Halliday in the 21st Century: Volume 11 in the Collected Works of M. A. K. Halliday 9781472541932, 9781623564513

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Preface Jonathan J. Webster

Being the editor of the ten-volume series The Collected Works of M. A. K. Halliday impressed me with the scope of his scholarship into language. His long engagement in the study of language is still ongoing. Since the tenth volume was published in 2009, Professor Halliday’s insights into language have continued to appear in published papers in a variety of venues, prompting this eleventh volume, titled Halliday in the 21st Century. In 2012, Annabelle Lukin, David Butt and myself had the opportunity to sit down with Professor Halliday and Professor Hasan in their living room in Sydney and talk about their pioneering work in developing the systemic functional approach to the study of language. During our conversation, Professor Halliday expressed his hope that linguistics will continue to throw light on language, and that it would maintain the basic principles that he has tried to live with. As he stated at the launch of The Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies at the City University of Hong Kong (see Chapter 2, ‘Working with Meaning: Towards an Appliable Linguistics (2008)’), one of his guiding principles has been the search for an ‘appliable linguistics’, which he describes in Chapter 7, ‘Putting Linguistic Theory to Work (2010)’, as follows: An appliable linguistics, as I understand it, is a theory which tackles problems and tries to answer questions – but questions that are asked, and problems that are raised, not by professional linguists so much as by other people who are in some way concerned with language, whether professionally or otherwise. There are large numbers of such people: educators, translators, legal and medical specialists, computer scientists, students of literature and drama, . . . ; and it is their ‘take’ on language that is being addressed, at least to the point of clarifying what sorts of questions can usefully expect to be asked, and whether or not there is any hope of coming up with an answer.

Why the term ‘appliable’, not ‘applied’ nor ‘applicable’? Halliday replies (see Chapter 8, ‘Pinpointing the Choice: Meaning and the Search for Equivalents in a Translated Text (2012)’):

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I use ‘appliable’ because ‘applied linguistics’ has come to function in some kind of opposition to ‘linguistics’ (meaning ‘linguistics proper’, or theoretical linguistics), whereas I want to reject that opposition; I want a single concept which unifies the two. And I don’t say ‘applicable’ because that suggests ‘applicable to’ some particular sphere of activity or other, whereas I want a general term which gives the sense of something that is capable of – having evolved in the context of – being applied.

The first part of this volume consists of chapters elaborating on what is an appliable linguistic theory, followed by a second part of chapters looking at how such a theory can be applied in addressing either research-related or practical problems involving language. Another basic principle highlighted by Professor Halliday during our conversation that summer afternoon is that language is ‘a basic human resource with potentially immense power, which is hidden, partly because people are genuinely not aware of how much they are, in fact, depending on it.’ This power is the power to make meaning, to construe our experience of the material world around us and then exchange that construal with others, and in the process of doing so enact social relationships with those with whom we are engaged in conversation. The chapters in the third part of this volume elaborate more on this semogenic power of language. Several years ago, when I first read the following in Professor Halliday’s paper for the inaugural issue of the journal Linguistics and the Human Sciences (see Chapter 10, ‘On Matter and Meaning: The Two Realms of Human Experience (2005)’), I was immediately struck with not only the eloquence of his words, but also, and more importantly, the depth of his understanding and insight into the immense power of language. It seems that meaning was how the world began, as quanta (bits, or ‘qubits’) of information; and that these remain the ultimate constituents of matter. As matter leads on to life, and then blood, and warm blood, and brains, meaning turns up again at a higher level, this time as qualia rather than (just) quanta. The science of meaning of this kind – meaning in the biological, and eventually the human, sphere – is semiotics; since language is the leading edge of meaning, the leading edge of semiotics is linguistics. If information is indeed the basic stuff of the universe, then physics will turn out to be one kind of linguistics, after all.

It is indeed a privilege to be able to have a role in editing this, the eleventh, volume in the collected works of a truly great scholar who continues to bring humankind a wealth of appliable insight into the meaning-making power of language.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to the original publishers for permission to reprint the articles and chapters in this volume. Original publication details are provided below, and also at the beginning of each chapter. ‘The spoken language corpus: a foundation for grammatical theory’, from Advances in Corpus Linguistics, Rodopi, 2004, pages 11–38. Reprinted with the permission of Rodopi. ‘Working with meaning: towards an appliable linguistics’, from Meaning in Context, Continuum, 2008, pages 7–23. Reprinted with the permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. ‘Putting linguistic theory to work’, from American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference 2010, Georgetown University, 2010. ‘On text and discourse, information and meaning’, from Choice and Text Group, Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark, 2011. ‘Why do we need to understand about language?’ from The 1st Interdisciplinary Linguistics Conference (ILinC), Queen’s University Belfast, UK, 2011. ‘Written language, standard language, global language’, from The Handbook of World Englishes, edited by B. B. Kachru, Y. Kachru and C. B. Nelson, Blackwell Press, 2006. Reprinted with the permission of Wiley. ‘The gloosy ganoderm: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation’, from Chinese Translators Journal, Volume 1, Nanjing University Press, 2009, pages 17–26. ‘Pinpointing the choice: meaning and the search for equivalents in a translated text’, from Appliable Linguistics, edited by A. Mahboob and N. K. Knight, Continuum, 2012. Reprinted with the permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. ‘On grammar as the driving force from primary to higher-order consciousness’, from The Development of Language: Functional Perspectives on Species and Individuals, edited by A. Lukin and G. Williams, Continuum, 2004, pages 15–44. Reprinted with the permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

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‘On matter and meaning: the two realms of human experience’, from Linguistics and the Human Sciences, edited by J. J. Webster, Equinox, 2005, pages 59–82. Reprinted with the permission of Equinox. ‘Mountains of the word: construing the architecture of nature into meaning’, from the Indonesian International Systemic Congress, the University of Brawijaya, Malang, East Java, 2009. ‘Language evolving: some systemic functional reflections on the history of meaning’, from the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, University of British Columbia, 2.

Editor’s Introduction Jonathan J. Webster

Professor M. A. K. Halliday has always described himself as being a grammarian who is actively engaged in ‘trying to explain how language functions as a semogenic, or meaning-creating, resource’. He takes grammar to be ‘the source of energy for the semiotic process’, the ‘driving force’ behind the human potential for ‘construing and enacting the relationships of the individual, the group and the species to their social and physical environment’. In ‘On Grammar as the Driving Force from Primary to Higher-Order Consciousness (2004)’, Halliday focuses on the child’s transition from protolanguage to language, arguing that ‘the ontogenesis of grammar offers a way in to tracking the development of higher-order consciousness, or semiosis, suggesting what semiotic strategies are likely to be put in place when the human individual moves from infancy to childhood.’ Appearing in the launch issue of the journal Linguistics and the Human Sciences Halliday’s paper ‘On Matter and Meaning: The Two Realms of Human Experience (2005)’ continues to develop the idea, which also appeared in ‘On Grammar as the Driving Force from Primary to Higher-Order Consciousness (2004)’, that we inhabit two phenomenal realms, one of matter and the other of meaning. Both are necessary, as Halliday explains, ‘Meaning relies on matter to make it accessible to a receiver; in linguistic terms, meaning depends on matter to realise it.’ Not only does meaning rely on the material to be realized  – to materialize, but also our material existence is construed through the very same processes that enable us to make meaning. For it is through language that we construe our human existence, whether it be ‘the commonsense theory that is enshrined in our everyday grammar’ or the reconstrual of that experience in a scientific theory which has been ‘heavily subsidized by conscious design’. Either is ‘the output of the semogenic power of the grammar’.

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Presented at the Thirty-Seventh International Systemic Functional Linguistics conference, held at the University of British Columbia, ‘Language Evolving: Some Systemic Functional Reflections on the History of Meaning (2010)’, explores how meaning potential changes over time, evolving in the context of the speech fellowship, progressing from nomadic, to agricultural pastoral, to industrial. ‘Mountains of the Word: Construing the Architecture of Nature into Meaning (2009)’ was presented at the conference ‘The Language of Space, Light and Shadow: Language and Architecture systemically entwined’, held in Indonesia in 2009. In this paper, Halliday discusses ‘the language people use in talking, and especially in writing, about mountains’. He focuses on ‘the writings about mountains by British climbers of the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when mountains came into the consciousness of people who had new and advanced technology and a correspondingly strong commitment to material explanations and material values.’ As Halliday notes, ‘In this cultural environment, mountains appeared as a welcome and revitalizing counter-reality.’

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The Spoken Language Corpus: A Foundation for Grammatical Theory (2004)

1  Introductory I felt rather daunted when Professor Karin Aijmer invited me to talk at this Conference, because it is 15 years since I retired from my academic appointment and, although I continue to follow new developments with interest, I would certainly not pretend to keep up to date  – especially since I belong to that previous era when one could hope to be a generalist in the field of language study, something that is hardly any longer possible today. But I confess that I was also rather delighted, because if there is one topic that is particularly close to my heart it is that of the vast potential that resides in a corpus of spoken language. This is probably the main source from which new insights can now be expected to flow. I have always had greater interest in the spoken language, because that in my view is the mainspring of semogenesis: where, prototypically, meaning is made and the frontiers of meaning potential are extended. But until the coming of the tape recorder we had no means of capturing spoken language and pinning it down. Since my own career as a language teacher began before tape recorders were invented (or at least before the record companies could no longer stop them being produced), I worked hard to train myself in storing and writing down conversation as it occurred; but there are obviously severe limits on the size of corpus you can compile like that. Of course, to accumulate enough spoken language in a form in which it could be managed in very large quantities, we needed a second great technical innovation, the computer; but in celebrating the First published in Aijmer, K. and Altenburg, B. (eds) (2004), Advances in Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. pp. 11–28. Also in Volume 6, the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday.

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computerized corpus we should not forget that it was the tape recorder that broke through the sound barrier (the barrier to arresting speech sound, that is) and made the enterprise of spoken language research possible. It is ironical, I think, that now that the technology of speech recording is so good that we can eavesdrop on almost any occasion and kind of spoken discourse, we have ethics committees and privacy protection agencies denying us access, or preventing us from making use of what we record. (Hence my homage to Svartvik and Quirk, which I still continue to plunder as a source of open-ended spontaneous dialogue.) So my general question, in this chapter, is this: what can we actually learn, about spoken language and, more significantly, about language, by using a computerized corpus on a scale such as can now be obtained? What I was suggesting by my title, of course (and the original title had the phrase ‘at the foundation of grammatics’, which perhaps makes the point more forcefully), was that we can learn a great deal: that a spoken language corpus does lie at the foundation of grammatics, using ‘grammatics’ to mean the theoretical study of lexicogrammar – this being located, in turn, in the context of a general theory of language. (I had found it necessary to introduce this term because of the confusion that constantly arose between ‘grammar’ as one component of a language and ‘grammar’ as the systematic description of that component.) In this sense, the spoken language corpus is a primary resource for enabling us to theorize about the lexicogrammatical stratum in language – and thereby about language as a whole. I can see no place for an opposition between theory and data, in the sense of a clear boundary between ‘data-gathering’ and theory construction. I remember wondering, when I was reading Isaac Newton’s Optics, what would have happened to physics if Newton, observing light passing through different media and measuring the refraction, had said of himself ‘I’m just a data-gatherer; I leave the theorizing to others’. What was new, of course, was that earlier physicists had not been able to observe and measure very much because the technology wasn’t available; so they were forced to theorize without having adequate data. Galileo and Newton were able to observe experimentally; but this did not lead them to set up an opposition between observation and theory – between the different stages in a single enterprise of extending the boundaries of knowledge. Now, until the arrival of the tape recorder and the computer, linguists were in much the same state as pre-Renaissance physicists: they had to invent, to construct their database without access to the phenomena on which they most depended. Linguistics can now hope to advance beyond its pre-scientific age; but it will be greatly hindered if we think of data and theory as realms apart, or divide the world of scholarship into those who dig and those who spin.

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It is not the case, of course, that linguists have had no data at all. They have always had plenty of written language text, starting with texts of high cultural value, the authors whose works survived from classical times. This already provoked disputation, in Europe, between text-based scholars and theoreticians; we find this satirized in the late medieval fable of the Battle of the Seven Arts, fought out between the Auctores and the Artes. But the ‘auctores’ embodied the notion of the text as a model (author as authority); this was written language as object with value, rather than just as specimen to be used as evidence. And this in turn reflects the nature of written language: it is language produced under attention, discourse that is self-conscious and self-monitored. This does not, of course, invalidate it as data; it means merely that written texts tell us about written language, and we have to be cautious in arguing from this to the potentiality of language as a whole. After all, speech evolved first, in the species; speech develops first, in the individual; and, at least until the electronic age, people did far more talking than writing throughout their lives.

2  Spoken and written Throughout most of the history of linguistics, therefore, there has been no choice. To study text, as data, meant studying written text; and written text had to serve as the window, not just into written language but into language. Now, thanks to the new technology, things have changed; we might want to say: well, now, we can study written texts, which will tell us about written language, and we can study spoken texts, which will tell us about spoken language. But where, then, do we find out about language? One view might be: there’s no such thing as language, only language as spoken and language as written; so we describe the two separately, with a different grammar for each, and the two descriptions together will tell us all we need to know. The issue of ‘same or different grammars’ has been much discussed, for example, by David Brazil (1995), Geoffrey Leech (2000) and Michael Stubbs (2000); there is obviously no one ‘right answer’ – it depends on the context and the purpose, on what you are writing the grammar for. The notion ‘there is no such thing as language; there are only . . .’, whether ‘only dialects’, ‘only registers’, ‘only individual speakers’ or even ‘only speech events’ is a familiar one; it represents a backing away from theory, in the name of a resistance to ‘totalizing’, but it is itself an ideological and indeed theoretical stance (cf. Martin’s 1993 observations on ethnomethodology). And while of all such attempts to narrow down the ultimate domain of a linguistic theory the separation into spoken language and

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written language is the most plausible, it still leaves ‘language’ out of account, and hence renders our conception of semantics particularly impoverished – it is the understanding of the meaning-making power of language that suffers most from such a move. It was perhaps in the so-called modern era that the idea of spoken language and written language as distinct semiotic systems made most sense, because that was the age of print, when the two were relatively insulated one from the other – although the spoken ‘standard language’ of the nation state was already a bit of a hybrid. Now, however, when text is written electronically, and is presented in temporal sequence on the screen (and, on the other hand, more and more of speech is prepared for being addressed to people unknown to the speaker), the two are tending to get mixed up, and the spoken/written distinction is increasingly blurred. But even without this mixing, there is reason for postulating a language, such as ‘English’, as a more abstract entity encompassing both spoken and written varieties. There is nothing strange about the existence of such varieties; a language is an inherently variable system, and the spoken/written variable is simply one among many, unique only in that it involves distinct modalities. But it is just this difference of modality, between the visual–synoptic of writing and aural–dynamic of speech, that gives the spoken corpus its special value – not to mention, of course, its own very special problems! I think it is not necessary, in the present context, to spend time and energy disposing of a myth, one that has done so much to impede, and then to distract, the study of spoken language: namely the myth that spoken language is lacking in structure. The spoken language is every bit as highly organized as the written – it couldn’t function if it wasn’t. But whereas in writing you can cross out all the mistakes and discard the preliminary drafts, leaving only the finished product to offer to the reader, in speaking you cannot do this; so those who first transcribed spoken dialogue triumphantly pointed to all the hesitations, the false starts and the backtrackings that they had included in their transcription (under the pretext of faithfulness to the data), and cited these as evidence for the inferiority of the spoken word – a view to which they were already ideologically committed. It was, in fact, a severe distortion of the essential nature of speech; a much more ‘faithful’ transcription is a rendering in ordinary orthography, including ordinary punctuation. The kind of false exoticism which is imposed on speech in the act of reducing it to writing, under the illusion of being objective, still sometimes gets in the way, foregrounding all the trivia and preventing the serious study of language in its spoken form. (But not, I think, in the corridors of corpus linguistics!)

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3  Spoken language and the corpus Now what the spoken corpus does for the spoken language is, in the first instance, the same as what it does for the written: it amasses large quantities of text and processes it to make it accessible for study. Some kinds of spoken language can be fairly easily obtained: radio and television interviews, for example, or proceedings in courts of law, and these figured already in the earliest COBUILD corpus of 20  million words (18  million written and 2  million spoken). The London-Lund corpus (alone, I think, at that time) included a considerable amount of spontaneous conversation, much of it being then published in the Corpus of English Conversation I referred to earlier (see Svartvik and Quirk, 1980). Ronald Carter and Mike McCarthy, in their CANCODE corpus at Nottingham, work with 5  million words of natural speech; on a comparable scale is the UTS-Macquarie corpus in Sydney, which includes a component of ‘spoken language in the workplace’ that formed the basis of Suzanne Eggins and Diana Slade’s (1997) Analysing Casual Conversation. Already in the 1960s there was a valuable corpus of children’s speech, some of it in the form of interview with an adult but some of children talking amongst themselves, at the Nuffield Foreign Language Teaching Materials Project under the direction of Sam Spicer in Leeds; and in the 1980s Robin Fawcett assembled a database of primary school children’s language in the early years of his Computational Linguistics Unit at the (then) Polytechnic of Wales. These are, I am well aware, just the exemplars that are known to me, in a worldwide enterprise of spoken language corpus research, in English and no doubt in many other languages besides. What all these projects have in common, as far as I know, is that the spoken text, as well as being stored as speech, is also always transcribed into written form. There are numerous different conventions of transcribing spoken English; I remember a workshop on the grammar of casual conversation, about twenty years ago, in which we looked into eight systems then in current use (Hasan, 1985a), and there must be many more in circulation now. What I have not seen, though such a thing may exist, is any systematic discussion of what all these different systems imply about the nature of spoken language, what sort of order (or lack of order) they impose on it – or, in general terms, of what it means to transcribe spoken discourse into writing. And this is in fact an extraordinarily complex question. In English we talk about ‘reducing’ spoken language to writing, in a metaphor which suggests that something is lost; and so of course it is. We know that the

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melody and rhythm of speech, which are highly meaningful features of the spoken language, are largely absent; and it is ironical that many of the transcription systems – the majority at the time when I looked into them – abandoned the one feature of writing that gives some indication of those prosodies, namely punctuation. Of course punctuation is not a direct marker of prosody, because in the evolution of written language it has taken on a life of its own, and now usually (again referring to English) embodies a compromise between the prosodic and the compositional (constituent) dimensions of grammatical structure; but it does give a significant amount of prosodic information, as anyone is aware who reads aloud from a written text, and it is perverse to refuse to use it under the pretext of not imposing patterns on the data – rather as if one insisted on using only black and white reproductions of representational art, so as not to impose colours on the flowers, or on the clothing of the ladies at court. The absence of punctuation merely exaggerates the dog’s dinner image that is being projected on to spoken language. There are transcriptions which include prosodic information; and these are of two kinds: those, like Svartvik and Quirk (deriving from the work of Quirk and Crystal in the 1960s), which give a detailed account of the prosodic movement in terms of pitch, loudness and tempo, and those (like my own) which mark just those systemic features of intonation and rhythm which have been shown to be functional in carrying meaning – as realizations of selections in the grammar, in the same way that, in a tone language, they would be realizations of selections in vocabulary. I use this kind of transcription because I want to bring out how systems which occur only in the spoken language not only are regularly and predictably meaningful but also are integrated with other, recognized grammatical systems (those marked by morphology or ordering or class selection) in a manner no different from the way these latter are integrated with each other. (Texts 1–4 illustrate some different conventions of transcription: Text 1 from a tape recording made and transcribed about 1960; Text 2 from Svartvik and Quirk, 1980; Text 3 an orthographic (and somewhat ‘reduced’) version of Text 2; Text 4 from Grimshaw, 1994.) Thus there is a gap in the information about spoken discourse that is embodied in our standard orthographies; and since one major function of a spoken language corpus is to show these prosodically realized systems at work, it seems to me that any mode of transcription used with such a corpus should at least incorporate prosodic features in some systematic way. They are not optional extras; in some languages at least, but probably in all, intonation and rhythm are meaningful in an entirely systematic fashion.

