A retrospective view of Systemic Functional Linguistics, with notes from a parallel perspective

Development from the ‘Scale and Category’ model to SFL

In thinking about the development of SFL from Scale and Category Grammar I believe it is relevant to take into account the contemporary influence of work and ideas in T-G. Two aspects of this strike me as particularly interesting. One is the consistent emphasis that Halliday, and SFL generally, have placed on the analysis of real texts, from a wide range of different genres and registers. As a rich, and always growing, source of ‘putative counter-examples’, this approach challenges, head on, the T-G restriction of focus to the ‘native-speaker’s intuitions’. This has remained one of the major contrasts between the two schools of linguistic thought over the years, though SFL could be said to occupy the middle ground between T-G and some varieties of ‘corpus linguistics’ in this respect. It has not rejected testable intuitions that could be supported from textual analysis but it is also by no means an exclusively data driven approach that derives its categories from the statistical analysis of corpora. In as far as there is some movement towards a more functionally-oriented approach in some T-G based studies, such as the analysis of English questions by Robert Fiengo (2007: 146, 170–1), there might now be something more of a move towards developing a consensus that both data and intuitions are needed.

The second aspect relates to Chomsky’s concept of ‘deep structure’. This had an impact of a more technical kind on Scale and Category: namely, an increasing emphasis on systems, as opposed to structures. Halliday’s paper, ‘Some notes on “deep” grammar’ (1966) is seminal in this respect. This shift is of course reflected in the change of name to Systemic Functional Linguistics. But it is worth noting that when the first edition of Halliday’s book, Introduction to Functional Grammar (henceforward, ‘IFG’), appeared in 1985, the description of English which it gave was expressed almost exclusively in terms of structures, even if a systemic analysis under-pinned it. This is particularly interesting because the book represented his teaching over the intervening years. As he says in the ‘Foreword’ (ix), ‘This book grew out of seventeen pages of class notes’.

University College London

Those early days in the UCL Malet Place basement, from 1964 onwards, were very intellectually stimulating. It was during this period, up to the beginning of the seventies, that many of the ideas that have proved lasting in Systemic Linguistics were first established. This is the period in which Halliday’s three papers on transitivity and theme in English appeared in the Journal of Linguistics (1967–8) and the later paper on modality and mood in English appeared in Foundations of Language 6 (Halliday 1970b). Taken together, these still form the foundation of a great part of the description in the third (revised) edition of IFG in 2004. It was also the period in which Halliday first put forward his concept of the four meta-functions and the associated four components of the grammar, beginning with his paper, ‘Options and Functions in the English Clause’ for Brno Studies in English 8 (Halliday 1969) and expanded in the following year in his ‘mood’ paper and also in the chapter, ‘Language Structure and Language Function’ , in a collection edited by John Lyons (Halliday 1970a). This is one of the key foundations of the model as we know it now. I would also place the main work of Halliday and Hasan’s collaboration on their book, Cohesion in English, essentially in this period, even though it was completed and published later (Halliday and Hasan 1976).

During this time, again, John Sinclair began implementing Firth’s approach to the vocabulary in terms of collocations, by a large scale computational study at the University of Birmingham; and Halliday developed his Edinburgh work on the intonation of English in relation to the grammar, for teaching purposes. The initial recordings of the illustrations for A Course in Spoken English: Intonation (Halliday 1970c) were made then (though later replaced), using a group of native speakers from UCL of whom I was one. There could in my opinion be no clearer indication of the contrast between Halliday’s approach and that of Chomsky than the mere existence of this body of work on intonation. As late as 2007 (38–43), Robert Fiengo, a relatively functionally inclined scholar who works within T- G, could claim that intonation is largely a matter of ‘affect’ and feel free to ignore it in a study of English questions.

