Table Of ContentFunctional and Systemic Linguistics
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 55
Editor
Werner Winter
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Functional and
Systemic Linguistics
Approaches and Uses
Edited by
Eija Ventola
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 1991
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Functional and systemic linguistics : approaches and uses /
edited by Eija Ventola.
p. cm. — (Trends in linguistics. Studies and mono-
graphs ; 55)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-012740-7 (alk. paper)
1. Systemic grammar. 2. Functionalism (Linguistics). 3.
Discourse analysis. 4. Language and education. I. Ventola,
Eija.
II. Series.
P149.F86 1991 91-34972
410 —dc20 CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging in Publication Data
Functional and systemic linguistics : approaches and uses / ed.
by Eija Ventola. — Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter,
1991
(Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 55)
ISBN 3-11-012740-7
NE: Ventola, Eija [Hrsg.]; Trends in linguistics / Studies and
monographs
© Copyright 1991 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30
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Printed in Germany
Preface
When the 16th International Systemics Congress was held in Helsinki in
1989, it was the first time that the conference had been organized in a
non-English speaking country. At the same time that there was an
expansion in a geographical sense, it seemed appropriate to widen the
horizons in other respects as well. Thus, the congress called for papers
on the latest developments in systemic and other functional theories of
language. The purpose was to establish a dialogue with linguists working
within, for example, the Prague school linguistic tradition, functional
textlinguistics, stylistics, applied, and educational linguistics. The response
to the call is reflected in this collection of papers from the congress.
Part I begins with general theoretical considerations and then moves
on to specific issues and approaches.
Enkvist views text production as a dynamic, goal oriented process —
as a realization of weighted choices of systems. Such factors as salience,
iconicity, patterns of information flow, and syntactic markedness in texts
are taken to be controlled by global, hierarchic weightings of decision
parameters in the production of various text types.
Lemke discusses how the processes of producing a text change the
context in which text production continues. Selections at a certain text
production stage change the probabilities of system selections which
follow. The dynamic reweighting of probabilities of synoptic systems is
considered highly significant for the study of text types, i. e., the study
of characteristics of various genres and registers.
Halliday's chapter discusses how language systems persist and change
over time. His view is that to understand these processes, the synoptic
and dynamic views on language are necessary. Furthermore, grammars
of languages have to be probabilistic in nature and also have to decribe
language systems as equiprobable or skewed according to "coding ori-
entations" available for the language user.
Danes' chapter sees the main domains of linguistics in language as a
system of knowledge, in the domain of language as texts and in that of
text processing. He discusses the Prague School functional linguistic view
of modelling sentence structure and transitivity roles in grammar and
vi Preface
semantics. He argues for a semantic classification of predicate structures
and proposes a fundamental distinction of predicates into static and
dynamic ones, the predicate structures of which will be presented in the
form of semantic formulae which are established on a cognitive level.
Bateman — Paris' and Teich's chapters introduce the readers to specific
computational considerations and developments in systemic linguistics.
The Bateman — Paris chapter discusses the application of the notion of
"register" to computational text generation. The goal is to generate texts
according to the levels and kinds of expertise of the intended readers.
The focus is on the implementation of register theory in the experiential
and logical functions of language. The chapter introduces new mecha-
nisms which control choices in register and illustrates new progress in
research both for computation and linguistics.
Teich's chapter discusses the notion of transitivity, and more specifically
the treatment of "raising" and "control" verbs and the problems involved
with these verbs in the machine translation project of the European
Community, EUROTRA-D. Teich illustrates how semantic participant
roles, generated from a systemic transitivity network, are used to achieve
better translation results, and suggestions are made for a more delicate
functional account of raising and control.
McGregor addresses a fundamental issue in systemic-functional theory:
a rank scale in grammar and the concomitant principle of accountability.
The chapter attempts to answer some of the criticisms that have been
raised against the notion of rank. McGregor contends that the concept
is valid in the domain of experiential metafunction, and furthermore
considers it to be universal, although he does not take the ranks them-
selves or their number to be universal.
Part II chapters discuss issues which are partly theoretical and partly
applied or educational. They are, however, issues which have to be taken
into consideration specifically in the analysis of spoken data and therefore
the papers in these chapters have been grouped together. Geluykens',
Tsui's, Davies', Fine's and Christies' papers all contribute to the analyses
of how meanings are exchanged in conversational contexts.
Geluykens' chapter extends the previous presentations of Prague School
functional linguistics and systemic linguistics on Given — New distinc-
tion. It argues that the previous presentations have not given sufficiently
operational and testable characterizations. For analyses of conversational
data, he introduces the concept of Recoverability which classifies elements
in terms of their derivability from previous discourse.
Preface vii
Davies' chapter focuses on minimal exchanges in English discourse and
the kind of predictions that can be made of exchange structures by using
a model of propositional attitudes. The chapter suggests the possibility
of defining an "ill-formed exchange" and linking minimal units of dis-
course to grammatical form.