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But while it is fairly obvious what an orthographic transcription leaves out, it is perhaps less obvious what it puts in. Orthographies impose their own kind of determinacy, of a kind that belongs to the written language: a constituentlike organization which is not really a feature of speech. Words are given clear boundaries, with beginnings and endings often somewhat arbitrarily assigned; and punctuation, while in origin marking patterns of prosodic movement, has been pre-empted to mark off larger grammatical units (there is considerable variation in practice: some writers do still use it more as a prosodic device). It is true that spoken language is also compositional: the written sentence, for example, is derived from the clause complex of natural speech; but its components are not so much constituents in a constituent hierarchy as movements in a choreographic sequence. The written sentence knows where it’s going when it starts; the spoken clause complex does not. (Text 3 illustrates this second point.) But writing imposes determinacy also on the paradigmatic axis, by its decisions about what are, or are not, tokens of the same type. Here the effect of ‘reducing speech to writing’ depends largely on the nature of the script. There is already variation here on the syntagmatic axis because different scripts impose different forms of constituency: in Chinese, and also in Vietnamese, the unit bounded by spaces is the morpheme; in European languages it is the word, though with room for considerable variation regarding what a word is; in Japanese it is a mixture of the morpheme and the syllable, though you can generally tell which morpheme begins a new word. On the paradigmatic axis, Chinese, as a morphemic script, is the most determinate: it leaves no room for doubt about what are and what are not regarded as tokens of the same type. But even English and French, though in principle having a phonological script, have strong morphemic tendencies; they have numerous homonyms at the morphosyllabic interface, which the writing system typically keeps apart. Such writing systems mask the indeterminacy in the spoken language, so that (for example) pairs like mysticism/misty schism, or icicle/eye sickle, which in speech are separated only by minor rhythmic differences, come to be quite unrelated in their written forms  – James Joyce made brilliant use of this as a semogenic resource (but as a resource for the written language). But even in languages with a more purely phonological script, such as Russian or Italian, the writing system enforces regularities, policing the text to protect it from all the forms of meaningful variation which contribute so much to the richness and potency of speech. So transcribing spoken discourse – especially spontaneous conversation – into written form in order to observe it, and to use the observations as a basis for theorizing language, is a little bit problematic. Transcribing is translating,

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and translating is transforming; I think to compile and interpret an extensive spoken corpus inevitably raises questions about the real nature of this transformation.

4  Some features of the spoken language I would like to refer briefly to a number of features which have been investigated in corpus studies, with reference to what they suggest about the properties of language as a whole. I will group these under seven headings; but they are not in any systematic order – just the order in which I found it easiest to move along from each one to the next.

4.1  Patterns in casual conversation Eggins and Slade, in their book Analysing Casual Conversation (1997), studied patterns at four strata: lexicogrammatical, semantic, discoursal and generic. The first two showed up as highly patterned in the interpersonal domain (interpersonal metafunction), particularly in mood and modality. At the level of genre they recognized a cline from story-telling to chat, with opinion and gossip in between; of the ten genres of conversation that they ranged along this cline, they were able to assign generic structures to seven of them: these were narrative, anecdote, exemplum, recount, observation/comment, opinion and gossip. Of the other three, joke-telling they had not enough data to explore; the other two, sending up and chat, they said ‘cannot be characterized in generic terms’. Their analysis, based on a spoken corpus, suggests that casual conversation is far from lacking in structural order.

4.2  Pattern forming and re-forming Ronald Carter, in a recent paper ‘Language and creativity: the evidence from spoken English’ (2002), was highlighting, as the title makes clear, the creative potential of the spoken language, especially casual speech. He referred to its ‘pattern forming and re-forming’, emphasizing particularly the ‘re-forming’ that takes place in the course of dialogue: one speaker sets up some kind of lexicogrammatical pattern, perhaps involving a regular collocation, an idiom or cliché, or some proverbial echo; the interlocutor builds on it – but then deflects,

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‘re-forms’ it into something new, with a different pattern of lexicogrammatical wording. This will usually not all happen in one dyadic exchange; it may be spread across long passages of dialogue, with several speakers involved; but it can happen very quickly, as illustrated in one or two of Carter’s examples from the CANCODE corpus: [Two students are talking about the landlord of a mutual friend] A: Yes, he must have a bob or two. B: Whatever he does he makes money out of it just like that. A: Bob’s your uncle. B: He’s quite a lot of money, erm, tied up in property and things. He’s got a finger in all kinds of pies and houses and stuff. [Two colleagues, who are social workers, are discussing a third colleague who has a tendency to become too involved in individual cases] A: I don’t know but she seems to have picked up all kinds of lame ducks and traumas along the way. B: That – that’s her vocation. A: Perhaps it is. She should have been a counsellor. B: Yeah but the trouble with her is she puts all her socialist carts before the horses.

4.3  Patterns in words and phrases There might seem to be some contradiction between this and Michael Stubbs’ observation, in his Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics (2000), that ‘a high proportion of language use is routinized, conventional and idiomatic’, at least when this is applied to spoken language. Of course, one way in which both could be true would be if speech was found to consist largely of routinized stuff with occasional flashes of creativity in between; but I don’t think this is how the two features are to be reconciled. Rather, it seems to me that it is often precisely in the use of ‘routinized, conventional and idiomatic’ features that speakers’ creativity is displayed. (I shall come back to this point later.) But, as Stubbs anticipated in his earlier work (1996), and has demonstrated in his more recent study (of ‘extended lexical units’), it is only through amassing a corpus of speech that we gain access to the essential regularities that must be present if they can be played with in this fashion. There can be no meaning in departing from a norm unless there is a norm already in place to be departed from.

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4.4  Patterns in grammar Michael Stubbs’ book is subtitled Corpus Studies in Lexical Semantics; Susan Hunston and Gill Francis (2000) is Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English: one ‘lexical semantics’, the other ‘lexical grammar’. I have written about Hunston and Francis’ (2000) book elsewhere; what they are doing, in my view, is very successfully extending the grammar in greater detail (greater delicacy) across the middle ground where lexis and grammar meet. There is no conflict here with theoretical grammar, at least in my own understanding of the nature of theory; indeed they make considerable use of established grammatical categories. But this region of the grammar, with its highly complex network of microcategories, could not be penetrated without benefit of a corpus – and again, it has to include a spoken corpus, because it is in speech that these patterns are most likely to be evolving and being ongoingly renewed.

4.5  The grammar of appraisal Eggins and Slade referred to, and also demonstrated in the course of their analysis, the centrality, in many types of casual conversation, of the interpersonal component in meaning. Our understanding of the interpersonal metafunction derives particularly from the work of Jim Martin: his book English Text: System and Structure (1992), several articles (e.g. 1998), and a new book co-authored with Peter White (2005). Martin focused especially on the area of ‘appraisal’, comprising appreciation, affect, judgement and amplification – all those systems whereby speakers organize their personal opinions, their likes and dislikes, and their degree and kind of involvement in what they are saying. These features have always been difficult to investigate: partly for ideological reasons – they weren’t recognized as a systematic component of meaning; but also because they are realized by a bewildering mixture of lexicogrammatical resources: morphology, prosody (intonation and rhythm), words of all classes, closed and open, and the ordering of elements in a structure. Martin has shown how these meanings are in fact grammaticalized – that is, they are systemic in their operation; but to demonstrate this you need access to a large amount of data, and this needs to be largely spoken discourse. Not that appraisal does not figure in written language  – it does, even if often more disguised (see Hunston, 1993); but it is in speech that its systemic potential is more richly exploited.

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4.6  ‘Non-standard’ patterns There is a long tradition of stigmatizing grammatical patterns that do not conform to the canons of written language. This arose, naturally enough, because grammatics evolved mainly in the study of written language (non-written cultures often developed theories of rhetoric, but never theories of grammar), and then because grammarians, like lexicographers, were seen as guardians of a nation’s linguistic morals. I don’t think I need take up time arguing this point here. But, precisely because there are patterns which don’t occur in writing, we need a corpus of spoken language to reveal them. I don’t mean the highly publicized ‘grammatical errors’ beloved of correspondents to the newspapers; these are easily manufactured, without benefit of a corpus, and I suspect that that kind of attention to linguistic table manners is a peculiarly English phenomenon – perhaps shared by the French, I’ve heard it said. I mean the more interesting and productive innovations which pass unnoticed in speech but have not (yet) found their way into the written language – and are often hard to construct with conscious thought; for example, from my own observations: It’s been going to’ve been being taken out for a long time [of a package left on the back seat of the car]. All the system was somewhat disorganized, because of not being sitting in the front of the screen [cf. because I wasn’t sitting . . .]. Drrr is the noise which when you say it to a horse the horse goes faster. Excuse me – is that one of those rubby-outy things? [pointing to an object on a high shelf in a shop]. And then at the end I had one left over, which you’re bound to have at least one that doesn’t go. That’s because I prefer small boats, which other people don’t necessarily like them. This court won’t serve [cf. it’s impossible to serve from this court].

4.7  Grammatical intricacy Many years ago I started measuring lexical density, which I defined as the number of lexical items (content words) per ranking (non-embedded) clause. I found a significant difference between speech and writing: in my written language samples the mean value was around six lexical words per clause, while in the samples of spoken language it was around two. There was of course a great

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deal of variation among different registers, and Jean Ure (1971) showed that the values for a range of text types were located along a continuum. She however counted lexical words as a proportion of total running words, which gives a somewhat different result, because spoken language is more clausal (more and shorter clauses) whereas written language is more nominal (clauses longer and fewer). Michael Stubbs, using a computerized corpus, followed Jean Ure’s model, reasonably enough since mine makes it necessary to identify clauses, and hence requires a sophisticated parsing programme. But the clause-based comparison is more meaningful in relation to the contrast between spoken and written discourse. What turned out to be no less interesting was what I called ‘grammatical intricacy’, quantified as the number of ranking clauses in the clause complex. A clause complex is any sequence of structurally related ranking clauses; it is the spoken analogue of (and of course the underlying origin of) what we recognize in written language as a sentence. In spontaneous spoken language the clause complex often became extraordinarily long and intricate (see Texts 3 and 5). If we analyse one of these in terms of its hypotactic and paratactic nexuses, we get a sense of its complexity. Now, it is very seldom that we find anything like these in writing. In speech, they tend to appear in the longer monologic turns that occur within a dialogue (that is, they are triggered dialogically, but constructed by a single speaker, rather than across turns). Since dialogue also usually has a lot of very short turns, of just one clause, which is often a minor clause which doesn’t enter into complex structures in any case, there is no sense in calculating a mean value for this kind of intricacy. What one can say is, that the more intricate a given clause complex is, the more likely it is that it happened in speech rather than in writing. But the fuller picture will only emerge from more corpus studies of naturally occurring spoken language (cf. Matthiessen, 2002: 295ff.).

5  Some problems with a spoken corpus So let me turn now to some of the problems faced by corpus linguists when they want to probe more deeply into the mysteries of spoken language. One problematic area I’ve mentioned already: that of representing spoken language in writing; I would like to add some more observations under this heading. As I remarked, there are many different conventions used in transcribing, and all of them distort in some way or other.

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The lack of prosodic markers is an obvious – and serious – omission, but one that can be rectified in one way or another. In another few decades it may be possible to devise speech recognition systems that can actually assign prosodic features – patterns of intonation and rhythm – at the phonological level (that is, identifying them as meaningful options); meanwhile we might explore the value of something which is technically possible already but less useful for lexicogrammar and semantics, namely annotation of speech at the phonetic level based on analysis of the fundamental parameters of frequency, amplitude and duration. But, as I suggested, a more serious problem is that of overtranscribing, especially of a kind which brings with it a false flavour of the exotic: speech is made to look quaint, with all its repetitions, false starts, clearings of the throat and the like solemnly incorporated into the text. This practice, which is regrettably widespread, not only imparts a spurious quaintness to the discourse – one can perhaps teach oneself to disregard that  – but, more worryingly, obscures, by burying them in the clutter, the really meaningful sleights of tongue on which spoken language often relies: swift changes of direction, structures which Eggins and Slade call ‘abandoned clauses’, phonological and morphological play and other moments of semiotic inventiveness. Of course, the line between these and simple mistakes is hard to draw; but that doesn’t mean we needn’t try. Try getting yourself recorded surreptitiously, if you can, in some sustained but very casual encounter, and see which of the funny bits you would cut out and which you would leave in as a faithful record of your own discourse. But even with the best will, and the best skill, in the world, a fundamental problem remains. Spoken language isn’t meant to be written down, and any visual representation distorts it in some way or other. The problem is analogous, in a way, to that of choreographers trying to develop notations for the dance: they work as aids to memory, when you want to teach complex routines, or to preserve a particular choreographer’s version of a ballet for future generations of dancers. But you wouldn’t analyse a dance by working on its transcription into written symbols. Naturally, many of the patterns of spoken language are recognizable in orthographic form; but many others are not – types of continuity and discontinuity, variations in tempo, paralinguistic features of tamber (voice quality), degrees of (un)certainty and (dis)approval – and for these one needs to work directly with the spoken text. And we are still some way off from being able to deal with such things automatically. The other major problem lies in the nature of language itself; it is a problem for all corpus research, although more acute with the spoken language: this is what

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we might call the lexicogrammatical bind. Looking along the lexicogrammatical continuum (and I shall assume this unified view, well set out by Michael Stubbs (1996) among the ‘principles’ of Sinclair’s and my approach, as opposed to the bricks-&-mortar view of a lexicon plus rules of syntax) – If we look along the continuum from grammar to lexis, it is the phenomena at the lexical end that are the most accessible; so the corpus has evolved to be organized lexically, accessed via the word, the written form of a lexicogrammatical item. Hence corpuses have been used primarily as tools for lexicologists rather than for grammarians. In principle, as I think is generally accepted, the corpus is just as useful, and just as essential, for the study of grammar as it is for the study of lexis. Only, the grammar is very much harder to get at. In a language like English, where words may operate all the way along the continuum, there are grammatical items like the and and and to just as there are lexical items like sun and moon and stars, as well as those like behind and already and therefore – which fall somewhere in the middle; occurrences of any of these are easily retrieved, counted, and contextualized. But whereas sun and moon and stars carry most of their meaning on their sleeves, as it were, the and and and to tell us very little about what is going on underneath; and what they do tell us, if we just observe them directly, tends to be comparatively trivial. It is an exasperating feature of patterns at the grammatical end of the continuum, that the easier they are to recognize the less they matter. And it is here that the spoken language presents special problems for a wordbased observation system: by comparison with written language, it tends to be more highly grammaticalized. In the way it organizes its meaning potential the spoken language, relative to the written, tends to favour grammatical systems. We have seen this already in the contrast between lexical density and grammatical intricacy as complementary ways of managing semantic complexity: the written language tends to put more of its information in the lexis, and hence it is easier to retrieve by means of lexical searching. Consider pairs of examples such as the following (and cf. those cited as Text 6 in Appendix 1.1): Sydney’s latitudinal position of 33° south ensures warm summer temperatures. Sydney is at latitude 33° south, so it is warm in summer. The goal of evolution is to optimize the mutual adaption of species. Species evolve in order to adapt to each other as well as possible.

If you are researching the forms of expression of the meaning ‘cause’, you can identify a set of verbs which commonly lexify this meaning in written English – verbs like cause, lead to, bring about, ensure, effect, result in, provoke  – and

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retrieve occurrences of these together with the (typically nominalized) cause and effect on either side; likewise the related nouns and adjectives in be the cause of, be responsible for, be due to and so on. It takes much more corpus energy to retrieve the (mainly spoken) instances where this relationship is realized as a clause nexus, with ‘cause’ realized as a paratactic or hypotactic conjunction like so, because or as, for at least three reasons: (i) these items tend to be polysemous (and to collocate freely with everything in the language); (ii) the cause and effect are now clauses, and therefore much more diffuse; (iii) in the spoken language not only semantic relations but participants also are more often grammaticalized, in the form of cohesive reference items like it, them, this, that, and you may have to search a long way to find their sources. Thus it will take rather longer to derive a corpus grammar of causal relations from spoken discourse than from written, and likewise with many other semantic categories. Note that this is not because they are not present in speech; on the contrary, there is usually more explicit rendering of semantic relationships in the spoken variants; you discover how relatively ambiguous the written versions are when you come to transpose them into spoken language. It is the form of their realization  – more grammaticalized, and so more covert  – that causes most of the problems. Another aspect of the same phenomenon, but one that is specific to English, is the way that material processes tend to be delexicalized: this is the effect whereby gash slash hew chop pare slice fell sever mow cleave shear and so on all get replaced by cut. This is related to the preference for phrasal verbs, which has gained momentum over a similar period and is also a move towards the grammaticalizing of the process element in the clause. Ogden and Richards, when they devised their Basic English in the 1930s, were able to dispense with all but 18 verbs, by relying on the phrasal verb constructions (they would have required me to say ‘. . . were able to do away with all but 18 verbs’); they were able to support their case by rewording a variety of different texts, including biblical texts, using just the high frequency verbs they had selected. These are, as I said, particular features of English; but I suspect there is a general tendency for the written varieties of a language to favour a more lexicalized construal of meaning. So I feel that, in corpus linguistics in general but more especially in relation to a spoken language corpus, there is work to be done to discover ways of designing a corpus for the use of grammarians – or rather, since none of us is confined to a single role, for use in the study of phenomena towards the grammatical end of the continuum. Hunston and Francis, in their work on ‘pattern grammar’

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(1999), have shown beyond doubt that the corpus is an essential resource for extending our knowledge of the grammar. But a corpus­driven grammar needs a grammar-driven corpus; and that is something I think we have not yet got.

