Critique on functional grammar of Halliday’s SFG in linguistic analysis Linyan Fu 1904142 Abstract：As a great move and one of the most influential linguistic schools, Systemic and Functional Grammar is an inheritance, development and transcendence of structuralism. It sets language analysis free from the cage of language itself and offers a broader and deeper insight into language analysis from a sociological perspective. Considerable linguistic analyses owe debt to the formulation of the theory which is still practical in linguistic analysis, discourse analysis, literature criticism and so on. Powerful and strong influential as it is, it still has some inadequacies. Through presenting real-life linguistic examples, it is indicated that functional grammar is limited in that three meta-functions, ideational, textual and interpersonal functions, are not always applicable in accounting for the meaning of a clause simultaneously. This article will point out its strengths and attach emphasis to its limitations by presenting language examples to illustrate that it is still limited in explaining language use with all three meta-functions. Key words: systemic and functional grammar; ideational function; interpersonal function; textual function 1. Introduction Language is the most important communication tool for human beings (Lenin,1962). How we communicate with language and how language is constructed are the core to reveal the nature of language, which are covered within linguistic studies. Approaches to linguistic analysis are developed fruitfully. For example, structuralism, a methodology originated in the 19th century, was founded by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure which has become an important trend of thought and one of the most commonly used research methods to analyze language, culture and society in the second half of the 20th and the 21st century. Simply speaking, structuralism attempts to explore the deep structure of how meaning is produced and reproduced in a culture through various practices, phenomena and activities as systems of signification. During the period, what grammarians do is to construct an abstract model of the system of language, based on observation of language instantiated in use. As a matter of fact, that people exchange meanings constantly in flux is extremely complex and indirect, but structuralists cast away those factors as they study language in a vacuum circumstance without taking real-life situations into consideration. While Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG), proposed by M.A.K. Halliday, is a great achievement of linguistic analysis. Halliday enlarges and extends linguistic analysis to display a dynamic and real map of language use with two inseparable elements in his SFG: system and function. Halliday’s theory of SFG mainly originates from three aspects, namely, Malinowski’s anthropological achievements, Wolfe’s linguistic relevance theory and Firth’s language theory. SFG underwent three stages: 1. the beginning, from 1950s to the early 1960s; 2. the development, setting up scale and category grammar with the publication of his seminal paper Categories of the theory of grammar in 1961; 3. the establishment from 1970s to the middle of 1990s accompanying the publication of his book Some Notes on ‘Deep’ Grammar(1966) and Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English in 1967, which symbolized as the establishing of his systemic and functional grammar. In 1966, this linguistic model was developed into “Systemic Grammar”, which was then enriched by three meta-functions. Therefore, Halliday’s SFG presents a more comprehensive and more practical vantage point of linguistic study. Despite its strengths, this paper will discuss some limitations of SFG, particularly on functional grammar, because there are still some linguistic utterances which cannot be explained clearly with it. This paper consists of four parts. The first part introduces the background and some elementary information about SFG; the second part summarizes Halliday’s main thoughts, the overall point of SFG, its specialties and its great achievement; the third section discusses and illustrates the limitations from the perspective of the finiteness, explicability, applicability and adequacy of functional grammar with examples from our daily language use; the fourth one generalizes the conclusion of the paper. 2. Summary Regarding language as a continuum of system and function from the sociological perspective, SFG covers two indispensable elements: systemic grammar and functional grammar. According to systemic grammar, “a system is a set of options with an entry condition, that is to say, a set of things of which one must be chosen, together with a statement of the conditions under which the choice is available. The system network is the grammar, based on the notion of choice. The grammar of any language can be represented as a very large network of systems, an arrangement of options in simultaneous and hierarchical relationship (Halliday，1976).” Systemic grammar aims at setting up a semantic relation network which can be employed to explain relevant semantic options in the entire language. The notion of system, referring to a system of potentials, a range of alternatives, is made a central explanatory principle. Systemic grammar, conceiving the whole of language as a “system of systems”, is concerned with building up a network of systems of relationships, which can account for all the semantically available choices in the language as a whole. With regard to functional grammar, Halliday initially proposed seven functions in children’s model of language: the instrumental, the regulatory, interactional, the personal, the heuristic, the imaginative and informative function. Since adult’s language are more complicated and has to serve many functions, the previous functional scope of the child’s language is gradually decreased into more general and abstract functions. After refinement and generalization, Halliday (1994) classified language’s meta-functions into 3 types: ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. Ideational function means that language is a reflection of things and processes that exist in the subjective and objective world, and what is said is realized through