Tsui's chapter examines in detail a speech act class of "assessments",
that is, acts where speakers express evaluative assessments. Tsui investi-
gates the socio-semantic choices which speakers have to make when
making assessments, and demonstrates their lexicogrammatical realiza-
tions with authentic conversational data.
Fine is interested in comparing speakers of different abilities in social
interaction in terms of how they respond to the dynamic character of
creating exchanges in conversation. According to him, in such compari-
sons three factors have to be taken into account: that creation of social
reality through exchanges in conversation involves paradigmatic choices,
that conversation has its dynamic dimension, and that the model used
for analysis is a probabilistic model.
Christie focuses on the generic plane of conversation in educational
contexts. She discusses first order registers, which function to operation-
alize and maintain the teaching and learning activity, and second order
registers, which realize the activity and information dealt with by the
children as they learn. Christie leads us to adopt a Bernsteinian propo-
sition of considering pedagogic language both as instructional and reg-
ulative, and further, to view the operation of first order registers as
projecting and determining the second order registers.
Part III centres around theoretical and applied issues in written texts,
mostly in educational contexts.
Couture's chapter takes a critical view on the ways functional theories
influence the practices of written communication. Couture argues that
often in functional theories, writing practices are advocated which result
in "regressive language practices". Yet, she considers some of the new
developments in systemic-functional theory particularly capable of re-
vealing pertinent social values and thus benefitting the writing practices.
Thibault discusses the relationships between grammar, technocracy,
and the noun. By using cognitive linguistics and other scientific language
examples as his material, he shows how technocratic values are condensed
thematically by grammatical encodings in texts and how in education
one needs to have access to these thematic condensations to understand
and critically evaluate the values projected.
viii Preface
Martin takes us further into the pedagogical discourse world with his
chapter on discourse of science and history in secondary schools. He
looks at how the discourse functions of organizing and explaining are
achieved in texts. Differences in the use of lexicogrammatical resources
of language, e. g., in nominalization, distinguish the role of technicality
in science from the role of abstraction in history.
Francis — Kramer-Dahl's chapter is concerned with the generic dif-
ferences in writing, the differences between a clinical report and a clinical
story. The former is a dominant genre in reporting case studies in
neuropsychology. The latter is represented by Oliver Sacks' story "The
man who mistook his wife for a hat". The authors deal interestingly with
the issues of intertextuality emerging from the two exemplary texts. The
metafunctional analyses of the linguistic realizations in the texts show
that the clinical report is written for an expert audience, sharing highly
codified knowledge necessary to decode the meanings in the report. In
his text, Sacks wanted to present an alternative way of writing clinical
reports, a person-oriented way of writing. Consequently, the clinical
report becomes the patient's story.
Nwogy — Bloor's chapter investigates variations of thematic organi-
zation of information in three related types of medical texts — in abstracts
accompanying medical reports, research articles proper, and popularized
articles. By using Danes' notion of thematic progression, the authors
seek to account for how language is organized in texts to express the
writer's attitudes towards contextual realities in texts. The variations in
the choice and distribution of thematic progression patterns are found to
relate to the influence of contextual factors such as audience, medium,
and purpose of discourse in each genre.
Hoey's chapter directs our attention to the concept of cohesion. He
utilizes previous work done on cohesive harmony in systemic linguistics
and argues that cohesion is not only to be understood as global lexical
chains of lexical items which occur in texts, but also as cohesion of "whole
messages", that is, as coherence. He demonstrates that various coherence
processes can be perceived at work between any non-adjacent sentences
which have a sufficient number of cohesive ties. The coherence processes
indicate how new material in a text is understood on the basis of the
constant material.
The chapter by Parsons focuses on cohesion and coherence in scientific
texts written by foreign students, comparing them to similar texts pro-
duced by native speakers. The chapter strives for deeper insight into the
difficulties in writing such texts and investigates the validity of chain
Preface ix
interaction in cohesive harmony as a method of measuring cohesion in a
particular genre of texts. Statistical analysis confirms the crucial role of
central tokens in chains as a direct measure of textual coherence.
The chapter by Drury compares summaries of a journal article written
by a native speaker and two non-native speakers of English. The texts
were produced as authentic assignments for a postgraduate diploma. The
systemic-functional analysis is used, firstly, to discuss the linguistic choices
made in the summaries and those made in the original text, and, secondly,
to discuss why certain summarizing strategies seem to be identified as
more successful in terms of structure and language. The analysis provides
insights into developing paraphrasing and summarizing skills of non-
native writers of English at university level.
Ventola — Mauranen's chapter discusses the linguistic difficulties non-
native professionals at Finnish universities experience when writing their
articles in English and the revision system that operates for correcting
writers' texts. Most of the lexicogrammatical problems in writers' articles
are corrected by native English speakers who function as revisers. Yet
many problems which are textual in nature remain in the articles. The
chapter argues that it is necessary to draw both writers' as well as revisers'
attention to operating principles of various textlinguistic systems to over-
come such problems in academic texts produced by Finns. Systemic-
functional linguistics seems to provide convenient tools for textual im-
provement of texts by writers and revisers.
Helsinki 1990 Eija Ventola