Beginnings of the model

The first stage, ‘Scale and Category’ as set out in his Word article (Halliday 1961) goes back to his (1955) Cambridge PhD study of a late fourteenth century Chinese text, published as a Special Publication of the Philological Society as, The Language of the Chinese “Secret History of the Mongols” (Halliday 1959). In this stage we have the overall theoretical framework, including the four categories of ‘unit’ , ‘structure’ , ‘class’ and ‘system’ , and the three scales of, ‘rank’ (associated with size of unit); ‘delicacy’ (associated with progress through a system path and so with increasingly finer distinctions and a greater degree of detail in the description); and ‘exponence’ (later termed ‘realization’ , following Lamb, and associated with degree of abstract/concrete). It was also at this time that the foundations of Halliday’s work on English Intonation were laid. His two pioneering articles, ‘The Tones of English’ and ‘Intonation in English Grammar’ , belong here and were both first published in 1963 (Halliday 1963a 1963b) Geographically, this stage is associated with a wide range of different places: with The School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where Halliday studied under J.R. Firth; with China, in Beijing, and at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou; with Cambridge, and subsequently with Scotland, at the University of Edinburgh.

Stage 1 is essentially what Halliday brought with him to London in 1963.

Systemic functional linguistics: the lexico-grammar

The second stage, at University College London, is the one that I have been outlining earlier. It sees a greater emphasis on systems, somewhat at the expense of structures. The three (1967–8) Journal of Linguistics articles on transitivity and theme are expressed and organized chiefly in terms of system networks. This is the stage that sees the establishment of Halliday’s multifunctional approach, which has remained central to the model ever since. It is also the period in which Halliday’s two major papers on English intonation were brought together and made more generally available in his (Halliday 1967b) book, Intonation and Grammar in British English.

SFL and social semiotics

I would place the beginning of a third stage, in which Halliday published complex ideas to do with social semiotics, essentially at the end of the UCL period and afterwards, from 1971 on. However, the inception of this work can be seen much earlier, in his Inaugural Lecture, as the first Professor of General Linguistics at University College London, later published as, ‘Grammar, Society and the Noun’ (Halliday 1967a). In that, he set out his own position in relation to Whorf’s work and ideas of ‘Linguistic relativity’ . This third stage shows the influence of Bernstein’s work on the relationship between language and social class. Halliday’s (1971b) essay, ‘Language in a social perspective’ in the Educational Review and his 1972 paper, ‘Towards a sociological semantics’ , both reprinted in his Explorations in the Functions of Language (1973), illustrate this, as does his later book, Language as social semiotic (1978). Halliday’s work at this time also shows the influence of Sydney Lamb’s development of Stratificational Grammar in relation to the concept of ‘realization’ and different levels (strata) of abstraction, which represented a development of the scale of exponence. It is the period in which Halliday substantively enters the field of child language development with his analyses of the language of Nigel at 19 months and in which he generally works to expand the perceived relevance of the model. His best known article on literary language, ‘Linguistic function and literary style: an enquiry into the language of William Golding’s The Inheritors’, belongs here in terms of publication (1971a), although its origin was as a 1965 conference paper in London. The development of a computational approach to the grammar, using systems, in the work of Bill Mann and Christian Matthiessen at the University of Southern California (1983), which began following guest lectures by Halliday at Stanford University in 1980, is associated with the latter part of this period. Geographically, this stage includes time spent in North America but is also, from 1975, the first of those associated with Australia, at the University of Sydney.

Return to the lexico-grammar; grammatical metaphors

I would suggest a fourth stage in Halliday’s work, beginning with the publication of Introduction to Functional Grammar in 1985 and including its second edition in 1994, which incorporated the concept of ‘grammatical metaphors’. This represents a return to an emphasis on descriptive linguistics as such, as distinct from social semiotics. The first two editions of IFG are organized and expressed very largely in terms of structures. In harmony with this return to a structural analysis of texts, there is much further work by Halliday in the description of particular texts and types of texts in different registers, including his (1985b/1989) book, Spoken and Written Language, and several important papers on the language of science, including, ‘The Language of Physical Science’ (Halliday 1988).

Expansion of systems

Perhaps it would be in order to suggest a fifth stage, of which one major achievement would be the publication of the third edition of IFG in 2004, in collaboration with Christian Matthiessen. If so, this would represent something of a re-visiting and further development of the stage 2 approach, in the sense that there is much more of an explicit account in terms of systems in the third edition of IFG than in either of the two earlier versions. This aspect of the revision and extension is attributed largely to Matthiessen (IFG 3: ix), who draws on some of his specialized computational expertise in this area (cf. Matthiessen, 1995). I believe that the forthcoming fourth edition of IFG continues and expands this direction. Another major achievement here is the revision of Halliday’s work on intonation in collaboration with Bill Greaves in their (Halliday and Greaves 2008), Intonation in the Grammar of English.