6  Corpus-based and corpus-driven Elena Tognini-Bonelli, in her book Corpus Linguistics at Work (2001), defines corpus linguistics as a ‘pre-application methodology’, comprising an empirical approach to the description of language use, within a contextual–functional theory of meaning, and making use of new technologies. Within this framework, she sees new facts leading to new methodologies leading to new theories. Given that she has such a forward-looking vision, I find it strange that she finds it strange that ‘more data and better counting can trigger philosophical repositioning’; after all, that’s what it did in physics, where more data and better measuring transformed the whole conception of knowledge and understanding. How much the more might we expect this to be the case in linguistics, since knowing and understanding are themselves processes of meaning. The spoken corpus might well lead to some repositioning on issues of this kind. Like Hunston and Francis, Tognini-Bonelli stresses the difference between ‘corpus-based’ and ‘corpus-driven’ descriptions; I accept this distinction in principle, though with two reservations, or perhaps caveats. One, that the distinction itself is fuzzy; there are various ways of using a corpus in grammatical research that I would not be able to locate squarely on either side of the boundary – where, for example, one starts out with a grammatical category as a heuristic device but then uses the results of the corpus analysis to refine it further or replace it by something else. (If I may refer here to my own work, I would locate both my study of the grammar of pain (1998a), and the quantitative study of polarity and primary tense carried out by Zoe James and myself (1993), somewhere along that rather fuzzy borderline.) And that leads to the second caveat: a corpus-driven grammar is not one that is theory-free (cf. Matthiessen and Nesbitt’s ‘On the idea of theory-neutral descriptions’, 1996). As I have remarked elsewhere (2001), there is considerable recourse to grammatical theory in Hunston and Francis’ book. I am not suggesting that they deny this – they are not at all anti-theoretical; but it is important, I think, to remove any such implication from the notion of ‘corpus-driven’ – which is itself a notably theoretical concept.

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I don’t think Tognini-Bonelli believes this either, though there is perhaps a slight flavour in one of her formulations (p. 184): ‘If the paradigm is not excluded from this [corpus-driven] view of language, it is seen as secondary with respect to the syntagm. Corpus-driven linguistics is thus above all a linguistics of parole.’ I wonder. Paradigm and syntagm are the two axes of description, for both of which we have underlying theoretical categories: structure as theory of the syntagm, system as theory of the paradigm. It is true that, in systemic theory, we set up the most abstract theoretical representations on the paradigmatic axis; there were specific reasons for doing this (critically, it is easier to map into the semantics by that route, since your view of regularity is not limited by structural constraints), but that is not to imply that structure is not a theoretical construct. (Firth, who first developed system-structure theory, did not assign any theoretical priority to the system; but he developed it in the context of phonology, where considerations are rather different.) So I don’t think corpus-driven linguistics is a linguistics of parole – but in any case, isn’t that notion rather self-contradictory? Once you are ‘doing linguistics’, you have already moved above the instantial realm. I can see a possible interpretation for a linguistics of parole: it would be a theory about why some instances  – some actes de parole  – are more highly valued that others: in other words, a stylistics. But the principle behind corpus linguistics is that every instance carries equal weight. The instance is valued as a window on to the system: the potential that is being manifested in the text. What the corpus does is to enable us to see more closely, and more accurately, into that underlying system – into the langue, if you like. The ‘corpus-driven grammar’ is a form of, and so also a major contributor to, grammatics.

7  Aspects of speech: a final note I am assuming that the spoken language corpus includes a significant amount of ‘authentic’ data: unsolicited, spontaneous, natural speech – which is likely to mean dialogue, though there may be lengthy passages of monologue embodied within it. Not because there is anything intrinsically superior about such discourse as text – if anything, it tends to carry a rather low value in the culture; but because the essential nature of language, its semogenic or meaning-creating potential, is most clearly revealed in the unselfconscious activity of speaking. This is where systemic patterns are established and maintained; where new, instantial patterns are all the time being created; and where the instantial

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can become systemic, not (as is more typical of written language) by way of single instances that carry exceptional value (what I have called the Hamlet factor) but through the quantitative effects of large numbers of unnoticed and unremembered sayings. For this reason, I would put a high priority on quantitative research into spoken language, establishing the large-scale frequency patterns that give a language its characteristic profile – its ‘characterology’, as the Prague linguists used to call it. This is significant in that it provides the scaffolding whereby children come to learn their mother tongue, and sets the parameters for systematic variation in register: what speakers recognize as functional varieties of their language are resettings of the probabilities in lexicogrammatical choice. The classic study here was Jan Svartvik’s study of variation in the English voice system (1966). It also brings out the important feature of partial association between systems, as demonstrated in their quantitative study of the English clause complex by Nesbitt and Plum (1988). My own hypothesis is that the very general grammatical systems of a language tend towards one or the other of two probability profiles: either roughly equal, or else skew to a value of about one order of magnitude; and I have suggested why I think that this would make good sense (1993b). But it can only be put to the test by large-scale quantitative studies of naturally occurring speech. Let me say clearly that I do not think this kind of analysis replaces qualitative studies of patterns of wording in individual texts. But it does add further insight into how those patterns work. It is usually said that human language, as it evolved and as it is developed by children, is essentially dialogic. I see no reason to question this; the fact that other primates (like ourselves!) send out warnings or braggings or other emotional signals, without expecting a response, is not an objection that need be taken seriously. Dialogue, in turn, provides the setting for monologic acts; and this is true not only instantially but also systemically: monologue occurs as extended turns in the course of dialogic interaction, as a good-sized corpus of casual conversation will show. Clearly monologue is also the default condition of many systemic varieties: people give sermons, make speeches, write books, broadcast talks and so on; but they do so, even if it is largely for their own satisfaction, only because there are others who listen to them (or at least hear them) and who read them. Any piece of spoken monologue can be thought of as an extended turn: either given to the speaker by the (contextual) system, as it were, like a conference paper, or else having to be established, and perhaps struggled for, as happens in casual conversation. Speakers have many techniques for holding the floor,

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prolonging their speaking tum. Some of these techniques are, in Eggins and Slade’s terms, generic: you switch into telling a joke, or embark on a personal narrative. But one very effective strategy is grammatical: the clause complex. The trick is to make the listeners aware another clause is coming. How you do this, of course, varies according to the language; but the two main resources, in many languages, are intonation and conjunction. These are, in effect, two mechanisms for construing logical–semantic relationships in lexicogrammatical form  – in wording. The highly intricate clause complexes that I referred to earlier as a phenomenon of informal speech embroil the listener in a shifting pattern of phono-syntactic connections. This is not to suggest that their only function is to hold the floor; but they help, because listeners do, in general, wait for the end of a sequence – it takes positive energy to interrupt. What the clause complex really does, or allows the speaker to do, is to navigate through and around the multidimensional semantic space that defines the meaning potential of a language, often with what seem bewildering changes of direction, for example, from the doctor’s expectations to corridors lined with washing to the danger of knocking out expectant mothers, all the while keeping up an unbroken logical relationship with whatever has gone before (Text 3). It is grammatical logic, not formal logic; formal logic is the designed offspring of grammatical logic, just as the written sentence is the designed offspring of the clause complex of speech. This kind of spontaneous semantic choreography is something we seldom find other than in unselfmonitored spoken discourse, typically in those monological interludes in a dialogue; but it represents a significant aspect of the power of language as such. I have been trying to suggest, in this chapter, why I think that the spoken language corpus is a crucial resource for theoretical research: research not just into the spoken language, but into language in general. Because the gap between what we can recover by introspection and what people actually say is greatest of all in sustained, unselfmonitored speaking, the spoken language corpus adds a new dimension to our understanding of language as semiotic system-&-process. That there is such a gap is not only because spontaneous speech is the mode of discourse that is processed at furthest remove from conscious attention, but also because it is the most complexly intertwined with the ongoing socio-semiotic context. Tognini-Bonelli’s observation that all corpus studies imply a contextual theory of meaning is nowhere more cogent than in the contexts of informal conversation. Hasan and Cloran’s work on their corpus of naturally occurring dialogue between mothers and their three-to-four-year-old children showed how necessary it was not merely to note the situations in which meanings were

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exchanged but to develop the theoretical model of the contextual stratum as a component in the overall descriptive strategy (Hasan and Cloran, 1990 [2009]; Hasan, 1991, 1992b, 1999b; Cloran, 1994). People’s meaning potential is activated – and hence ongoingly modified and extended – when the semogenic energy of their lexicogrammar is brought to bear on the material and semiotic environment, construing it, and reconstruing it, into meaning. In this process, written language, being the more designed, tends to be relatively more focused in its demands on the meaning-making powers of the lexicogrammar; whereas spoken language is typically more diffuse, roaming widelier around the different regions of the network. So spoken language is likely to reveal more evidence for the kind of middle range ‘grammar patterns’ and ‘extended lexical units’ that corpus studies are now bringing into relief; and this in tum should enrich the analysis of discourse by overcoming the present disjunction between the lexical and the grammatical approaches to the study of text. Already in 1935, Firth had recognized the value of investigating conversation, remarking ‘it is here we shall find the key to a better understanding of what language really is and how it works’ (1957: 32). He was particularly interested in its interaction with the context of situation, the way each moment both narrows down and opens up the options available at the next. My own analysis of English conversation began in 1959, when I first recorded spoken dialogue in order to study rhythm and intonation. But it was Sinclair, taking up another of Firth’s suggestions – the study of collocation (see Sinclair, 1966) – who first set up a computerized corpus of speech. Much later, looking back from the experience with COBUILD, Sinclair wrote (1991: 16): ‘a decision I took in 1961 to assemble a corpus of conversation is one of the luckiest I ever made.’ It would be hard now to justify leaving out conversation from any corpus designed for general lexicogrammatical description of a language. Christian Matthiessen, using a corpus of both spoken and written varieties, has developed ‘text-based profiles’: quantitative studies of different features in the grammar which show up the shifts in probabilities that characterize variation in register. One part of his strategy is to compile a subcorpus of partially analysed texts, which serve as a basis for comparison and also as a test site for the analysis, allowing it to be modified in the light of ongoing observation and interpretation. I have always felt that such grammatical probabilities, both global and local, are an essential aspect of ‘what language really is and how it works’. For these, above all, we depend on spoken language as the foundation.

The Spoken Language Corpus

Appendix 1.1:  Transcripts of recorded conversations Text 1: Passage from tape recording transcribed about 1960 Key: Indented lines represent the contributions of the interviewer, the asterisks in the informant’s speech indicating the points at which such contributions began, or during which they lasted. The hyphens (-, --, --- ) indicate relative lengths of pauses. Proper names are fictitious substitutes for those actually used. The informant is a graduate, speaking RP with a normal delivery. i is this true I heard on the radio last night that er pay has gone net pay but er -retirement age has gone up -- *for you chaps* *yes but er* to seventy*   5 *yes I think that’s scandalous* *but is it right is it true* *yes it is true yes it is true* *well it’s a good thing* yes *but the thing is that er -*everybody wants more money -10 *I mean you’ve got your future secure* but er the thing is you know -- er I mean of course er the whole thing is absolutely an absolute farce because -- really with this grammar school business it’s perfectly true that - that you’re drawing all your your brains of the country are going to come increasingly from those schools -- therefore 15 you’ve got to have able men -- and women to teach in them -- but you want fewer and better**- that’s the thing they want *hm* - fewer grammar schools and better ones --- *because at the *Mrs Johnson was saying* 20 moment* it’s no good having I mean we’ve got some very good men where I am which is a bit of a glory hole-- but er there’s some there’s some good men

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26

there there’s one or two millionaires nearly there’s Ramsden who cornered the -English text book market-- *and er*- yes he’s got a net income of 25 *hm* about two thousand five hundred a year and er there’s some good chaps there I mean you know first class men but it’s no good having first class men ­dealing with the tripe that we get*--* you see that’s the trouble that you’re wasting it’s 30 *hm* a waste of energy -- urn an absolute waste of energy -- your -- your er method of selection there is all wrong -- *um *but do you think it’s better to have-- er teachers who’ve had a lot of experience -- having an extra five years to help solve this -- problem of 35 of fewer teachers -- er or would you say -- well no cut them off at at sixty-five and let’s get younger* *it’s no good having I would if I were a head I’d and you know and I know well I’d chuck everyone out who taught more than ten years on principle*-40 *ha ha ha why* *because after that time as a boy said they either become too strict or too laxative*-*ha ha ha ha ha ha- hm* *yes -but ha ha ha no they get absolutely stuck you know after ten years * *45 -- they just go absolutely dead -- we all *hm* do- bound to you know you you churn out the same old stuff you see- but um- the thing is I mean it’s no good having frightfully- well anyway they they if they paid fifteen hundred a year I mean -- if you could expect to get 50 that within-- ten years er er for graduates er you you still wouldn’t get the first class honours- scientists- they’d still go into industry because it’s a present er a pleasanter sort of life * * you’re living in an adult world and you’re *yes* living in a world which is in the main stream-- I mean school mastering is 55 bound to be a backwater you’re bound to you want some sort of sacrifice sacrificial type of people you know ** *yes* no matter what you pay them you’ve got to pay them more but you’ve got to give-- there’s got to be some reason you know some- you’re always giving

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60 out and you get nothing back ** *hm* and --- I mean they don’t particularly want to learn even the bright ones they’d much rather-- fire paper pellets out of the window or something or--no they don’t do that but they they-- you know you’ve got to drive them all 65 the time --- they’ve got to have some sort of exterior reason apart from your own -- personal satisfaction in doing it you know

Text 2: Passages from Svartvik and Quirk (1980: 215–18) A

||can be‧ CONVEX █ 936 ||or it can be ‘ CON + CAVE █ 937 《4 to 5 sylls》+ 938 + ||YES █‧ 939 ||that’s -- ||that’s ∆very GOOD █ ‧+ 940 I ||wouldn’t be ∆ABLE 941 █ to || HAVE ′that one █ 942 for ||some ′reason you see ‧ ′||THIS █ ‧943 the ||CHECKER board effect █ -- 944 [ə:m] I re||coil ′∆BADLY from THIS █ 945 I ||find I ∆hadn’t LOOKED at it █ 946 and I ||think it’s ∆probably re′minds me you ‘know of ∆nursing ∆{WALTER} ‘through his ′′∆THROAT █ -- 947 ||when you ∆PLAY █ 948 ||CHECKER boards {or ||SOMETHING █ } █ 949 I ||think it’s [rə] it re||minds me of the ∆LUDO board that {||WE HAD █ } █ ‧ 950 and I ||just RE∆COILED █ 951 ||straight AWAY █ 952 《and thought》

C

953 ★

>A

( -- laughs) ‧ ||[m] █ ★

《not》||not THAT one █ ‧ ★954 and I ||didn’t look IN∆SIDE █ 935 but ||that’s + ∆very ∆FINE █ + 952

C

956

+||[m] █ -+ 957 ||[m] █

>A

958

||ISN’T it █ -- 959 ||VERY ′fine █ -- - -- 960 ||YES █

C

it’s ||very INTERESTING █ 962 to ||try and ∆ANALYSE █ 963 ||why one LIKES █ 964 ||abstract PAINTINGS █ 965 cos ||I ′∆LIKE ′those CHECKS █‧ 966 ||just the ∆{FACT} that they’re ′∆NOT █‧ 967 ||all [ə:] ‧∆at RIGHT ′angles █‧968 ||means that my ∆eyes ∆don’t go out of ∆FOCUS █ 969 ||chasing the ∆LINES █

A

970

C

||they ∆actually ∆can ∆FOLLOW the ′lines █‧ 972 [əm]with||out -- [?ə:] sort of ||getting out of ∆ FOCUS █

A

||yes I’ve ∆GOT it NOW █ 974 ||it’s ||it’s [i] ∆those ex′act two COLOURS you SEE‧{TO||GETHER █}█‧ 975 he ||had [ə:m] -- he ||had a ∆blue and orange CRANE █ -- 976 I re||member it ∆very WELL █ -- ‧ 977 ||and you know ||one of those ′things that ∆ wind UP █ -- 978 ||AND [ə] █ -- 979 ||that’s IT █‧

C

980

961

||YES █

971

973

it ||does re∆mind ME █ 981 of MEC||CANO ′boxes█‧

Halliday in the 21st Century

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A

982

||YES █ 983 +well+

C

984

+ the ||box+ that CON∆TAINS★ Mec′cano 《ACTUALLY》█ ★

A

985 ★

C

990

+||[mhm] █ +

>A

989

the be||ginning it was ∆LETHAL █ 991 if ||any body ′else CAUGHT it █

C

992

||YEAH █

>A

||YES █ 986 ||well we ★ ∆had a ′∆bad ′DO you ′know █ 987 we ||had a -- ‧ ||《oh》we ∆had ▷six or ∆eight WEEKS █ 988 when the ′had [ə:m] -- a ′THROAT █ 989 +||which+ was [ə] -- well at

it was ||lethal to ex∆pectant ′mothers with ∆small CHILDREN █ -- 994 ||AND [ə] █ -- 995 I ||had to do ∆barrier ★ ∆NURSING █ -- 996 it was ||pretty HORRIBLE █‧ 997 and the ||whole [ə] ∆CORRIDOR █ ‧ 998 ★ was ||full of ∆pails of DISINFECTANT █ 999 you ||KNOW █ 993

C

1000 ★

A

and you ||went IN █‧ 1002 ||AND 《of ||course 2 to 3 sylls》∆ barrier ′nursing I ∆didn’t go ′in in a MASK █ 1003 I ||COULDN’T with a ‘child that SMALL █‧ 1004 and I ||didn’t ′care if I CAUGHT it █ 1005 ||but I mean it was [i?] ||《ours ∆emptied》OUTSIDE you SEE █

C

1006

>A C >A

||[m] ★

1001

||[m] █

||and you ∆had to‧∆come OUT █ 1008 ||and you ‧ ∆brought ∆all these ∆THINGS █ 1009 ||on to a pre∆pared ★ ′surgical BOARD █★ 1007

||[m] █ -- ★1011 ||[m] █

1010 ★

and you ||stripped your GLOVES off █ 1013 be||fore you ∆TOUCHED ′anything █ 1012

C

1014

||[m] █

>A

1015

and you ||DISINFECTED ||oh it was ||oh it was ∆really APPALLING █

C

1016

||[m] █

>A

1017

||AND [əm] █ -- - -- 1018 || I don’t think the ′doctor had EX∆PECTED █ that I ||WOULD do ′barrier ′nursing ★ you SEE █ ★

1019

C >A

1020★

||[m] █ ★

《I ||think》she said ′something a′bout [i ? œ] she ||wished that ∆everybody would ′take‧[ə:] the ′thing ′∆SERIOUSLY █ 1022 you ||KNOW █ 1023 when they were ||TOLD {as || I did █}█ 1024 cos she ||came in and the ∆whole CORRIDOR █‧1025 was ′||LINED █‧ 1021

The Spoken Language Corpus

C >A

C >A

1026 ★

29

||[m] █

with★ ||various FORMS of █‧ 1028 ||WASHING ‧ and SO on █ 1029 ||BUT [ə] █ ‧ 1030 ||after ALL █ 1031 I mean you ||CAN’T go ’down and SHOP █ 1032 if you ||know that ′you’re ′going to ∆knock ’out an ex∆pectant MOTHER █ -1033 it was ||some ▷《violent》 ▷STREPTOCOCCUS {that he’d ||GOT █}█ -1034 ||AND █ 1035 he ||could have gone to an ∆iso’lation HOSPITAL █ 1036 but I ||think she just ∆DEEMED {that he was ★||too SMALL – 1027 ★

||YES █ 1038 ||[m] █ 1039 ||[m] █ ‧ ★

1037★

{for the EX||PERIENCE █}█}★ -- 1040 ||and then ∆after he’d ∆HAD him █ [ə:] you ||know ∆HAD him for a ′few days at HOME █ 1042 this ||couldn’t be ∆DONE █ 1036 1041