transitivity, polarity and voice in the category of language. Interpersonal function denotes that Language is a meaningful activity and a means of doing things between people in society, which inevitably reflects the relationship among people. It is embodied by mood and modality in language. Textual function refers to the assumption that language can make the discourse coherent and relevant to the immediate situation which is accomplished by theme, rheme and cohesive system. In his view, clause, the basic unit in a text, can be regard as a representation which models experience of change (Halliday,1994). “And experientially, the clause construes a quantum of change as a figure, or configuration of a process, participants involved in it and any attendant circumstances. (Halliday, 2004:169)” All such figures are sorted out in the grammar of the clause which can reflect a mode of action, of giving and demanding goods and services and information (Halliday, 2004). “The grammatical system by which it is achieved is that of Transitivity. The transitivity system construes the world of experience into a manageable set of PROCESS TYPES (Halliday, 2004:170).” Each process type embodies its own model or schema for providing a particular domain of experience as a figure of a particular kind (Halliday, 2004). Process can be classified into 6 types: material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal and existential process. Material process is a process of doing and happening, specifically, transitive doing and intransitive happening. “Doing” process is realized by transitive verbs while “happening” process is achieved by intransitive verbs to show what’s going on externally. In contrast, mental process, a process of sensing, is about inner experience going on inside our mind; including perception, emotion and imagination. Relational process is a process of referring to a kind of relation among entities. It can be further split into attributive type and identifying type. Between material and mental is behavioral process denoting those that represent the outer manifestations of inner workings, the acting out of processes of consciousness and physiological states, like coughing, laughing, breathing, etc. (Halliday, 2004). Verbal process refers to a process of saying which is a symbolic relationship construed in human consciousness and enacted in the form of language, like saying and meaning (Halliday, 2004). Existential process is a process regarding existence, the existential, by which all phenomena are simply tended to happen or exist. With system and function being two major elements, SFG makes great contribution to the theoretical construction of language and great achievements in explaining linguistic phenomenon with its special perspective: firstly, it puts emphasis on the sociological perspective of language; secondly, it regards language as a form of doing rather than a form of perceiving and it tells linguistic behavioral potential from real linguistic activity; thirdly, it shows priority to the description of the features of specific languages and varieties of languages; fourthly, a lot of aspects of language according to hierarchy are presented; fifthly, it is scientific in that it tests its hypotheses through observation from texts together with statistical techniques. All these strong points make it one of the most influential schools in linguistic analysis and applicable in researches on language teaching, literature criticism, translation and other fields. 3. Evaluation Halliday’s linguistic theory is elaborated from a sociological perspective. Halliday regards language as a social symbol, which is purposefully used by people to express meaning in context. M.A.K Halliday, a major mover in the development of ideas about language, makes great contribution to modern linguistics by creating a new perspective to language study and sorting out the combination of functions with linguistic forms. On the one hand, what is special about Halliday’s system is that every system is a system of potentials, a variety of alternatives, and each level is realized by a level below it. Focusing on the functional analysis of syntax and discourse, Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar pays attention to both form and meaning. It emphasizes the dynamic process of language and the application of linguistics, so it has great explanatory power and guiding significance in the application of syntax analysis, discourse analysis, literary criticism, foreign language teaching and translation theory. On the other hand, viewing language as the product of social activity, Halliday concentrates on the interpretation of the grammatical patterns based on configurations of functions and believes that language is built into social meanings as a basic element in social activities. According to Halliday, studying language from functional perspective has two reasons. One is to unveil how language is used in reality. The other is out of setting the basic principles of language use. The above discussion shows that SFG is useful and practical in explaining a lot of language phenomenon, while it still has some inadequacies in its theory and its application to analyzing language use, especially with functional grammar. 3.1 Infiniteness of functions As for prime functions of language, the representative viewpoints are Matthews’ theory of two functions, Buhler’s theory of three functions and Jacobson’s theory of six functions. According to Matthews, communicative and expressive functions are the basic functions of language (Matthews, 1974); for Buhler, fundamental functions of language are expressive, vocative and descriptive functions (Buhler, Karl:1934); Jacobson extends Buhler’s map of functions of language by adding phatic, metalingual and poetic functions (Jakobson, 1960). Since language, a social activity, is used in certain time and space for different purposes, out of various intentions which turn language a complicated phenomenon, the list of functions of language is open-ended and it is hard or even impossible to enumerate all the specific functions of language without an overall view on dynamic language use. What’s more, each function can be further divided into sub-functions recursively. Being a merit of his theory, Halliday frees the analysis