Return to Chinese linguistics

Finally, in view of his opening plenary lecture at the Fortieth International Systemic Functional Linguistics Congress, entitled, ‘That Certain Cut: Towards a Characterology of Mandarin Chinese’ and his current position as advisor to the Functional Linguistics Institute at Sun Yat-Sen University, it may not be fanciful to suggest a sixth stage in Halliday’s work, representing a return to his first love in linguistics: the study of the Chinese languages.

Narrow limits of this account

In this grotesquely brief summary I have just sketched the trajectory of some of the theoretical developments made by Michael Halliday himself, and I have purposely left out of account almost everything done by anyone other than him, except in as far as they have been his collaborators in particular publications. This is especially unjust to Ruqaiya Hasan, who has done so much to consolidate and extend the model and three of whose seven volume series of collected works, edited by Jonathan J. Webster and published by Equinox, have now appeared (2005 2009 2011). It is also unjust to Matthiessen, with, for example, his (1995) monumental work on English systems, and Martin, with his (1992) and later work on discourse and genre, and on ‘Appraisal Theory’ with White (2005).

Purely for reasons of space, I have mentioned little of the work of the Birmingham ‘school’ and none of that at Cardiff, for example, Fawcett (2000/2010), both of which have extended the range of SFL. I have also not referred to the debates concerning theme and the nature of the register/genre distinction, or indeed the huge amount of work carried out by scholars all over the world in applying SFL to different kinds of texts, for a wide range of particular purposes. The theme of ISFC40 was, ‘Broadening the Path’; but it is immediately clear, even within the confines that I have set myself, how ‘broad’ the path of SFL already is.

Standpoint and background of author in relation to SFL model

The remarks that follow are geared to some core theoretical aspects of SFL, as opposed to its applications. They should be seen as made from the standpoint of a friendly fellow-searcher after understanding: someone whose research began within SFL but has become less centrally related to it over time, though I have taught both undergraduate and postgraduate courses using SFL approaches and materials, including different editions of IFG. Let me briefly sketch the nature of my research connections with SFL. My original involvement in the UCL research programme led me to an early exploration of comment adjuncts (Davies 1967) along lines that were not then standard, although later partly adopted in SFL, and to some attempts to set out what was then the standard account of elements of clause structure (Davies 1968b) and the relation of the model to other linguistic theories (Davies 1968a). From 1967, when I left London for Cardiff University, I was working on an interactional role theory approach to the deep grammar of mood and condition in English. This issued in a dissertation (1976) and a later book (Davies 1979) which made some fairly substantial theoretical departures from the SFL model and proposed some different components in the grammar, notably one of ‘telling’ , but still used systems to set out some of the surface grammar complexities of English interrogatives.

Perhaps on this basis it was included in the bibliography of the first edition of IFG in 1985; and some papers of mine are cited under ‘Further Reading’ for the chapter on the interpersonal component in the second edition in 1994, including one on modal verbs (Davies 1988a) in which I again used systems. But subsequently I have developed an approach in terms of set theory and operators, first sketched in my 1979 book, and have used it to develop the different components proposed there: in particular those of ‘knowledge’ (Davies 2001) and ‘telling’ (Davies 2006). In a later paper (Davies 2012: 237–238,240–245, 249–250) I have moved towards proposing a different ‘entry’, in terms of a model of interaction with factors in the existing Common Ground, to an area that is close to the textual meta-function in SFL and again involves telling. Telling is seen as what is done with reality (events and states of affairs, knowledge of them and decisions and wishes about them) to construct and present language for use between people in interaction. It is the only purely linguistic, and the only essential, meta-function and operates on those of decision and knowledge (which partly correspond to the interactional and experiential meta-functions in SFL). This is the ‘parallel perspective’ of my title.

Three suggested topics

I would like to suggest that some of the major theoretical issues which have been raised by what I regard as Halliday’s seminal insights should remain open to further debate and investigation. I believe that one respect in which SFL could be broadened now would be to explore links with other approaches and I want to indicate briefly three major topics on which I believe the theoretical discussion should be seen as still open.