C

1043 ★

||[mhm] █

A

||she ′made the DE∆[CISION] ′∆FOR me REALLY █‧ 1045 ||which at the ∆time I thought was ′very IM∆PRESSIVE █ 1046 but she ||didn’t ∆know me ′very WELL █

C

1047

A

I ||think she ′thought I was a ca∆reer ∆WOMAN‧ 1049 who would be ||only too ∆GLAD █ 1050or ||would say oh well he’s ∆GOT to ′go into a HOSPITAL █ 1051||YOU know █‧ 1052so she ||made the de’cision ∆FOR me █ 1053 and ||THEN said █ 1054 it’s ||too ∆LATE now █ 1055to ||put him into a ‧ an ∆iso’lation HOSPITAL █ 1056 ||I would have ‘had to do ‘that a ∆few ∆DAYS a′go █ 1057 《which》|| I thought 《I didn’t WANT her to ‘do █》 1058 ( -- laughs)

C

1059

A

1061

C

1062★

>A

1063 ★

1044

( -- laughs)

1048

||《this ′one ′man》[ə:] -- ||do ′nurses ′∆TEND to be ag′gressive █‧ 1060or ||does one just ∆THINK that ′nurses are ag′gressive █ well ||that was my ∆DOCTOR █ ||OH █ ★

||AND★ [əm] █ -- 1064 she ||didn’t at that time UNDER∆STAND me ′very well I THINK █ 1065 ★she ||DOES NOW █★

Text 3: Orthographic (and somewhat ‘reduced’) version of Text 2 A: Yes; that’s very good. . . . I wouldn’t be able to have that one for some reason you see: this checker board effect – I recoil badly from this. I find I hadn’t looked at it, and I think it’s probably because it probably reminds me you know of nursing Walter through his throat, when you play checker boards or

30

Halliday in the 21st Century

something. I think it’s – it reminds me of the ludo board that we had, and I just recoiled straight away and thought [mm] not – not that one, and I didn’t look inside; but that’s very fine, [mm mm] isn’t it? – very fine, yes. B: It’s very interesting to try and analyse why one like abstract paintings, ‘cause I like those checks; just the very fact that they’re not all at right angles means that my eyes don’t go out of focus chasing the lines [yes] – they can actually follow the lines without sort of getting out of focus. A: Yes I’ve got it now: it’s those exact two colours you see, together. He had – he had a blue and orange crane, I remember it very well, and you know one of those things that wind up, and – that’s it. B: It does remind me of meccano boxes [yes well] – the box that contains meccano, actually. A. Yes. Well, we had a bad do you know; we had – oh we had six or eight weeks when he had a throat which was – [mhm] well at the beginning it was lethal if anyone else caught it. [yeah] It was lethal to expectant mothers with small children, and I had to do barrier nursing; it was pretty horrible, and the whole corridor was full of pails of disinfectant you know [mm], and you went in, and of course with barrier nursing I didn’t go in in a mask – I couldn’t with a child that small, and I didn’t care if I caught it, but I mean it was – ours emptied outside you see [mm] and you had to come out and you brought all these things on to a prepared surgical board [mm mm] and you stripped your gloves off before you touched anything [mm] and you disinfected – oh it was really appalling [mm]. I don’t think the doctor had expected that I would do barrier nursing you see [mm] – I think she said something about she wished that everybody would take the thing seriously you know, when they were told, as I did, ‘cause she came in and the whole corridor was lined [mm] with various forms of washing and so on, but after all I mean you can’t go down and shop if you know that you’re going to knock out an expectant mother. It was some violent streptococcus that he’d got and he could have gone to an isolation hospital but I think she just deemed that he was too small [yes mm nun] for the experience, and then after we’d had him, you know, had him for a few days at home this couldn’t be done. [mhm] She made the decision for me really, which at the time I thought was very impressive, but she didn’t know me very well: I think she thought I was a career woman who would be only too glad and would say ‘oh well he’s got to go into a hospital’, you know, so she made the decision for me and then said ‘it’s too late now to put him into an isolation hospital; I would have had to do that a few days ago’ – which, I thought, I didn’t want her to do!

The Spoken Language Corpus B: Do nurses tend to be aggressive, or does one just think that nurses are aggressive? A: Well, that was my doctor [oh], and she didn’t at that time understand me very well. I think she does now.

Text 4: Passage from Grimshaw (ed.) 1994 . . . ˄ and I / think she’s a/ware of this and I / think you I know she – . . .// 4 ˄ I / think one / thing that’ll / happen I / think that . . . // 1 ˄ that / Mike may en/courage her // 1 ˄ and I / think that’ll be / all to the / good // P. // 4 ˄ to I what ex/tent are / these / ˄ the / three / theories that she se/lected // 1 truly repre/sentative of / theories in this / area // A. // 1 that’s / it/ ˄ // 1 that’s / it// P. // 1 ˄ they / are in/deed // S. // 1 yeah// P. // 1 oh // 2 they are / the / theories // A. // 1 that’s about / it// P. // 1 they are / not / really repre/sentative / then// S. // 1 well there are // 1 ˄ there are I vari/ations // 1– there are / vari/ations // 1 on / themes but . . . // 4 ˄ but / I don’t / know of any / major con/tender ˄ there / maybe // 1 ˄ well / I don’t / know of / anything that / looks much / different from the / things she’s . . . ˄ she has / looked at in the spe/cific / time // A. // 4 ˄ ex/cept for the/ sense that – P. // l ˄ so / nobody / nobody would at/tack her on / that ground I then if she – // A. // 1 oh no / I don’t / think so // 4 ˄ I think the / only / thing that would be sub/stantially different would be a// 1 real / social / structuralist who would / say// 4 ˄ you / don’t have to / worry about cog/nitions // 1 what you have to / do is / find the lo/cation of these / people in the / social / structure // 1– ˄ and / then you’ll / find out how they’re / going to be/have with/out having to / get into their / heads at / all // 4 ˄ and / that// 1 hasn’t been / tested // 1– ˄ ex/cept in / very / gross / kinds of / ways with// 1 macro / data which has / generally / not been / very satis/factory // 1 yeah / ˄ // 1 ˄ so I can/ tell her that – // 3 ˄ you / know I – S. // l ˄ she’s / won //

31

Halliday in the 21st Century

32

Text 5. Choreographic notation for the clause complex of spoken language (cf. forms of notation in Martin 992). Clause complex from Text 3 above. The doctor probably expected ‘β I would say ‘‘β that he had to go into hospital so . . .

instead of asking me +β . . . she made the decision for me =β which at the time seemed very impressive =3 but she didn’t know me very well

she said “2

it’s too late now to put him into a hospital =2 I should have had to do that a few days ago

+2

and I thought to myself ‘2 I didn’t want ‘β you to do that

Figure 1.1

The Spoken Language Corpus

33

Text 6: Spoken ‘translations’ of some sentences of written English Note: Written originals are those lettered (a) in Set 1 and those in the left hand column of Set 2. 1.  (1a) Strength was needed to meet driver safety requirements in the event of missile impact. (1b) The material needed to be strong enough for the driver to be safe if it got impacted by a missile. (2a) Fire intensity has a profound effect on smoke injection. (2b) The more intense the fire, the more smoke it injects (into the atmosphere). (3a) The goal of evolution is to optimize the mutual adaption of species. (3b) Species evolve in order to adapt to each other as well as possible. (4a) Failure to reconfirm will result in the cancellation of your reservations. (4b) If you fail to reconfirm your reservations will be cancelled. (5a) We did not translate respectable revenue growth into earnings improvement. (5b) Although our revenues grew respectably we were not able to improve our earnings. 2. Sydney’s latitudinal position of 33° south ensures warm summer temperatures.

Sydney is at latitude 33° south, so it is warm in summer.

Investment in a rail facility implies a long term commitment.

If you invest in a facility for the railways you will be committing [funds] for a long term.

[The atomic nucleus absorbs energy in quanta, or discrete units.] Each absorption marks its transition to a state of higher energy.

[. . .] Each time it absorbs energy it (moves to a state of higher energy =) becomes more energetic.

[Evolutionary biologists have always assumed that] rapid changes in the rate of evolution are caused by external events [which is why . . .] they have sought an explanation for the demise of the dinosaurs in a meteorite impact.

[. . .] when [species] suddenly [start to] evolve more quickly this is because something has happened outside [. . .] they want to explain that the dinosaurs died out because a meteorite impacted.

34

Halliday in the 21st Century [it will be seen . . . that] a successful blending of asset replacement with remanufacture is possible. Careful studies are to be undertaken to ensure that viability exists.

[. . .] it is possible both to replace assets and to remanufacture [current equipment ] successfully. We must study [the matter] carefully to ensure that ([the plan] is viable =) we will be able to do what we plan.

The theoretical program of devising models of atomic nuclei has been complemented by experimental investigations.

As well as working theoretically by devising models of atomic nuclei we have also investigated [the topic] by experimenting.

Increased responsiveness may be reflected in feeding behavior.

[The child] is becoming more responsive, so s/he may feed better.

Equation (3) provided a satisfactory explanation of the observed variation in seepage rates.

When we used equation (3) we could explain satisfactorily (the different rates at which we have observed that seepage occurs =) why, as we have observed, [water] seeps out more quickly or more slowly.

The growth of attachment between infant and mother signals the first step in the child’s capacity to discriminate among people.

Because / if / when the mother and her infant grow (more) attached to one another // the infant grows / is growing (more) attached to its mother we know that / she knows that / [what is happening is that] the child has begun / is beginning / is going to begin to be able to tell one person from another / prefer one person over another.

2

Working with Meaning: Towards an Appliable Linguistics (2008)

1 My job here tonight is to launch. But I’m a grammarian; so I can’t help observing that the verb launch represents a material process, one that is ‘effective’ (that is, having two participants, an Actor and a Goal), and in which the Actor is human and the Goal is an artefact, one designed to move across water (in other words, a boat). The process of launching consists in shifting the boat from where it has been built to where it is going to work: from land to water – unlike amphibians, which are born in the water and then move on to the land, boats are born on the land and then move into the water; and they have to be launched. But if we say that the Queen of England launched a new luxury liner, she may have performed some material act, like hurtling a bottle of champagne against the boat; but she didn’t actually push it. Or rather, she didn’t push it materially; she pushed it semiotically. She said something – she performed some act of meaning – which inaugurated the movement of the boat. So even with boats, launching may be a semiotic process rather than a material one; and in that case it is not such a distant step to launching a Centre, which is what I am doing now. And if I have launched my own discourse in this somewhat roundabout way, it is because the power of meaning, this potential for a significant outcome of a semiotic act, is in a sense what this whole enterprise is about. The Centre has my name attached to it, for which I feel keenly embarrassed, because I don’t think I have merited any such distinction  – but also very gratified, because its aims as set out by Jonathan Webster, who initiated the whole First published in Webster, J. J. (2008) Meaning in Context. London: Continuum. pp. 7–23.

36

Halliday in the 21st Century

project, correspond closely to what I have tried to follow as a guiding principle: the search for what I have called an ‘appliable’ linguistics  – a comprehensive and theoretically powerful model of language which, precisely because it was comprehensive and powerful, would be capable of being applied to the problems, both research problems and practical problems, that are being faced all the time by the many groups of people in our modern society who are in some way or other having to engage with language. The colleagues that Jonathan has brought together for this opening of the Centre share a common commitment to taking language seriously, to recognizing the crucial role that is played by language in all the domains of human life. The occasion, as you will have noticed, is not being referred to as a conference; it is a symposium. At a conference, one typically brings together people who may not – often do not – know each other, to talk and exchange ideas on a particular common topic. At a symposium, on the other hand, one brings together people who do know each other, to talk and exchange ideas on anything they like – which means on a variety of very different topics. It takes much more time to exchange ideas with people you don’t know; a lot of effort is spent, by each participant, on establishing their own identity and their own credentials. We don’t need to do that; most of us already know one another, and we can get down to business right away. We come from very diverse backgrounds: different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, different intellectual and disciplinary backgrounds, different ideological backgrounds – belief systems and modes of thought, and even different ways of moving between the two. But we respect each other; and we share a respect for language, as a key element in addressing our tasks and our problems; and, further than that, a conviction that we have to theorize language in order to be able to engage with it and take it seriously. Perhaps I should add to that, in the words of one of my favourite writers J. B. Priestley: seriously, but not solemnly – but then we have a poet among us, Edwin Thumboo, and we can rely on him to make very sure of that. So rather than bringing different approaches to a common goal, those who have come together here are bringing a common approach to a variety of different goals. The focus is thematic, rather than disciplinary. How would I characterize the common theme? I might say: we think about things grammatically – because grammar is the mathematics of meaning. But if that seems obscure, then ‘engaging with language’ means that when you’re facing up to some particular task – it might be managing and passing on information, or preparing courses in science and technology, or diagnosing a medical disorder, or examining the foundations of conflicting beliefs – you say ‘this is a matter of language; if I want

Working with Meaning

37

to understand it, and perhaps to intervene in it, I need to work with language as my terrain.’ It means treating language not as a secondary channel for something else, but as our primary meaning-making resource: for cultural, aesthetic and religious experience, for knowledge and learning, for personal and social identity and interaction, and for material health and well-being. Underlying all of these is the principle that language is the essential condition for the evolution of the human species and for the development of every individual human being  – because language is the defining property of the human brain. I think that we would also, as part of the same general concern, want to make others aware of the importance of working with language. But there is a problem here. You learn a great deal of language, and maybe several languages, as you work your way through school; but you don’t learn about language – you don’t get to study linguistics. So most adult citizens – and I mean educated citizens, including our own colleagues who may be masters and intellectual powerhouses in their own disciplines – retain an image of language that is round about what they learned from their teachers in primary three. It happens that one of our group, Geoff Williams, has himself taught in the classroom, and worked with teachers, in the early years of primary education; and they have taught the children some linguistics (why not? after all, they are already being taught mathematics), and seen what a high level of understanding of grammar they can achieve, beginning at the ages of 6 or 7 – interestingly, it seems to get harder to learn grammatics as you get older, just as it may get harder to learn language itself. But most people have never been exposed to serious discussion of language; so while our colleagues in maths or physics can talk about ‘the localized gravitational attraction exerted by rapidly oscillating and extremely massive cloud loops of cosmic string’, and accountants can set up seminars in ‘evidence of the abnormal accrual anomaly incremental to operating cash flows’, if we mention anything as forbiddingly complex as ‘hypotaxis’ or a ‘non-finite clause’ we are sent away and told to cut out the jargon. Now scientists have to learn how to simplify: to describe in lay people’s terms what they themselves, and their discipline, are on about. But there are limits to how far you can simplify without distorting. Language is not simple; its complexity is the complexity of the human brain, and it is of no help to anyone to pretend it is simpler than it really is. And theory is not simple: it means shifting your depth of focus away from the immediate and using virtual entities as the tools to think with. And any ‘intelligent application of language studies’ has to rest on a theoretical understanding of the nature, the functions and the spacetime organization of human language.

38

Halliday in the 21st Century

2 So I shall need to say a few things about some of the properties of language, looking at language from the standpoint of linguistics as an applied science. I have already brought in one unfamiliar term, ‘grammatics’; but that is a device for avoiding ambiguity. We distinguish, quite consistently, between ‘language’ and ‘the study of language’, and we refer to the study of language as ‘linguistics’. But we use the same term, ‘grammar’, for both the object ‘grammar’ and ‘the study of grammar’, which causes a great amount of confusion. Chinese distinguishes yuyan and yuyanxue; and it also distinguishes – or it can do – between yufa and yufaxue; so ‘grammatics’ equals yufaxue, the study of grammar. Everyone learns grammar; it’s the central processing unit of a language. Linguists also learn grammatics; and that’s what these small children proved capable of doing. And they were not just capable of it; they enjoyed it, and they were able to think with it – an excellent example of outcome-based education. But I shall mix together my observations about language with discussion of concerns of the Centre, with particular reference to those who are taking part in this symposium. To start with a note about language. A language is a semiotic system: a system of meanings; and more than that, it is a system which creates meaning – a meaning-making, or ‘semogenic’, system. Meanings are not stored and lined up somewhere else, either inside us in the mind or outside us in the real world, waiting to be meant; they are brought into being in the shape of language. (They may have to wait to be said; but they are already formed out of language.) All our applications are likely to be concerned in some way or other with the meaning-making power of language. There are many spheres of action where there is work to be done and where language takes a prominent place. Some of these have been the province of applied linguistics for decades; so let me start by referring to two of these, language education and translation; and since we are here in China, but in a corner of China that was a British crown colony for 150 years, I will locate the discussion in contexts where the two languages concerned, Chinese and English, continue to impinge on one another. Chinese and English are the world’s two biggest languages, though with different manifestations of their bigness. Chinese has by far the greatest number of native speakers: if we count just Mandarin, then about 900 million, whereas English and Spanish, the next two in line, each has not much more than onethird of this total. But English has the highest number of users, native and nonnative; you can’t really count these, but say between 1 and 2 billion. English is a

Working with Meaning

39

worldwide language; it is not only international, as second language of countries throughout the Commonwealth, the former British Empire, but also global, in business and finance, in trade and tourism, in diplomacy, and in electronic modes of communication at every level. We shall have here at our symposium the leading authority on ‘World Englishes’, to use the term he introduced himself: Braj Kachru, who has provided the theoretical foundations for understanding the processes whereby a language expands its scope, and with it its semiotic force, in the social and political conditions of the modern world. As an international language, English is just one among many: we can count Arabic, Malay–Indonesian, Hindi–Urdu, Swahili, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese – and of course Mandarin, since it is also a national language of Singapore. But as a global language, at present at least, English is unique: it is the only one. Though it may not be the only one for long, because unlike the Japanese, who despite their earlier predominance in technology and world trade took no steps towards internationalizing their language – if anything, they actively discouraged it – the Chinese are deliberately moving in this direction: I am told that the government has recently announced a plan for a hundred new institutes – Confucian Institutes, I think they will be called – for teaching Chinese to foreigners. And the authorities at different levels have also begun to pay attention to the critical domains of linguistic contact where Chinese interfaces with English. The second of these is perhaps less familiar; so let me look at it first. China produces a huge quantity of material written in English, at every level from official documents and public notices to labels on packaging and tourist brochures; and almost all of it is translated from Chinese – even where there was no original Chinese text, it was written by Chinese and has Chinese meanings behind it. And much of the English is extremely bad; it is either unintelligible, or funny, and sometimes both. It is often assumed that this is because of mistakes in the lexicogrammar (the syntax and/or the vocabulary); such mistakes do occur, of course, as well as low-level errors in the printing. But the real problem arises in the wording as a whole, and even at the level of semantics. Here are two examples from a local tourist brochure: Temple of Sunshine Stone, originally named ‘Lotus Temple’, is one of four famous temples in Xiamen. As a matter of fact, this temple is a rock cave. Its ceiling is made of rock and, therefore, it is also called ‘one piece of tile’. Gulang Island Concert Hall was built in 1984. The design of the hall is so good that at every seat music can be heard.

