaching  not unified under a comprehensive, theoretical model of language teaching. According to Hymes (1972), the meaning of communicative competence itself is such competence involves: not only knowing the grammatical rules of a language but also what to say to whom in what circumstances and how to say it; that is, the rules of grammar are useless without the rules of language use. Thus, the real objective of linguistic research should be the study of how language is performed in different contexts, with different people, on different topics, for different purposes.

The competences that stated by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei and Thurrell including:

1.       Linguistic competence: the knowledge of the basic elements of the language code (syntax, morphology, vocabulary, phonology, orthography).

2.       Strategic competence: knowledge of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies which enable us to overcome difficulties when communication breakdowns occur, ie. It is the ability to express oneself in the face of difficulties or limited language proficiency.

3.       Sociocultural competence: the mastery of the sociocultural rules of language use: the appropriate application of vocabulary, registers, politeness, and style in a given social situation within a given culture.

4.       Actional competence: the ability to understand and convey communicative intent by interpreting and performing language functions (complimenting, reporting, agreeing/disagreeing, predicting, suggesting, etc.)

5.       Discourse competence: the ability to combine language structures into different types of unified spoken and written discourse (dialogue, political speech, poetry, academic paper, cookery recipe, etc.).

Source: www.elte.hu/DOWN/APPWEB

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/hbishop/