of the language out of the framework of the language itself to cover social aspects. However, language is not only a social activity, but also a psychological and cultural activity. How can we analyze the real-life language under the three meta-functions only in terms of the sociological perspective? What’s more, in explaining semantic meaning of a clause with meta-functions, there still exists controversy as for the hierarchy of these prime functions. Halliday believes that all the three meta-functions are of equal importance, while R. Jacobson thinks that ideational function is the major and the most important function among all the functions. Therefore, it is quite sophisticated to cover functions of language within finite categories as language is used in different context out of different communicative purposes, that is, the scope of it is open-ended and the stratification of functions with regard to its significance is not an easy problem when considering the specific context the language being used. 3.2 Inexplicability with ideational function 3.2.1 Suprasegmental phoneme Suprasegmental elements, after being treated as phonemes, especially by American structuralist linguists, are called suprasegmental phonemes, which are roughly equal to normal segmental phonemes. Bloomfield (1933) earlier called them secondary phonemes which include stress, rhythm, intonation, etc. Suprasegmental phonemes, an indispensable part of language, play important roles in our daily communication. A clause with different stress will lead to different senses, as in (1). (1). To love one person is very complicated. (a Chinese song) a. Putting stress on “love” makes the sentence mean that it is complicated to love one person, rather than hate or beat one; b. Putting stress on “one” makes the sentence denote that it is complicated to love only one person, maybe two persons will be less complicated; c. Putting stress on “complicated” makes the sentence express that to love one person is not easy or happy but complicated; d. Putting stress on “very” makes the sentence refer that to love one person is rather complicated, instead of being a little bit complicated. The above sentence analyses show us that the semantic information of the clause varies from one to the other via attaching stress on different words in it, but according to the ideational function, this clause can be analyzed as “Token+ relational process+ value” without any variants. In terms of ideational function, this sentence, considering all the linguistic forms in it, is a relational process with “to love one person” as its token and “very complicated” as its value without any change regardless of different stresses in uttering it. So with ideational function we cannot distinguish meaning variations caused by stress which is an indispensable suprasegmental phoneme in our daily communication. In addition, intonation, referring to the total pattern of pitch changes, also plays an important part in making sense in communication. It not only shows the relationship of words within sentences and between sentences, but also tells something about the feeling of the speaker, as in (2). (2). Really a. In one case, if the sentence is uttered with falling tone, it is a declarative sentence, in accordance with its surface meaning: it is real. b. In another case, when it is produced with rising tone, it becomes an interrogative sentence, differing from the meaning conveyed from its surface structure. It is no longer a statement, but a question, a doubt to show that the speaker is uncertain or not sure whether it is true or not. c. In the other case, as the speaker expresses this clause with falling and rising tone, it implies a hesitance and contrast which is not the same as the previous senses. With different intonations, the senses of the same sentence differ dramatically, but sentence analysis from ideational function perspective cannot reveal all semantic meanings of the same sentence. Hence, ideational function is a practical angle to analyze the semantic message of a clause, but it is still insufficient to investigate some clauses when suprasegmental elements are excluded from the analysis. 3.2.2 Greeting The three meta-functions of functional grammar can be employed to analyze the same sentence from three different angles. In most cases, it is workable to analyze a clause with these functions, as in (3). (3). For me, he is my hero. Function For me he is my hero Ideational Circumstance Actor Process: relation goal Interpersonal Residue Mood: indicative Residue Textual Theme Rheme However, not all the sentences can be discussed with these three functions, as in (4). (4). It’s a fine day, isn’t it? It is obvious that this sentence is only a ritual expression in daily communication to start a conversation with others, its ideational function almost doesn’t exist as it is not said to convey personal feeling or experience or process of doing something, that is, it is indeed meaningless from a semantic or conceptual perspective but an utterance for social communication. The same case is in Chinese. When we come across a friend, we usually ask some ritual questions, like (5). (5). Have you eaten? If we use the same sentence in western countries, it may cause misunderstanding because they might assume its meaning from ideational angle and think this is an indirect invitation as this sentence seems to ask the information, awaiting the other’s response. However, this interrogative sentence is not loaded with the ideational function in that it is not uttered to find out whether the person have eaten his meal or not, instead it is merely used to greet each other to maintain social interpersonal relationship. There are a lot of examples like this which cannot be analyzed with ideational function to show its real meaning. 