40

Halliday in the 21st Century

I wrote a piece of bad Chinese to try to give an idea of the effect. It is usually believed that languages differ in their grammar and vocabulary but that the meanings they express are all the same. But in a way this puts it the wrong way round. Of course the words are different; but the grammar, the syntactic structures of Chinese and English, are actually fairly similar. The two languages differ, rather, in the way they construct their meanings. A language, as I said, is a meaning-making system; and different languages can mean in different ways. This will make little difference in a technical or scientific text, because meanings in science and technology tend to be universal; but the language of cultural monuments and tourist guides is much more variable. Whatever the source of the errors, the effect is disastrous: the language sabotages all the value of the culture it is intended to display. We have at the symposium Erich Steiner, a leading specialist in translation theory; and one of his areas of expertise is register-specific translation: that is to say, the problem of matching genres as a whole – say, monumental English with monumental Chinese. Very often the English used in such contexts in China is simply in the wrong register. A great deal of research is needed in this area, into generic variation in Chinese, the limits of acceptability in different contexts of translation, types of equivalence and their priorities, and the like, all of which could be addressed by the Centre. Now to the other topic mentioned earlier, the teaching of Chinese to foreigners. For many customers over the past few decades, ‘applied linguistics’ has meant TESOL, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages; now I read in my Guardian Weekly that Americans are saying they are in ‘critical need’ of Mandarin, with the same consuming fervour (and the same ‘critical’ terminology) as I recall being used after the Russians launched their Sputnik in 1958; we will need Chinese for Speakers of Other Languages, or ChiSOL. I fear that this too might become a disaster area. Some time ago my son studied Chinese for two years in his secondary school in Australia, and it was a great waste of time; not because the teacher was bad, but because the syllabus was bad, a guarantee of failure for all except the students of Chinese origin, those who were already familiar with ways of meaning in Chinese. Now, I myself used to teach Chinese to speakers of English; this was my first profession, and I would say that many of the problems arise when students are expected to learn characters from the beginning. Before you tackle the script, you need to know the language, the way a child does: by the time they start on characters Chinese children are fluent in Chinese, and so it should be with the foreign learner. As I. A. Richards said, more than half a century ago, most language learners cannot cope with sight, sound and sense all being new to them at the same time.

Working with Meaning

41

From my own experience, first as a learner and then as a teacher, I gained the strong impression that the longer you delayed the characters the better the learners performed. Suppose you had a class for three years: if you didn’t introduce any characters until halfway through, then at the end of the three years not only would they know more of the language but they would also know more characters than others who had been made to learn characters right from the start. Once you are reasonably fluent in the language, the charactery is not a formidable problem; but when you’re not, then not only are the characters hard to learn but, more seriously, they inhibit the process of learning the language as well. Of course, adult beginners need writing; so you give them a transcription. Pinyin will serve, provided the accents are included; modified Pinyin might be better, though I never taught it myself; best of all was Y. R. Chao’s ‘GR’ (Gwoyeu Romatzyh), which had just the degree of redundancy that a script really needs to have. Pinyin is excellent for the purposes for which it was designed: as a notation system for use by Chinese in China. But it lacks redundancy; especially if it is used without the tone marks: the distinctions are too minimal to be of help to the foreign learner. Sadly, I doubt whether GR can now be resurrected; but if I was starting a Chinese language school that’s the script I would use. For the adolescent or adult beginner, whatever the language being studied, the teacher they will find most difficult is the half-trained native speaker, who has little idea of the difficulties faced by a foreign learner and is also likely to be encumbered by all the mythology that attaches to any language. Myths about a language always get in the way of effective teaching of the language. A Chinese teaching his or her own language has two such problems to overcome: learning to detach the language from the script, and discarding the idea that Chinese is somehow unique. Of course, Chinese is unique because every language is unique; but Chinese is no more unique than any other – Mandarin is a rather typical specimen of a language of eastern Asia, just as English is a typical specimen of a language of Western Europe. And Chinese remains Chinese whether it is written in characters or not; characters happen to suit Chinese because its morphemes don’t much vary  – but by the same token they also suited Vietnamese, which gave them up, whereas they’re not so well suited to Japanese (other than its Chinese loanwords), yet the Japanese quite happily continue to use them. There is no intrinsic connection between a language and its system of writing; most scripts around the world were borrowed and modified many times over before they arrived at the form and the location where they are now.

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As a teacher of Chinese today I would want at least the following resources: one, a corpus of spoken Chinese, edited and annotated; two, a multiple transcription facility; three, an annotated corpus of texts in different genres; four, a dictionary and thesaurus arranged for foreign learners; five, a reference grammar of Chinese for teachers and for students; six, audio recordings of Mandarin spoken with different regional accents; seven, a game for learning the characters (such as one I devised myself many years ago, based on the old English card game of Happy Families). If Chinese is going to be taught on a worldwide scale, this would not be an unreasonable demand.

3 Both the fields of activity I have been talking about, translation and language teaching between English and Chinese, require comparative studies in which the two languages are brought into relation with each other. My own work as a grammarian began with descriptive studies of Chinese; more importantly, systemic functional linguistics has been widely disseminated in China, and applied in the description of many aspects of the grammar of modern Chinese. Four of the leading scholars concerned are here with us at the symposium: Hu Zhuanglin, of Peking University, who first showed the way with his own researches on Chinese, and founded the Chinese Association of Functional Linguistics; Fang Yan, who will be convening the Thirty-Fifth International Systemic Functional Congress at her own university, Tsinghua, in 2008 (informally known as the Systemic Olympics; please consult Professor Fang for the details!); Zhu Yongsheng of Fudan University, co-author with Professor Hu of the first Chinese introduction to the theory; and Huang Guowen, of Sun Yat-sen University, whose Functional Linguistics Institute is associated with our Centre for possible joint ventures in applications and research. Both Fang Yan and Zhu Yongsheng in their papers at the symposium are presenting aspects of Chinese from a systemic functional point of view, while Huang Guowen, co-authoring with Wang Jin, investigates Chinese–English code-switching in relation to functional varieties and their sociolinguistic contexts. Behind many potential applications of linguistics lie key areas of linguistic research, in particular descriptive, comparative, typological and translation studies; and these now increasingly depend on access to large quantities of data in computable form  – that is, a computerized corpus; and to

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computational linguistic methodology in general. Both English and Chinese are well-described languages for which corpus data are, or are becoming, readily available  – although more is always needed, especially in natural spoken language where so much of the creativity, the creation of new meaning potential in language, tends to take place. At the same time there is still much more to be done in making the corpus friendly to the grammarian. Although the earliest corpora were thought of as sources for the study of grammar, it is much easier to access words than grammatical structures; so they evolved as tools for the lexicologist, and the grammarian had to formulate questions in terms of particular words that it might be hoped would lead to relevant sources of information. Grammarians need the corpus for numerous purposes: for study of quantitative patterns in the grammar, of genre-based grammatical variation, of systems that lie on the border of syntax and vocabulary, and so on. I hope the Centre will be able to nudge the computer further on its way to becoming a meaning machine. I will come back to this towards the end. But let me note here that a number of our colleagues have been using computational methods in working with meaning for quite some time in a variety of different endeavours. Jonathan Webster, Director of the Centre, has carried out a research project in examplebased translation between English and Chinese, using parallel texts from the Hong Kong legal code. John Bateman worked for several years in a computational linguistic project at the Imperial University in Kyoto, Japan. Christian Matthiessen, together with his colleague Wu Canzhong at Macquarie University, has developed methods for multilingual comparison and text generation in English and Chinese, and collaborated with Kazuhiro Teruya, of the University of New South Wales, to include Japanese within the same research framework. Christian Matthiessen has also developed a ‘text profiling’ system which presents a picture of selected grammatical features within a text, so that it becomes possible to characterize different functional varieties of a language in terms of grammatical frequencies. It was from about 1980 onwards, with the ‘fifth generation’ of computers, that the computer became significant as a research tool for finding out more about language; two very large systemic functional grammars in computable form date from around that time, the PENMAN project at the University of Southern California directed by William Mann, on which Christian Matthiessen worked as consultant linguist, and Robin Fawcett’s COMMUNAL project at the University of Cardiff in Wales. It was these experiences which gave systemic functional linguistics a place in the subsequent development of language technology.

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4 These activities that I have been talking about – language teaching, translation, and natural language processing – are familiar today as domains of applied linguistics; and are some of the contexts in which our systemic functional linguistics has evolved. To say that the Centre will be concerned with ‘intelligent’ applications does not mean that all these preceding efforts have been unintelligent. To me what it means is that what has been learned from these experiences is that if you want to apply something, you have to have a theory to apply; there has to be a coherent body of knowledge behind the applications – but, by the same token, that body of knowledge will be shaped, modified, extended by what results from the effort to apply it. So what is systemic? What is functional? What is linguistics? To do linguistics means to describe languages and to theorize language: that is, to explain language in theoretical terms. If you do functional linguistics, this means that your explanations are functional; but this itself is a complex notion. At the most abstract level, the nature and organization of language – its ‘architecture’, or (more dynamically) its town planning and traffic flow  – are explained by reference to the most general functions that language evolved to serve in human lives; more concretely, the detailed internal workings of the grammar are explained in terms of their functional interdependence and mutual impact. If you do systemic functional linguistics, it implies perhaps three other things besides: one, that these general functions are theorized as ‘metafunctions’, as distinct modes of meaning, each making a specific contribution to the overall structure of language, like the different types of musical instrument in the orchestra; two, that the underlying model of a language is ‘systemic’, a network of interrelated systems that collectively define the meaning-making potential of a language (language seen as a resource, not as a set of rules); three, that language has a stratified, stepwise form of organization, in which the ordering relation is the semiotic one of realization, not the material, physical one of causality: the ‘strata’ of language are related as value-&-token, not as cause-&-effect. I shall come back to this last point later on. As in any other field, a theory of language like this does not emerge readymade; it evolves gradually, and many voices contribute to it. And of course it goes on evolving. It is a scientific theory, in the sense of a system of abstract concepts which helps us to understand what language is and how it works; and it is always under pressure as new challenges appear: new languages being described, new corpus data from languages already described, and findings from

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new applications, particularly in language technology. To me a theory has always meant a strategic tool, a problem-solving device, a guide to action; and this notion, of what I call an ‘appliable’ theory, implies a theory that learns from the experience of being applied (or we learn; we can’t yet implement it as an automated learning device). In language technology, for example, systemic grammar has been being used in text generation for a long time, since Winograd’s adaptation of it in the early 1970s, and much has been learned from the systems developed by Mann and Matthiessen, by John Bateman and by Robin Fawcett. Recently Jon Patrick, also one of our speakers at the symposium, has used it in the field of document classification, in a project designed to identify fake money-making schemes, or ‘scams’, put out in webpages on the internet. Positive results in Jon Patrick’s project suggest ways of extending this kind of application, perhaps taking in more complex systems in the grammar, including interpersonal systems of ‘appraisal’ as theorized by Jim Martin and Peter White. John Bateman draws attention to a defect in the methodology – itself a theoretical issue – whereby the syntagmatic representations, the analyses of linguistic structure, simply cannot be automated to do the job required; it is, he says, ‘beyond the capabilities of the linguistic resources provided’. He may be right – John usually is, though I do recall two earlier occasions in my life when I have been told that my grammar could not be computed and so must be wrong. One was in 1956, when I analysed a text in English, Chinese and Italian for a machine translation project at Cambridge, and another in the late 1960s when I wrote a network for generating the forms of the English verb. In each case, when the next generation of computers came along, the problem seemed to have disappeared. However, it would be unwise to hope that this might happen again. In Erich Steiner’s project, the grammar is being put into service for tackling a problem in translation theory. There is a perception that translators, at least in some registers, tend to make their translated text more explicit than the original: they fill in certain gaps and implications in the argument. What are the criteria for saying the translation is more explicit, and what linguistic moves take place in the process of explicitation? In this sort of computational study, as with those of Jon Patrick and John Bateman, we move between the lexicogrammar and the semantics. In fact we are always doing this when we are working with meaning; but, although these are recognized in the theory as different strata, in using the theory we don’t seem to keep them apart. It has always been an issue how, how far, and where  – or even whether  – semantics and lexicogrammar are to be represented as distinct. Lexicogrammar is the internal organization of meaning as a self-regulating categorial system;

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semantics is the organization of meaning as interface between the lexicogrammar and the outside world – the ecosocial environment of human experience and human social relationships. Robin Fawcett, always a leading thinker in systemic functional theory, does not treat the two as different strata but maps the distinction into that between system and structure, reducing semantics to the more abstract facet of grammar. But his perspective is predominantly a syntactic one; whereas I need to separate the two in face of the complexity of language overall. You have to ‘thicken’ the description for various reasons: first, to explain that meanings are organized in different systemic spaces, called ‘typological’ and ‘topological’ by Martin and Matthiessen, at these two levels; secondly, to account for the two different kinds of structure, of different magnitudes, that are involved; and thirdly, most critically perhaps, to handle metaphor, which is one of the most pervasive of all meaning-making strategies (being addressed by Zhu Yongsheng in his paper at the symposium). Metaphor is a cross-coupling (decoupling, and recoupling in a different alignment) between the semantics and the lexicogrammar; it is a basic feature built in to the architecture of language, a concomitant of what Jim Martin calls ‘stratal tension’. The central problem of working with meaning is that being highlighted by Ruqaiya Hasan. She herself, both in earlier researches into language and verbal art (how language comes to be highly valued, as literature) and in a major research project into conversation between mothers and pre-school age children, to find out what kind of learning goes on in ordinary everyday interaction, had to focus particularly on the construction of meaning in context, either where the context had to be constructed within the text, as in a literary work, or where it was ‘given’ by the situation of language use, as in the development and deployment of language in early childhood. When people are using language – including children, talking and listening without reflecting on what they are doing – they operate with a sophisticated model of meaning, such as Ruqaiya Hasan represents in her semantic networks; whereas their received notions of meaning at the conscious level are simplistic and impoverished (so ‘semantic’ comes to mean exactly the opposite of what it signifies to a functional linguist). Hasan stresses that intelligent applications of language studies always demand the modelling of meaning. Christian Matthiessen explains how this requirement led to the evolution of the ‘meaning base’ in place of the ‘knowledge base’ of artificial intelligence research. This move was an essential step in the advance from highly specific, dedicated expert systems, for which a new inventory of concepts, and a new grammatical description, had to be provided every time,

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to a large-scale exportable system which could be adapted to a variety of tasks where language technology was involved. Such systems, as Matthiessen makes clear, depend on a consistent ‘metatheory’, a theory of the metalanguage that is being used in modelling language. This cannot be a ‘collection code’, a patchwork of bits and pieces of knowledge assembled under the banner of eclecticism  – often claimed to be theory-free ‘common sense’ but usually reflecting a level of understanding well below what is inscribed in our commonsense knowledge. The metatheory will offer – will demand – a comprehensive vision of language: one that, like language itself, will always be able to change its perspective and its focal length; and that also, like language itself, is constantly renewing its connection with life and updating its meaning potential.

5 A scientific theory is a system of related meanings – a ‘semiotic system’ – whose arguments are virtual phenomena, virtual processes and entities, that exist only on the semiotic plane. They owe their existence to the resource of grammatical metaphor; such as we find in the conducting capacity depends on the width of the channel where all the doings and happenings are turned into or made dependent on nouns, like ‘conducting’ and ‘capacity’ and ‘width’, while all the logical relations between the happenings are turned into verbs, like ‘depends on’. The thing called ‘capacity’ is a virtual thing; it doesn’t exist in the material world, but it is robust and dependable in the virtual universe of theory. A language likewise is a semiotic system: it is not made of matter, like a physical system; it is made of meaning. It is an evolved system: it was not designed, though people often try to interfere in it by design. Language evolved in the human species along with the human brain, as the form taken by higherorder consciousness. It is a highly complex system, involving social, biological and physical forms of organization: it is learned and used in contexts of social life, processed biologically in the brain via the organs of speech and hearing, and manifested in the physical process of sound waves moving through the air. And much of the time it hides below the level of our conscious attention. A language is also a theory. The lexicogrammar of every language is a theory of human experience: a way of ordering and interpreting the natural world and the inner world of our own consciousness. It is also, and at the same time, an enactment of our interpersonal relationships. The complexity of the human brain

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came along with – as an aspect of – the increasing complexity of our relations with our material environment and with each other; and, as part of the evolution of the brain, there came language. In the course of doing its job, or rather its jobs, that of construing the human experience and enacting the social process, language evolved a number of characteristics. It is indeterminate – its categories are fuzzy, not clearly defined. It is probabilistic  – it works with tendencies, rather than with certainties. It is unquantifiable  – some features of language can be measured, in the form of ‘information’, but most can’t. It abounds in complementarities  – pairs of contradictory codings both of which must be adopted to get an in-depth understanding of what is meant. And it is stratified, into a series of levels of organization or ‘strata’; these are, in technical terms, semantic, lexicogrammatical, phonological and phonetic – meaning, wording and the two facets of expression in sound. Some languages also have a graphological mode of expression  – in writing; but writing is secondary; it evolved only two or three times in the course of history, and, as I said, there is no inherent bonding between a language and its script  – most scripts are the result of numerous cycles of borrowing and adaptation. The relations among the various strata are complex; but there is one continuous thread, that of realization. While physical processes, those instantiating physical systems, take place in time, and so can be explained in terms of the relations of cause and effect, semiotic processes are different. Their manifestations are of course physical, and so located in time or space: speech unfolds in time, writing progresses through space. But their internal order is not based on space-time; it is based on realization. Meanings are realized as wordings; wordings are realized as sounds or writing. Each step is a pairing of value and token, or ‘signified’ and ‘signifier’ in the terminology of theory of signs. Since human beings are programmed to find meaning in nearly everything that happens (or else doesn’t happen), any phenomenon can be treated as semiotic, the way a doctor interprets your high fever as a token, or symptom, of influenza. Influenza doesn’t cause the fever; influenza is a virtual condition that is manifested, or realized, as a fever. In linguistic terms, influenza is a meaning; it is a term in a theory, a theory of the human bodily condition. With this conceptual fit the Centre could collaborate readily with medical specialists  – especially where the pathology is manifested in disorders of language, like aphasia or Alzheimer’s syndrome. There are other semiotic systems that are closely related to language, those that function together as ‘multiple modalities’ in the formation of text: visual

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images of all kinds, which we could also see as forms of visual art. These are sometimes thought of as being independent of language; but most of the time they are parasitic on language, like the PowerPoint presentations analysed by Hu Zhuanglin. All those who produce and receive such images are also users of language. So although visual aids such as maps, plans, charts, diagrams, figures, tables and graphs may present information that is not verbalized, that is complementary to the information in the wording, the textual fusion always takes place in the semantics – that is, in the meaning system of language, not outside it. Hence the whole text is accessible to a linguistic theory – a critical factor if the Centre becomes involved in monumental discourses such as those of tourist guides and cultural displays. The issue of realizational systems is in fact central to the intelligent application of language studies. David Butt has taken this up in his paper for the symposium, pointing up the robustness of such systems and stressing that along with our ‘systems thinking’, a key term in the theory and management of complexity, we need to be aware that many of the systems we are dealing with are in fact realizational systems. David Butt and Christian Matthiessen, at the Centre for Language in Social Life at Macquarie University, have been working in the field of ‘systems safety’, examining breakdowns in health care services and aircraft safety procedures, and showing that systems are liable to fail at a point of high semiotic risk, where the key factor is the management and transmission of ‘information’ – of meaning, in our systemic functional perspective.

6 In other words, failure in a system is often language failure – a failure in the flow and return of meaning. So can we say that success is also often language success? Meanings have been construed, exchanged and interpreted, transformed into appropriate action. We ought to be able to think this way about learning. Where learning has been successful, the learner’s meaning potential has been extended, the new meanings integrated with the rest (which may have necessitated some shaking up of meanings that were already there); the new resources perhaps questioned, or even challenged, and the outcomes judged by some criterion of success. In learning in daily life – commonsense learning, let us say – learners typically manage their own search for meaning, and judge the success of the outcome for themselves; but where this could be problematic – something might blow us all apart if they fail – we train them: we manage the meanings for them,

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and set ourselves up as judges of their success. Unlike commonsense knowledge, educational knowledge has to be able to be assessed. So any assessment of ‘learning outcomes’ in education, whether of the pedagogy that goes with them or of the effectiveness of the results, will depend on analytical awareness of the meanings that are involved. To be able to process the knowledge that has been gained, to pick it up and run with it, use it to think with, the student must be capable of extracting meaning from a text. To do this, the student has to extend the chain of realization outside language, to take into account the context, the domain at the other side of the semantic interface. Moreover the student has to be able to look from either end, to control both perspectives: the text as realization of the context, but also the text construing the context  – in other words, using language to learn. Geoff Williams considers the question of making the whole design, or architecture, of language explicit to the learner as part of the ‘abstract toolkit’ for learning with. Geoff is thinking of the primary school; but perhaps we might raise the same question at the tertiary level as well! It has always been a concern of systemic functional theory to extend our realizational vista outside the core levels of language itself, to include within the scope of the theory what my own teacher, J. R. Firth, called the ‘exterior relations’ of language. To understand instances of language, language as text, we bring in the context of situation, the frame within which the text is playing a part. To understand the potential of language, language as system, we bring in the context of culture, which means not just the traditional culture within which each language has evolved but the interlocking spheres which typically define the culture of a modern community. In computing with meaning, beyond the meaning base there has to be some representation of the context. Michio Sugeno, formerly of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, has been a pioneer of fuzzy computing, and also of ‘intelligent computing’ which is his own contribution to, and extension of, computing with words. His work over a number of years had many applications in the material realm, from fuzzy washing machines to automated public transport systems. He recently spent five years at the Brain Science Institute in Tokyo, directing a project in the Laboratory for Language-Based Intelligent Systems, called a ‘language­-based approach to creating the brain’. He used the systemic functional model to construct a wording base, a meaning base and also a ‘context base’ in computable form, as a way in to investigating the nature and functioning of the human brain. It seemed to me that Sugeno’s interpretation of computing with words was really computing with meanings. He considers that, if computers are to advance now any further, they will have to be taught to think like human beings. I have referred to this as

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‘thinking grammatically’, but that was meant in contrast to thinking logically; in fact people don’t remember, store and reason with wordings, they remember, store and reason with the meanings. Meanings are construed in the form of wording, and it is as wordings that they are exchanged in social life. So working with meaning takes us inside the human brain; it also takes us outside, to human societies, and to the restlessness, the constant upheavals, of meaning in the modern world. Edwin Thumboo, who has studied the diffusion of English in Kachru’s ‘outer circle’ of countries where it has domesticated itself in the regional and local cultures, heads his talk ‘signifiers without the signified’, as the language ‘becomes neutral . . . without the energy and the identity of a strong cultural backing’ (and I would add: without being flushed out by a continuing tide of toddlers). I do feel I want to distinguish here between the international and the global: between ‘international English’ and ‘global English’. As a speaker, originally, of a northern variety of British English, I feel very aware that I have lost my context base; but that is mainly because I am an old man and my childhood world no longer exists. But English has put on new meanings in its own original home; and, by another process of cross-coupling, akin to metaphor, it has created new meanings out of the impact between its own native semiotic and those of lndia, Africa, south-east Asia and elsewhere. Becoming international does expand the meaning potential  – though very few speakers control as much of it as Edwin does himself. But globalization seems different. Here on the one hand the language finds itself hijacked, by the community of big players – bankers, business executives, their managers and lobbyists and advertisers – managers of meaning in a virtual world where there are no people doing things but only abstractions like visions and targets and outcomes and cash flow and maximizing shareholder value and winning the war on terror. At the other end are the large community of small players who use English to text each other via their computers and mobile phones; this is a different language, highly volatile and interpersonal – though always open to being invaded by the dominant meanings of the first. Where English is now, Chinese may be next. Chinese has no problem in taking on all the new meanings, and has already incorporated enough of them to be able to participate – though the discourses are not yet as wholly naturalized in Chinese as they are in English. There has already been the experience of Mandarin spreading around the multilingual and multidialectal regions of China; but that hardly at all perturbed its ways of meaning, whereas as it starts to get globalized it will also get resemanticized. And the Chinese will have to get accustomed to their language being performed by foreigners – badly.

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7 The Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics is a healthy birthplace for the Centre, combining as it does teaching and research programmes in Chinese, in translation and in linguistics, and having as its next door neighbour the Department of English. Our overseas visitors may not appreciate what an unusual environment this is. Throughout China, while there are of course numerous departments of Chinese, and also of English, and not a few departments of translation studies, there are almost no departments in the critical field of linguistics. Languages are taught without reference to any general theory of language or overview of the world’s languages. Even here in Hong Kong there is as far as I know only one other than this one, the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. ‘Chinese linguistics’ is taught in Chinese departments, ‘English linguistics’ is taught in English departments; each language is presented sui generis, as if no other languages existed; and the description is ‘flattened’ as a result. We might contrast this situation with that of India, where almost all major universities have linguistics departments in which languages, and language itself, find a place in the structure of knowledge. So it has been a pleasure and a privilege to me to be working in this environment of C, T and L, all contributing to the nurturing of the Centre. I feel I have been very fortunate to be able to spend my working life working with meaning – working with all the different meanings of meaning, and engaging in a constant struggle to construe the wordings with which to understand them, and to discourse about them with other people. Many years ago I wrote a book about very young children’s language; I called the book Learning How to Mean. It then got translated into one or two other languages; but the translators always complained that they couldn’t translate the title, because in their language you couldn’t say the equivalent of ‘learning to mean’. I pointed out that you couldn’t say it in English either; but I meant it, so I said it, and why couldn’t they do the same? Translators may explicitate, as Erich Steiner has demonstrated; but they seem to think they’re not allowed to innovate, even to catch up with the original. It can often become a problem: how to make your meanings explicit first to yourself, which you do by wording them; and then, even more, how to make them intelligible to others. I have usually been concerned with other people’s questions about language rather more than those formulated by linguists; such questions never have easy answers – if they had, they wouldn’t need to be asked; but at least the questions themselves are reasonably clear, because they are problem-oriented, and there are criteria for evaluating the answers, which either

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help to solve the problems or they don’t. If they don’t, you simply have to drop them, or at least send them back to the workshop for improving the design. I had thought that my ‘translation at ranks’ was a sensible working model for machine translation; but no-one else ever did, so – regretfully – I dropped it. It obviously wasn’t such a bright idea after all. It wasn’t explicit enough to test or to argue about. Thinking about what makes such endeavours worthwhile, I came up with three factors, and then realized that they could all be brought together under the one guiding principle, that of being inclusive. And again I can’t help thinking about them grammatically, because one is ideational, one interpersonal and one is textual. The ideational aspect is what I call comprehensiveness: we try to keep in focus the whole of language – meaning and expression, system and text, child and adult, local and global, reflection and action, and so on; which means that when you are struggling with a problem you can go and look at it from round the back, like an infant who has just learned how to crawl: you vary your angle of vision, and see if your ideas still make sense. The interpersonal aspect is just that: recognizing the importance of bringing people into the discourse, at all levels, and making them feel at home within the meaning group – this is something I always ask of organizers of conferences, where newcomers can very easily feel lost. The textual aspect is that of sharing information: organizing the discourse so that individuals and groups can keep in touch, can see its thematic source and its information focus, and so can participate rewardingly in the ongoing exchange of ideas. Does this mean we all have to talk to each other in English, to accept it as the global language of intellectual activity? I hope not. I have always encouraged our colleagues to speak and write in their own language, especially where they are speaking or writing about that language, so that the protocol version of a lexicogrammatical study of Chinese, for example, is the version that is written in Chinese. Our colleagues in China often do write in Chinese, which is good for the development of the field because they can then be easily read by other Chinese scholars who are not specialists in English. But by the same token, the work doesn’t get read by foreigners who don’t know the Chinese language. This problem does need to be addressed: perhaps by some kind of English or multilingual digest of functional linguistic studies in China; and likewise for works written in other languages. Some of this, such as the writing of abstracts, is surely now something that could be automated. Meanwhile I welcome a gathering such as the present one, where those of us working with meaning, in different directions but from a common point of

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departure, can convene to exchange our own meanings, with one another and with other interested parties. Many thanks to Jonathan Webster for setting the whole event in train and making it possible for this symposium to happen – and to the university and its representatives here for supporting it and taking part. I hope that many of those who have come to view the launch will take this chance, over the next two and a half days, to come and listen to the invited speakers and maybe talk to them about their initiatives for the Centre. Many thanks for your kind attention.

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On Text and Discourse, Information and Meaning (2011)

1  Text, discourse and discourse analysis 1.1 This chapter started out as a slice of personalized history, told from my standpoint as a grammarian, of how language as we experience it in day-to-day life has been gradually brought into the domain of linguistic theorizing; and how this relates to the world we are now living in, whether we see it as the ‘knowledge society’, the ‘age of information’, the ‘digital age’ or simply as the global crisis of capitalism. What sorts of question have we been asking, as linguists, about the discourses that shape our environment? Some while back I was asked about the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘text’: were they the same thing, and if not, how would I distinguish between them? They refer to the same entity, I suggested; but looked at from different points of view. ‘Text’ is discourse that is being viewed as a linguistic process (hence ‘texts’ are pieces of language), while ‘discourse’ is text that is being viewed as a socio-cultural process (so ‘discourses’ are kinds of language) (and cf. Halliday, 2008: 77–8). This means that ‘discourse’ is likely to refer to texts of more than minimal length; apart from that, any passage of wording may be referred to in either way. In the mainstream of twentieth-century European and American linguistics, text was not regarded as a theoretical object, except by those (relatively few) who studied literary texts as language, under the heading of stylistics. Linguists of the Prague school valued the text, partly as a legacy of the Russian ‘formalists’; Presented in Choice and Text Group, Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. 5 October 2011.

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but J. R. Firth was almost the only theoretical linguist who took the text as the primary object of linguistic study. Those of us who tried to maintain and develop that perspective were dismissed by the structural linguists of the Chomsky school as being ‘data-oriented’; text, in their scheme, had no place in a theoretical approach to language.

1.2 When a new generation of scholars such as Janos Petöfi and Teun van Dijk wanted to bring text into their field of vision, they referred to their work as ‘text linguistics’. This was often written in English as a single word, on the model of the German Textlinguistik, since much of the early initiative came from German or German-speaking linguists. By calling it ‘text linguistics’ they gave it the status of a distinct subdiscipline within linguistics (or perhaps within applied linguistics – it was recognized as such by AILA), although still within the same general field of knowledge. But by the 1980s the term ‘text linguistics’ was being displaced by ‘discourse analysis’; the multiauthored work published in 1985, and edited by Teun van Dijk, was called Handbook of Discourse Analysis (1985). Early work in text linguistics, including that by van Dijk himself, had been modelled on formal syntax. But the term ‘discourse analysis’ does not contain the word ‘linguistics’; it proclaims its independence from linguistics (which by default at that time still meant formal linguistics), and establishes the study of texts as a separate discipline. This more or less coincided with the influence of ‘post-structuralist’ thinking – a form of post-modernism in which what had to be avoided, at all costs, was ‘totalizing’. Data was now seen as a good thing, while general theory was bad; this anti-theoretical stance was taken up in other quarters in the human sciences, for example, in the work of the ethnomethodologists (cf. Martin, 1993). Instead of lodging with linguistics, discourse analysis found a home in pragmatics, as instated in the Journal of Pragmatics that had been founded and brought into prominence by Jakob Mey. In this environment, discourse analysis became associated with studies of relevance, coherence, plausibility, politeness and other such conceptual frames.

1.3 In fact the Journal of Pragmatics defines its field as that of ‘linguistic pragmatics’, stating that ‘By providing possible theoretical foundations for the study of linguistic practice, the Journal has helped to extend our knowledge of the forms,

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functions and foundations of human interaction.’ The Journal ‘endeavours to narrow the distance between linguistics and . . . neighbouring disciplines’. Discourse analysis figures as one among seven (‘and other’) areas of linguistic research – one of which is ‘general linguistics’. There has been a lot of discussion about the relation between pragmatics and linguistics; one question often asked is: are they separate disciplines, or is one of them a part of the other? When Jakob Mey was setting up his editorial board for the Journal, he very kindly asked me to join in. I thanked him but declined, saying that I wasn’t sure what were the aims of pragmatics: was it not the semantics of instances of text? Now, many years later, it is clear that there is plenty of matter to fill journals under both these headings – both linguistics and pragmatics; though with considerable overlap in regard to the topics that are covered. The analysis of discourse figures prominently in both. Discourse can obviously be analysed from various standpoints. But a linguistic analysis of discourse is, it seems to me, one in which the text is being brought into relation with the system of the language  – it is being described in terms which form part of a general linguistic description of the lexicogrammar (at least) of the language in which it is spoken or written. This gives a perspective on the meaning of the text which is different from that of a commentary on the text as an object in itself, without reference to the potential that underlies it – to the choices that it might have made, but didn’t.

2  Discourse as variation 2.1 Discourse is made of language; more specifically, of language as instance. We talk of ‘written discourse’ and ‘spoken discourse’; so it consists of language as wording  – language that is represented at the lexicogrammatical stratum and made accessible to a receiver in either phonic or graphic form. Aside from this obvious dichotomy, clearly there is considerable variation among different discourse types – sets of instances of text that have certain features in common. We are familiar with this variation under the name of ‘register’; it has been characterized as ‘variation according to use’, as distinct from dialect, which is ‘variation according to user’ (Halliday et al., 1964). With register variation, this is resetting of the probabilities, in some region or regions of the lexicogrammar, such as to resonate with some aspect of the context in which it is situated. We can think of clear examples, such as the relatively high frequency of imperative

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mood in many instructional and procedural texts; most variation is more subtle and complex than this, involving syndromes of different features  – here, for example, we would need to combine imperative mood with certain specific process types (Matthiessen, 2006, 2010). The term ‘discourse genre’ suggests a discourse type characterized by a particular text structure – some selection from within a ‘generalized structure potential’ (Hasan, 1985b [1989], 1985c [1989]; Martin, 2009). Many other terms have been used in classifying texts; for example, ‘activity types’, where the focus is on the setting, particularly institutional settings like job interviews and court hearings (Sarangi, 2000).

2.2 There is a third type of discourse variation associated not with register or dialect but with what the late Basil Bernstein referred to as ‘code’, expanded as ‘sociolinguistic coding variation’ (Bernstein, 1971; Hasan, 1973 [2004]). Code in this sense is the discourse–semantic style associated with distinct ‘fellowships’ (Firth, 1950)  within a society; for example, country folk typically differ from city folk, likewise the younger generation from the older. This type of variation has been extensively researched by Ruqaiya Hasan, who has shown that, unlike both register and dialect, code is variation at the semantic stratum.1 She and her colleague Carmel Cloran studied the semantic variation in the talk between mothers and their children in their homes in an Australian city, analysing some 22,000 clauses semantically and using statistical methods for the analysis of variance; they found significant difference in the semantic profiles of the discourse along two separate variables. One was the social positioning of the family – working class or middle class; the other was the sex of the child – the talk between mothers and their daughters was very different from that between mothers and their sons (Hasan, 2009a).

2.3 Meanwhile the scope of the term ‘discourse’ had been expanded, as often happens with general terms that designate major movements in scholarship; it has gone beyond its original sense, and now includes material in other symbolic modalities than language. Some such items, like tables, diagrams, figures and graphs, are integrated into the flow of written discourse, as supplementary, or perhaps complementary, to the worded text; others may stand on their own, like the various kinds of maps, plans and charts. Texts

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including elements of these kinds are said to be ‘multimodal’: the nonlanguage elements can generally be glossed in the form of language (Baldry and Thibault, 2006; Bateman, 2008). For other so-called modalities, such as images, and art forms like painting and music, we need a more explicit term such as ‘multisemiotic’ (Matthiessen, 2010). They may be able, up to a point, to be described in language; but they cannot be glossed, or realized as wording. They are the manifestation of different semiotic systems, not isosemantic with language, and they need to be theorized in their own right. This does not mean that one cannot use linguistic theory as a tool for investigating them; systemic functional theory has proved to be quite a powerful resource with which to analyse and interpret other semiotics. Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images (1996) is now a ‘classic’ in this field. Michael O’Toole’s (1994) brilliant treatment of painting, architecture and sculpture, The Language of Displayed Art, now available in a new and revised edition (2011), draws on the systemic categories of stratification, rank and metafunction, raising the fundamental question of how far a functional theory of language can serve as a foundation for a theory of the visual arts. As far as music is concerned, we tend to assume that it is somehow further away from language; but this is probably because we have been forced to reduce all description to the written mode, even if what we are describing is spoken language. The semiosis of music is at a different angle in relation to language; but those who are informed in both, such as Van Leeuwen (1999) and McDonald (2003), have already shown that the relationship is one that can be fruitfully explored.

3  Special discourses? 3.1 Should we consider that discourse analysis is essentially one and the same operation, carried out across all varieties of discourse? The immediate answer, I think, must be ‘yes’. If discourse analysis consists, at least at the start, in relating the text to the linguistic system, as opposed to merely comparing it with other texts without reference to the system, then that process is the same without regard to the nature and variety of the text itself. The question naturally arises in the context of stylistics: do we need a special kind of analysis for a literary text? Again I would start by giving a direct answer ‘no’. English literature is written in the English language – that’s what it means to call it English literature. Likewise Danish literature is written in the Danish

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language. All literature is made of somebody’s mother tongue, even if it is written in some highly idiosyncratic form – think of Finnegan’s Wake: however deviant, its meanings are clearly anchored in the English language. We analyse a work of literature first and foremost as a piece of some linguistically recognizable text; hence in terms of a framework of linguistic categories, not in terms of some esoteric concepts devised for this special purpose. That said, however, it does not mean that literary texts have no special features of their own. Certain genres have their own special conventions, of course; but that is true of other, non-literary genres as well. What distinguishes a work of verbal art is the double articulation of its semantics. This is something literary scholars have always more or less taken for granted. Hasan formulated it as part of a general theory of language, proposing that in a literary text there is a level of ‘symbolic articulation’, which is the pattern of semantic selections as realized in the lexicogrammar, and, ‘above’ that, a level of ‘theme’, the deeper, more abstract motif, or complex of motifs, that is the underlying semantics of the text as realized in the symbolic articulation (Hasan, 1985b [1989]). So while literature does not demand any special techniques of lexicogrammatical analysis, literary stylistics does stand out as a distinct patch within the general field of discourse studies.