3.3 Inapplicability with textual function 3.3.1 Utterances with pragmatic meaning Besides greeting expressions, the textual function could not be employed to discuss some other linguistic phenomenon either, such as monologue, a special pattern of discourse. Sometimes, when we feel happy or nervous or scared and the like, we may unconsciously utter some irrelevant words. For instance, when a teacher is going to distribute examination paper, one of his students might say something to himself, as in (6). (6). Tomorrow my new toy will arrive. Because he is aware that he must fail in the examination, the student might express a clause like this. According to textual function which discusses that language can make the discourse coherent and relevant to the immediate situation and can be accomplished by theme and rheme, theme in this condition should be about the examination or present time, but “tomorrow”, the theme in this monologue, is produced, being irrelevant to any information concerning this circumstance. Although we cannot analyze this monologue with textual function, but pragmatically it does work as a relief to lessen the anxiety of that moment which is the reason why the student may say to himself such an apparently irrelevant clause. The inapplicability of textual function can also be seen in (7). (7). I am bathing. Without any context, we can analyze this clause with three meta-functions simultaneously, but actually in a dynamic situation, this clause may have nothing to do with the surface meaning of it. For example, when the phone is ringing, the speaker utters this clause in order to tell others in the room to answer the phone because he is unable to do it right now, so the theme and rheme in this clause according to textual functional analysis are no longer the real intention or the implicature of it, that is to say, the textual function is not workable here to dig out the real meaning of the clause. 3.3.2 Tautology Tautology, conveying no new information, is an apparently meaningless expression in which one word is defined as itself. e.g. ‘Girls are girls.’ It is clear that the speaker intends to communicate more than is said as in (8). (8). A party is a party. From textual function, a party is the theme and the rheme of this sentence as well in which there is no new information being conveyed, that is, it is meaningless. Supposing this sentence is used when a wife is asking her husband how the party she hosts is, the husband uses this clause to mean not superficially but implicitly: the party is not so good. Why the husband chooses this tautology in the case instead of expressing his idea directly may be that he intends to lessen the degree of hurting the feeling of her wife. More examples of this kind can be presented to illustrate that textual function is inapplicable in the semantic analysis of tautologies. 3.4 Inadequacy in interpersonal function In terms of functional grammar, people communicate with each other either to give or take things. The “thing” can further be divided into two types, namely, physical goods and services and intangible information. Matching two patterns together comes four basic tasks in interpersonal function: Interpersonal function can be represented by mood and the choice in the mood system is between indicative and imperative. If a clause is indicative, there exists a further option to be made between declarative and interrogative. Therefore, according to functional grammar, language can play the role of communication to express social and personal relations within interpersonal function with three patterns of clauses: declarative, interrogative and imperative clauses. Definitely, there exists direct relationship between each clause pattern with its corresponding purpose, like using declarative clause to provide goods or service or offer invisible goods-information and employing interrogative clause to ask for information or service. While exclamative clause, a less frequently used clause pattern, can also function as a means to ask for information or service which is neglected within mood system, as in (9). (9) How hot it is! a. From the ideational function, the clause expresses a relational process to mean the temperature is high. b. From the textual function, it is grammatically correct and consists of theme and rheme. But this clause is excluded from interpersonal function, as the interpersonal function is manifested by two moods which are featured by three types of sentence patterns. By analyzing this clause from a contextual perspective, we may realize that this clause is uttered by the user to ask for service or make an implicit order, like “Could you open the window?” or some other implicatures, so not only imperative clause but also exclamative clause which is excluded from interpersonal function can be adopted to take goods or information. More examples of this kind are available to prove that language users may prefer to use exclamative clause to ask someone to do something for him or her rather than use imperative one directly. Therefore, besides imperative, interrogative and declarative clauses, exclamative clause also plays an important and essential role in daily communication to achieve personal purpose of taking a thing. It is necessary to cover exclamative clause within the mood system of interpersonal function in order to make functional grammar more comprehensive. From all the above discussion, we can naturally draw the conclusion that three meta-functions are not universal or applicable to be employed to analyze all real-life clauses in English. 4. Conclusion In light of the significance of SFG approach to linguistic analysis, the article firstly describes the merits and its peculiarities, and then focuses on the limitations of the theory, especially in functional grammar. Firstly, by displaying different opinions of representative scholars concerning the number of functions of language, it can be seen that it is hard to cover all the functions of language within definite categories in considering the complexity of language. Secondly, it makes use of language examples to illustrate why meta-functions are not workable in accounting for the specific language use. As for ideational function, it may not be applicable when we take into consideration daily greetings and suprasegmental phonemes, like stress and tone. For textual function, utterances with pragmatic meaning and a special sentence pattern, tautology are far from workable in its analysis by just showing its theme and rheme. With regard to interpersonal function, the mood system only covers imperative and indicative pattern, excluding exclamative clause, a common sentence pattern, which is frequently expressed in our daily life to make requests. 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