3.2 Likewise, in general there is nothing special about the lexicogrammar of a text that gives it the status of literature. But in some genres, especially the more poetic ones, the prevalence of metaphor – metaphor in its traditional sense, of lexical metaphor – may serve as a kind of indexical feature, suggesting that this is the kind of text where wordings, and therefore their congruent meanings, are not to be taken (only) at their face value. That, after all, is what metaphor is all about. This in turn may suggest that grammatical metaphor may also carry some such underlying message (Halliday, 2004b).2 Grammatical metaphor is a characteristic feature of scientific texts, those which explicitly theorize about human experience; and here too there is something special going on. In some ways, scientific text (perhaps we might call it ‘verbal science’, by analogy with verbal art) does resemble literature: there is an analogous level of interpretation (a ‘double articulation’) within the semantics. It is not that of symbolic articulation with theme, but that of symbolic articulation with theory. Verbal art and verbal science are both dedicated to the more abstract construal of human experience; but they pursue it by different routes – different

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strategies of thinking, out of those evolved by the human brain. And the two currents of thought have not infrequently merged with one another during the known history of human discourse.3

3.3 Metaphoric discourse tends to gain a high prestige: it is somewhat exotic, estranged from the language of common sense; and its role in society, and the roles of those who espouse it, carry a particular value. This is especially true of grammatical metaphor, which then gets to be imitated in other discourse contexts. Advertisers and spin doctors in the media turn out impressive-sounding compositions to promote their clients and their wares; bureaucrats and agencies of the power structure take over the forms of scientific discourse, especially the grammatical metaphor, whose only function here is to proclaim status and exercise control. I have cited many examples of this in my writings, pointing out that while grammatical metaphor fulfils certain specific discourse functions in a scientific text – it creates taxonomies of highly charged technical concepts, and builds up complex sequences of rational argument – in bureaucratic texts it serves no semantic function at all; it serves merely the socio-political function of carrying authority and prestige (Halliday and Martin, 1993; Halliday, 2004b, esp. ch. 4).

4  Power of discourse; discourse of power 4.1 A notable trend in discourse analysis (and one that would perhaps distinguish it from text linguistics) has been that many of those who undertake the study of discourse approach the task from a particular angle, with a particular attitude towards their chosen text and a view of their own task as discourse analyst. In modern parlance, they have their own agenda. This can be seen in the choice of texts for analysis, which are often texts seen to display some socio-political stance of which the analyst disapproves: racism, perhaps, or colonialism, or a one-sided attitude to some earlier or contemporary issue. This could be misleading, if the analyst has picked out certain portions of the text which display the features in question without taking account of how far they typify the text as a whole  – though it might be argued that the fact

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that they are there at all (e.g. sexist comments and references) reveals a possibly unadmitted bias on the part of the writer. What is more problematic, perhaps, is the possibility that the analyst may have selected just certain features of the lexicogrammar which can be shown to support their argument. This problem arises especially if the analysis is based on choice of vocabulary without regard for colligational patterning with the grammar. If discourse analysis is so often carried out with some strongly held conviction to support it, the reason is probably that people have become more aware, over the past few decades, of the power of language to persuade, to deceive, and in many ways to control. In principle, of course, this has always been well known: there are well-established traditions of training lawyers to argue a case, logicians to dispute, and religious teachers and preachers to shape one’s beliefs. But the full potency of persuasive language only became clear in the twentieth century, in the two related spheres of politics and commerce: first with political propaganda, and secondly with advertising. Both, of course, were serviced by the technology of mass communication.

4.2 How far is the power of language hidden from those who are manipulated by it or even from those who manipulate them? There are two sides to this, one material the other semiotic. Communications engineers found out some time ago how they could project a message on to a screen subliminally, at such low intensity and/or for such brief moments of time that the viewer was not aware of having seen it. I do not know how effective these techniques proved to be or how far they continue to be used. But it is the semiotic element that is by far the more significant: the selection and presentation of the discourses that are served up to us day in and day out. Most obvious, perhaps, at least to us in Australia, is the selection of what is going to be presented as ‘news’. On the television networks this is determined by what ‘makes good television’  – which means wars, murders, sex scandals, natural disasters, close-ups of weeping victims and their families, and of course sport. Often a whole bulletin of so-called national and international news consists of no other material than these, with the text playing only a minor and fairly trivial part. Less obvious is the biased view of events that is promulgated textually, by radio and moving band news channels like Fox News and CNN. These channels are the mouthpieces of today’s corporate capitalism, and their discourse is

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relentlessly right-wing politically and naively market-driven economically. Much of our so-called free press, in fact controlled by just two syndicates, dishes up the same distortionate discourse, designed to persuade people by default that there is no conceivable reality other than the ‘reality’ that all this construes for us. A caution about that word ‘designed’. This discourse is not usually designed in the sense of being consciously manipulated – it is not engineered, let us say. It is entirely possible to introduce engineering into discourse processes; the example most familiar to us in Europe was the discourse of Nazi Germany, which was deliberately moulded so as to construe the values and ideology of Nazism (Klemperer, 2000). The discourse of corporate capitalism is not, as far as I know, so consciously crafted – which is why it is so much more difficult to recognize it and to resist it.4

4.3 A notable feature of this time has been the emergence of ‘critical’ approaches in discourse studies. This term first appeared in the formulation ‘critical linguistics’ (and also ‘linguistic criticism’) in the work of Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress in the late 1970s (Fowler, 1982, 1986; Kress and Hodge, 1979). It became best known in the context of ‘critical discourse analysis’ introduced by Norman Fairclough (1989).The term ‘critical’ here is multivalent; but it clearly indicates an approach in which the text is examined closely so as to reveal the underlying ideology, and it seems (or is usually taken) to imply that what is being revealed is in some way socially harmful – inviting Widdowson’s (2000: 155)  characterization of it as ‘discover[ing] devious intent’, and provoking Martin’s (2004) counterproposal for a ‘positive discourse analysis’. Fairclough’s (2000) work is well represented by his account of the linguistic resources brought into play by Britain’s Labour government, led by Tony Blair, under the rubric of ‘New Labour’. Fairclough, and others writing in CDA such as Lily Chouliaraki, often relate their work to the categories of functional linguistics, sometimes explicitly to our systemic functional grammar. Systemic functional theory is more fully exploited in some other studies which, while not labelled as ‘critical’, are grounded in a detailed analysis of the lexicogrammar of the text, such as Annabelle Lukin’s investigation into the registers of news reporting (Lukin, 2010; and cf. Lukin et al., 2004).

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5  The information society 5.1 So where are we now? We are told that we live in an ‘information society’ that the age of machines has now been superseded by the age of information. This, admittedly, is something of a world-weary postmodernist exaggeration; but it is clear that life today, at least in some areas within the ‘global village’, is largely managed for us by information systems and information technology. When things go wrong, it is often attributed to ‘information failure’: not the machinery breaking down, but information not being transmitted accurately to, or not being attended to by, those who needed to access it. Information is only as trustworthy as the person who obtains it and uses it. So what is information? To us, as linguists, it seems obvious that information is made of language. It may be coded and transmitted in many forms, most notably, perhaps, as mathematics; but it can always ultimately be reduced to language – to language as text, that is, to discourse. Or can it? Can all information be worded in the lexicogrammar of a natural language? Any set of symbols can of course be given a reading; English schoolchildren learn (or used to learn?) to recite the formula for solving a quadratic equation: ‘the equation a x squared plus b x plus c equals nought can be solved by minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c all over two a’. But can we give it a wordable meaning? – that is, can we paraphrase it in non-mathematical wording? Rather than saying that information is made of language, which means that it can always be meaningfully worded, we should perhaps be saying that information is made of meaning.

5.2 Another term for our present condition is the ‘digital age’, a term perhaps particularly used in the context of information technology (Wilsdon, 2001: ch. 5). Here it is suggested that perhaps 10 per cent of us, the ‘elderly’, may be excluded from the digital age; I myself belong to that 10 per cent, being not only old but also digitally challenged. But is all information digital? – or at least digitizable? One view, perhaps deriving from the physical sciences, would be yes – all information can be quantified, and measured in bytes. Does this apply to language? To the expression plane, phonetics and phonology (or their graphic analogues), maybe; it is at least conceivable. But to the content plane? – I am doubtful.

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I have argued elsewhere (2005b) that much of meaning cannot be measured; and I suggested using the term ‘information’ for just that component of meaning that is measurable. Does information technology  – or indeed whatever is subsumed into the ‘information age’ as a whole  – belong to the measurable segment? and what is it that is left outside? It could be maintained that all writing is inescapably digital, so as soon as a language comes to be written down, all discourse becomes digitalized. But, as we know, a great deal of what is meaningful in language never does get written down – all the features such as intonation, loudness, rhythm, voice quality and tamber; and no amount of graphic devices like emoticons will enregister all of these.

5.3 If we look at this in metafunctional terms, we can see that ‘information’ privileges the ideational metafunction at the expense of the interpersonal: not just because information is typically represented in written form but because only ideational meanings are accorded the status of information. The interpersonal element, although essential to the making of meaning, is not well recognized or valued in information and communication technology. This may help to explain the reaction against the dominance of ideational meaning in some highly technologized cultures. In literature, there is now a fashion for fake histories  – fictional stories woven around real people and events, blurring the distinction between chronicle and fantasy and weaving a web of interpersonal tensions and emotions. In linguistics there is a fashion for appraisal – Jim Martin chose a highly propitious moment for coming out with his rich and perceptive account of this important area of interpersonal meaning, and now any postgraduate thesis in discourse studies is likely to focus on some aspect of evaluative attitude or personal engagement. The reaction against the received tyranny of information is a flight into the interpersonal regions of meaning.

5.4 The interpersonal are typically analogue systems, in contrast to the more digitalized systems of the ideational. Information can be true, or it can be false; we don’t expect it to be fairly true, or true in parts. Misinformation is information which is untrue; there is also disinformation, which is false information that

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has been deliberately inserted into the channel. So there is a spiralling contest between those who want to control and inhibit its flow and those who are seeking to outsmart them; between those who want to use it for criminal acts and those who are struggling to prevent them. It is much easier to promulgate false information than to refute it: as Mark Twain observed, ‘a lie can spread around the world before the truth ever gets its boots on.’ People like to maintain a balance, in their discourse, between ideational and interpersonal meanings; that is the way grammar has evolved, and this has always been a principle behind the representation of language in systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 2005, esp. chs 9–11). Meaning, in our human semiotic, arises from the interplay between the two: between the ideational, construing our ‘reality’, and the interpersonal, enacting our social lives. From this point of view, ‘information’ is lopsided – like the pictorial signs that have taken over from language in telling us how to assemble pieces of furniture and equipment, or how to find our way around when we get lost in airports (these sometimes get tempered by the addition of a smiley, or a frowny; but these are crude caricatures beside the richness of our interpersonal exchanges).

6  Discourse and technology 6.1 The human brain invented computers. Not surprisingly, therefore, the brain itself is nothing like a computer; as Edelman (1992) said, 20 years ago, it is much more akin to a jungle. And human language, as Terrence Deacon has demonstrated, co-evolved along with the human brain (Deacon, 1997). But since computers exist, it would be helpful if they could be programmed to process discourse. The prospect of machine translation was mooted in the very early days of computing; and in 1956 I was privileged to join a small group at Cambridge, led by a philosopher and including a mathematical statistician and a geneticist, exploring the plausibility of using a computer to translate, or assist in translating, from one language to another. Our experimental text was a short passage on hybridization, with versions in English, Italian and Chinese. We didn’t go near a computer; but we exchanged some lively ideas on representing discourse in computable form (Leon, 2000).5 By the 1980s computers had evolved to the point where linguists could use them as tools for linguistic research. Except in China, machine translation

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had gone out of fashion; now it was computational linguistics, then natural language processing, including text generation and analysis (the latter known as ‘parsing’). Systemic functional linguistics figured in several of these endeavours, including two very large-scale projects, Mann and Matthiessen’s PENMAN at the University of Southern California, and Robin Fawcett’s GENESYS at Cardiff University in Wales. Both these projects were organized around system networks, and descendants of both continue to be active today (Mann and Matthiessen, 1985; Fawcett and Tucker, 1990).

6.2 In the meantime, the role of the computer in discourse studies has totally changed; no-one would now think of carrying out such research without one. The most far-reaching effect has been in corpus studies, where the computer has made it possible to record and process indefinitely large quantities of spoken and written text, so that linguists now have data adequate for statistical methods of analysis (Wu, 2009). This opens the way to the description of language in probabilistic terms  – though there are still many problems in the automatic retrieval of instances of grammatical categories; the corpus is not yet friendly to discourse grammarians. In general, however, the way has been opened up for integrating discourse studies into theoretical linguistics (e.g. Matthiessen, 2006; compare also Matthiessen’s (2005) work in text-based comparison and typology of languages). There is evidence also of the effectiveness of computer-based analysis of discourse in various applied linguistic domains, for example Malcolm Coulthard’s (2000) studies of plagiarism, and the automatic classification of texts reported on by Jon Patrick (2008). In the latter case the Australian Securities and Investment Commission set up a project called ‘Scamseek’ designed to recognize fraudulent texts, or ‘scams’; the researchers reached a high level of accuracy in identifying a semantic motif of ‘scaminess’, using a combination of selected networks from systemic functional analysis and conventional computational methods to build up the semantic and structural profile of a text. This is an interesting project because it exemplifies a kind of collaboration that is still fairly unusual, where linguists and other specialists – in this case computer scientists  – have worked together to solve a problem referred to them by an outside agency (and cf. also Butt, in press). Many computer science departments have been engaging with language for decades without ever hearing from (or even hearing about) linguists; much of linguistics wasn’t

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very relevant to them anyway (but some of it was). And while linguists have been working on projects in and around machine translation for a long time, commercial firms have come out with their own marketable products developed without any expert knowledge of language (or of translation), by a process of trial and error  – finding out what works and building on it. Their software, while far from ideal, does often produce acceptable results. But I think future applications of discourse studies (and most of what I have been calling ‘appliable linguistics’ involves dealing with discourse in some way or other) are likely to be joint ventures in which linguists, software engineers and some other body of specialists are collectively involved.

7  Conclusion There are changes taking place today in the nature of meaning, and of knowing. The total quantity of meaning which assails us is increasing all the time, so that we face the familiar problem of ‘information overload’ and are more and more inclined to hand over the responsibility to others: to the technocrats and consultants who ‘manage’ it (dumb it down) for us, and the media owners who ‘edit’ it (censor it). In the academic world we are forced to publish if we want to survive; so more and more gets written, while less and less of it gets read. The quality of meaning is also changing. I don’t mean quality in the sense of how good or bad – that is a matter of subjective judgement; I mean it in the sense of how it is made and how it is transmitted. Meaning is tending to became modularized: it comes in bite-size packaging, and teachers at all levels find the attention span of the learners is becoming shorter all the time. School students are taught to think, but not how to find something to think about; university departments are told to break down the barriers, to become ‘interdisciplinary’ – a substantive aim if it means rethinking the structure of knowledge, but it can easily end up by denying that knowledge has any structure at all. As a grammarian, looking at meaning in an evolutionary perspective, or in the perspective of the development of the individual meaner, you recognize that the familiar trajectory, whereby every structure begins by being enabling and goes on to become constraining, is quite characteristic of semiotic structures. It is familiar, for example, in the evolution of genres of literature; and we may expect to see it in other modes of discourse as well. The natural human response, perhaps, is the revolutionary one: simply destroy the existing structure, and wait for a new one to emerge (whereas attempts to create new structure by design

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have often been rather discouraging). But this can take a long time, and the problem now is that we always seem to find ourselves in a hurry. We recognize this phenomenon of enablement and constraint, very readily with political and economic structures; and, perhaps a little more grudgingly, with social ones. So what about semiotic structures: ways of meaning, and their accompanying modes of discourse? What we need here is a general theory of meaning – something linguists have always striven after, though often without being aware of it (as Saussure was). Such a general semiotic theory is now coming to be demanded by other scientists as well, particularly perhaps among physicists and evolutionary biologists (Davies and Gregersen, 2010). Many sciences are implicated in this endeavour. But linguistics should be at the centre. Are we ready to lead the dialogue?

Notes 1 The difference lies in the nature of the higher level constant. Dialect, in principle, is variation at the formal strata, lexicogrammar and/or phonology, with the semantics as the higher level constant: register, in principle, is variation in lexicogrammar and semantics, without any higher level constant. So dialects are different ways of doing the same things, registers are ways of doing different things. Code, on the other hand, is variation at the semantic stratum, with the context as higher level constant. In Hasan’s large-scale research, the contexts were moments of interaction between a mother and her child, such as preparing and eating a meal, working together on some shared task, or bathing and readying for sleep. 2 The student who, when asked to paraphrase ‘make hay while the sun shines’, famously answered ‘create dry grass while the orb of day sheds its effulgence’, had failed to recognize the semantic recoupling that is the feature of metaphor. 3 One of the masterpieces of European literature is Lucretius’ long hexameter poem De Rerum Natura ‘On the nature of things’. In it Lucretius (c. l00–55 BC) presented Epicurus’ atomic theory of the nature of matter. He also dispensed with the gods: here are lines from the poem Lucretius written by another poet with a scientific bent, Tennyson: ‘The Gods, the Gods! If all be atoms, how then should the Gods Being atomic not be dissoluble, Not follow the great law?’ Lucretius’ poem was lost for many centuries until discovered in a medieval monastery by a learned Italian monk. 4 Some years ago I wrote an article pointing out how much of our ‘settlement’ grammar predisposed us to see ourselves (our species) as distinct from, and even in conflict with, the rest of creation. That the grammar construed our experience in this manner was no doubt once conducive to our survival. Now however, with

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our obscene population growth and all-conquering technology, such a view of ourselves and our environment has become thoroughly detrimental to both. (This is another instance of a semiotic system going from being enabling to being constraining.) 5 But I was unable to persuade my colleagues to think about language paradigmatically – as choice rather than as chain, or at least to try to represent both axes.

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Why Do We Need to Understand about Language? (2011)

I wrote this chapter in response to being invited to a conference called ‘Crossing boundaries: the impact of language studies in academia and beyond’. This was being held at Queen’s University Belfast at the initiative of an international group of postgraduate students. Now, crossing boundaries is fashionable these days, when knowledge is being restructured as we move (or so we are told) into a new age, the ‘age of information’. But the ‘impact of language studies’ I found more striking; I had not come across it before, and it seemed to me a thoughtful and forward-looking motif around which to organize a conference. And so it proved to be. I am by nature – and thanks to a short but intensive moment of early training by my teacher in China, Wang Li – a grammarian; and I consider that grammar, by which I mean not syntax but an integrated stratum of lexicogrammar, is the semogenic powerhouse of language. But I am also by nature a generalist, as was Wang Li and also my other great teacher J. R. Firth, Professor of General Linguistics in the University of London. We seldom hear of ‘general linguistics’ these days; the discipline has become too specialized. Yet language is everywhere, in academia and beyond; so linguistics must be everywhere, to at least keep up with language, and perhaps to help steer it along. University authorities never know where to put linguistics  – it doesn’t fit in to their scheme of corporate management. Maybe, as someone at Belfast suggested, it should be present as a flavour, a prosody, in every school in the university. So this chapter is addressed, not to specialist linguists, but to those who are interested in the significance of language  – and therefore of the study of Presented in the 1st Interdisciplinary Linguistics Conference (ILinC), Queen’s University Belfast, UK, 14–15 October 2011.

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language – as the foundation of human knowledge. This does presuppose some general theory of language, but a theory that is what Hasan (2007) characterizes as ‘exotropic’, defined not by the object under study but by the issues in which that object (in this case language) played a significant role. I have referred elsewhere to the point made by the physicist George Williams, that as human beings we inhabit two incommensurable realms: the realm of matter, measurable in mass, heat, length and so on, and the realm of information, measured in bytes (Williams, 1995; cf. Halliday, 2005b). The realm of matter is investigated in the physical and biological sciences, and to some extent also in the social sciences; these got separated because our material world is made up of systems of different kinds. We can arrange these in a linear progression: first come physical systems; add life, then you have biological systems; add value, then you have social systems. At each step you are adding a new form of order: introducing more information by which the matter is becoming organized. When we come to language, this is a system of a fourth order of complexity known as a semiotic system. Here what has been added is another component, that of meaning. In a semiotic system, information has replaced matter and taken over as the primary realm. It has been objected that all social systems are also semiotic; it is true that they have a lot of information in them, but there is still a significant distinction to be made. A hive of bees is not itself a semiotic system, although its members have evolved a system that is semiotic, the honey dance. What distinguishes the four different kinds of system is the different mix, the particular balance of matter and information that determines the properties of each. It has been suggested that, at the big bang in the beginning of time, information came into being before matter (von Baeyer, 2003).1 Some particles, I understand, have no mass. Is it possible, I wonder, that at first matter and information were simply not differentiated, before coming to be separated out? Here, however, as a grammarian I would like to replace ‘information’ by ‘meaning’, and talk of the two realms as the realm of matter and the realm of meaning. Information is then a part of meaning: it is just that part that can be measured, whereas much of the realm of meaning cannot be measured – it is too dependent on the observational (ideational and interpersonal) environment.2 In this broad sense of meaning, we recognize that, once separated, matter and meaning interpenetrate: matter needs meaning to organize it, while meaning needs matter to realize it. We can watch an analogous process taking place with newborn human infants: in the first moments of life, their material and semiotic acts are undifferentiated. Before long, however, we hear (or a mother hears) a difference between a cry, which is a material act

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(though it usually gets interpreted semiotically), and a yell, which exploits the same material resources but has developed into a directed act of meaning. I want to emphasize the continuity between meaning in its broad sense (wherever there is a system, there is meaning) and meaning in its more specific sense, prototypically as the critical property of post-infancy human language, but extended so as to take in, first, the protolanguage of the human infant (as in Halliday, 1975 [2004]), secondly, similar systems in other species that share in primary consciousness (perhaps all those that are warm-blooded; cf. Edelman, 1992), and thirdly, other semiotic systems that are devised and used by humans (Martinec, 2005; Baldry and Thibault, 2006; Bateman, 2008). Linguists call such a theory, concerned with meaning in this sense of language and its associated systems, ‘semiotics’; and we are pleased to find that other scientists are now recognizing that there is a need for some kind of a general theory of meaning (cf. Davies and Gregersen, 2010, where it is referred to as a theory of information – on the misleading nature of this term see further below). We can define what I am referring to as the ‘extensions’ by reference to human ‘adult’ (i.e. post-infancy) language as the prototype. First, the infant’s protolanguage is a system of simple signs, or value-&-token pairs, where the value is the semantic content and the token is the phonetic and/or kinetic expression (i.e. sound and/or gesture). There is no lexicogrammar in it, and no reference. This kind of semiotic system is typical of humans in their first 12 to 15 months of life; it develops along with the human body, where it tracks the various stages of bodily control: raising the head, rolling over, sitting up, and crawling, and it starts to be superseded when the child begins walking upright. Our ‘adult’ language represents an evolutionary and developmental leap, into what Edelman terms ‘higher-order consciousness’. Language has been thought of as the ‘distinctively human semiotic’ (e.g. Wells, 1967); and is now seen as having co-evolved together with the human brain (Deacon, 1997). Other species (to take up the second of my extensions) have evolved semiotic systems that have the same formal properties as human infants’ protolanguage (but adapted, of course, to the contexts of their adult lives). Some other mammalian species, such as the Bonobo apes, can accommodate to many of the features of human language, at least in interaction with humans (and especially if they start young enough, like Kanzi; cf. Benson and Greaves, 2005). Their achievements are sometimes rated in terms of equivalence to those of a child of a certain age; but this is quite misleading – they are not following anything like the same trajectory. As an all-pervasive way of acting and of thinking – as a mode of living, in effect – language is, without question, distinctively human.

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I leave aside the third extension, which is problematic if we haven’t yet specified what the essential features are by which we characterize human language. This is hard to do, because it would mean enumerating all the many types of complexity that make language what it is. But two very general features seem to me to stand out, such that anyone interested in the relation of language to the disciplines and forms of knowledge might want to be aware of. To give them their technical names, there are metafunction and stratification. Language is ‘metafunctional’ in that, not only is it a system of both thinking and acting at the same time, but the way in which it has evolved has been shaped by these two functions and their manifestation as discourse. Language is ‘stratified’ in that it is not an inventory of signs but a succession of value-&-token pairings, where the token of one cycle is also the value of the next (this is the speaker’s perspective; for the listener, the value of one cycle becomes the token of the next). Let me say something about each of these two features in turn. To say that language evolved as a way of both acting and thinking at the same time (or, more solemnly, as ‘a mode of action and reflection’) means that, whenever we say anything (where ‘say’ stands for speak or listen or write or read), we are both enacting some moment in human relationships and construing some aspect of human experience. What we call the ‘grammar’ (or, more accurately, the lexicogrammar) of a language is its organization into meaningful patterns of wording; these make up the resources with which we enact and construe. By ‘enacting’ I mean that we ongoingly manage our interactions with other people, from the small-scale encounters of daily life to the pronouncements with which we maintain our social networks and our own identities within them; here the grammar is a form of praxis, and the key evolutionary step for this was dialogue. By ‘construing’ I mean that we are all the time rehearsing and reinforcing our sense of reality, recognizing and naming categories of phenomena such as processes and entities, and the complex relationships among them; here the grammar is a theory – a well-tried theory of human experience, no less – and the key evolutionary step for this was reference. We call the first ‘interpersonal’, the second ‘ideational’ meaning. To say that language is stratified into cycles of token-&-value means that it is a realizational system: the relation between value and token is a symbolic one not a causal one – the token is said to ‘realize’ the value.3 And here another critical step was taken in the evolution of language. We may surmise that language emerged in a form similar to that of an infant’s protolanguage, having just one round of value and token (a ‘content’ and an ‘expression’), the token being iconically related to the value (e.g. beckoning; cf. Halliday, 2004a). At some stage

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the two became decoupled, so that the relation of token to value may come to be conventional (or ‘arbitrary’) instead of natural. Once this constraint is removed, the meaning potential of the system becomes indefinitely large, subject only to the limits of human articulatory and auditory capabilities and the capacity of the human brain. And all these resources – the brain, the organs of speech and hearing, and the functional/stratal organization of language  – have been evolving together as a single package. This then is the critical difference between semiotic systems and material systems: material systems are ordered causally, by cause-&-effect, whereas semiotic systems are ordered realizationally, by value-&-token (Butt, 2008). There is no causal relationship between meaning and wording, or between wording and sounding; hence no ordering in time. If we model linguistic processes in a computer, of course, time gets introduced: meaning before sound in text generation, sound before meaning in parsing. And since the brain is itself a material organ, it also operates in real time; we are getting to be able to observe its workings directly with enhanced functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), now no doubt overtaken by some more recent technology which I haven’t yet heard of. As I remarked earlier, meaning needs matter to realize it. We see how densely semiotic and material systems interpenetrate if we watch people performing extremely complex tasks. The complexity lies in the subtle and constantly shifting relations between the discourse and its situational context. If we consider the work practices in high-risk environments, such as air traffic control rooms, surgical operating theatres or nuclear power stations, the interface between matter and meaning is critical, and an essential element in the application of linguistic theory to the management of safety is the analysis of the context of situation and the cultural patterns that are in force (cf. Hasan, 2009a). When accidents occur, as they will as predicted by the ‘Swiss cheese’ theory, they have typically been explained as instantial failures – as an error made by some particular operator at some particular moment, or else as the action of some particular baddie like the ‘rogue trader’ in the banking system. One linguist who has directly observed a number of high-risk surgical procedures is David Butt, of Macquarie University in Sydney. Butt has noted that mishaps often seem to occur where there is a strict hierarchy of semiotic power – the ‘right to mean’ is somewhat constrained; and, related to this, that what are in fact relations of realization (‘this shows that’) are frequently misinterpreted as causation (‘this causes that’). In his view such instances need to be seen as systemic failure, and discourse should be analysed by linguists in terms of the meaning potential associated with each situation type.

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Those who led us into the mechanical age, some ten generations ago, very quickly became aware of the hazards that could arise when machinery failed or went wrong, and they steadily evolved effective ways of either preventing disasters or, if not, at least then managing them. Information failure is no less hazardous than mechanical failure; but so far we have not yet learnt even to recognize it, let alone to prevent it or to manage it if it occurs. Here is another job for linguists: the management of meaning. Managing meaning is more complex than managing matter (and one model that can certainly not be applied is the business management model!). Let me return to the notion of grammar as the theory of experience. By means of language, we have been able to construe our ‘reality’: almost all our knowledge is organized in language, and almost all our learning is accomplished in and through our language  – this is why we have no way of recovering memories from our protolinguistic infancy: they were not yet made of language (our experience had not yet been ‘semioticized’ in the archival mode). Once we have a language – or, more specifically, once we have a lexicogramnar – all our experience is modelled as meaning to match it. We don’t notice this, most of the time; but we may become aware of it in creative moments, poetic, playful or just problematic. Think, for example, of the construction of space-time in English: how do we reconcile the relation of objects to one another with our own perceptual orientation towards them? If I stand on my head, and some coins fall out of my pocket, are they falling up or falling down? If I approach a doorway walking backwards, is the doorway before me or behind me? (And does it make a difference if I use the more modern wording ‘in front of me’?) If I am giving a stage direction to an actor, to approach a wardrobe where the doors are opening away from him (i.e. he is facing the back of it), and I say ‘go behind the wardrobe’, where does he end up? Objects in space have length, depth, width and height (despite there being only three spatial dimensions). Length is horizontal (though we can ask how long a piece of string is even if it is rolled up into a ball – but probably not by saying ‘how long is that ball of string?’); and it has no particular orientation to ourselves. Width, on the other hand, suggests extension to our left and to our right. Height is vertical, that is, ‘up and down’, provided above or at the same level as ourselves; otherwise ‘up and down’ is depth, so a mountain is high while a pothole is deep (and a cliff or a tree may be tall). Depth is also horizontal, ‘front to back’, by reference to a potential observer; so with a movable container, such as a drawer, or a horizontal hollow such as a cave, deep becomes ambiguous (‘these drawers are not very deep’) and may not always accept shallow as its antonym. And what is deep when applied to a stair may

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depend on whether you’re going up it (deep = front to back) or down it (deep = high to low). When time is construed spatially, it is mapped into length (long to short), with orientation as front to back (‘before and after’); but this can be problematic: if I move the date of our seminar from Tuesday the 12th to Monday the 11th, have I moved it back or moved it forward? History proceeds from the past to the present, and we project it into the future; but time flows out of future through present into past. And when we construe location and movement in abstract and metaphorical space, as we reinterpret our experience at a greater remove from the material, we eventually find ourselves entering an entirely semiotic universe; yet one that is still ordered in terms of location and movement in physical space – though this tends to be disguised because the metaphor was first evolved in Greek and Latin, which continue to be the favoured sources for serious discourse. Economics is fertile ground for spatial metaphor.4 In another paper (Halliday, 2010), I tried to track some of the lexicogrammatical– semantic forms of discourse, and discourse strategies, that figured in the evolution of systematic knowledge, as made available (and ultimately made possible) by language in its written form, and as it appears in Europe in the textual continuity from the time of Homer. First there is particular narrative, about individuals and events, as found in the ancient epics; here the knowledgebuilding strategy is simile, ‘this person or event was like that one’, with the target being some memorable phenomenon such as a mythical warrior or an aweinspiring cosmic spectacle (Kappagoda, 2005). Then came generalized narrative as encoded in proverbs, sayings that were still concrete and specific in form but were to be understood as having a generalized purport. Both of these, of course, were a feature of languages before they came to be written down. The third step is that of expository discourse, where generalization becomes abstraction; there have always been abstract nouns, of course, and the lexicogrammar has always encouraged transcategorizing (shifting between word classes, for example, verb to noun, like English move: you move (verb), your move (noun), sometimes with change of form as in movement); such transcategorized terms, especially the nouns, steadily move from the concrete to the abstract (e.g. ancient Greek prassein ‘make’, noun pragma, at first ‘thing made, artefact’, evolving to mean ‘thing done, affair’). Fourthly, such terms may evolve further, by the strategy of metaphor, becoming not just abstract but virtual; here there is what we can recognize as semantic junction, whereby a new, virtual entity comes into being, like motion, which is both a process (like the verb move) and an entity (the core meaning of a noun). Such phenomena exist only on the semiotic plane; they are good to think with, because they can be classified (types of motion, such as linear,

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orbital, parabolic) and they can be measured and compared. They enable us to construct educational discourses, whereby knowledge is passed on to apprentices and children – that is, such knowledge can be taught. In the fifth stage, the entire discourse becomes metaphorical; this is the realm of scientific theory, where the whole of human experience is reconstrued and the typical sentence is something like ‘The rate of crack growth depends not only on the chemical environment but also on the magnitude of the applied stress’ (cf. Halliday, 1988/2004). Thus the evolution of scientific knowledge is realized in the evolution of scientific language. Scientific theory (which I have called ‘verbal science’ by analogy with verbal art) is based on the metaphoric reconstrual of reality that is brought about in the lexicogrammar, by the strategy of grammatical metaphor, whereby virtual entities, with virtual qualities, engage in virtual processes, building up complex theoretical taxonomies and chains of reasoned argument. This kind of discourse now permeates our everyday life, by courtesy of the mass media; many years ago I culled this sentence from a popular television magazine: ‘He also credits his former big size with much of his career success’ – in other words, he also thinks he was successful in his career largely because he used to be big. There is no need for ‘hard words’ to create this kind of virtual reality. Metaphor, whether in its grammatical or its lexical sense, is a cross-coupling between the semantics and the lexicogrammar. In lexical metaphor, which is metaphor in its traditional sense, this is the replacement of one lexical item (word or phrase) by another in the realization of a given meaning; for example, cast-iron in place of irrefutable, as in a cast-iron defence, cast-iron argument. In grammatical metaphor, one grammatical category is replaced by another  – a word class, a structural unit, and often both; for example, in place of ‘she didn’t know the rules, so she died’ we have ‘her ignorance of the rules led to her death.’ Both grammatical and lexical metaphors are characterized by semantic junction (this is the basis of the distinction between metaphor and simile). Verbal science depends on extended grammatical metaphor, where, as I said earlier, the entire discourse becomes a construct of virtual reality – a semiotic alternative universe. A scientific theory is a metaphorized representation of human experience. Verbal art does not depend in the same way on accumulated instances of lexical metaphor; rather, the entire text may be one extended metaphor, as recognized in literary scholarship. For example, Tennyson’s poem usually known just as ‘In Memoriam’, but in fact titled ‘In Memoriam A.H.H. – obiit MDCCCXXXIII’, may be understood as a disquisition on the dethroning of the human species from their privileged position as God’s chosen race; but it is realized metaphorically as an elegy on the death of one particular individual.

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Human understanding, up to the present, has evolved in a progression from the particular by building in, first, generalization, then abstractness, and then metaphor. We can follow this progression with every individual child, as they move from protolanguage to language (the ‘mother tongue’), beginning with the commonsense knowledge of home and neighbourhood (based on the general), then on to the educational knowledge of the primary school (based on the abstract) and then, if they are lucky enough, to the technical, subject-based knowledge of the secondary school (based on the metaphoric). The history of knowledge, in the individual as in the species, is a history of ‘motivated selection’ among possible modes of meaning, as language copes with, and so enables, the increasing complexity in our relations with our environment – and, at the same time, the increasing challenges that arise in our relationships with one another. Meanwhile the whole enterprise is in jeopardy because today we face a powerful onslaught on the entire organization and dissemination of knowledge. Here are the words of the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, author of ‘Principles of Economics’, on the situation in the United States: Now we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges – environmental, economic and more – that’s a terrifying prospect. Observer, 4 September 2011: 33

In the United Kingdom, at this time, university fees are being massively inflated, thus seriously restricting people’s access to knowledge; the human sciences are being cut back and even closed down, despite their being not only important sources of knowledge in themselves but also the one branch of the sciences that holds all the others together; and knowledge is being evaluated as a commodity to be bought and sold in the market by those who can afford it. The result is to increase the gap between the knowers and the rest, a semiotic class divide which is even more damaging than the material divide between the haves and the havenots – which is itself also increasing all the time. As a grammarian, I am committed to the view that every human being has the right of access to meaning – this is what education is all about. And language is at the centre of the picture. This is obvious enough on the surface: everyone is aware of problems of communication, and of the obstacles and barriers that obstruct or distort the effective exchange of meaning. But it is less obvious at the deeper level, where what is needed is theory: a robust general theory of

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meaning, showing how human knowledge has evolved, and continues to evolve, as experience is transformed into meaning and thus freed to spiral ‘up’ through the strata of generalization, abstractness and metaphor; and how, beginning at or before birth, individual humans learn, developing their meaning potential by an analogous progression – from the micro through the macro to the meta, in a sort of knight’s move – in fact of course a series of them, since we always need to revisit our earlier ways of knowing. This transformation into meaning is not something that only begins in school. It is already anticipated in the infant’s primary consciousness, externalized in the form of protolanguage; and it takes off when the child stands up and walks, seeing the world from every angle under its own control. Linguistically this is the occasion of the move into language, with its critical features, already referred to, of (ideational) reference and (interpersonal) dialogue. Henceforward children are building up their ‘commonsense knowledge’; and this involves much classifying of experience  – early work on child language development often focused on children’s steady approximation to the classes that were ‘given’ (recognized and grammaticized) in their own particular mother tongue. The educational discourse of the primary school takes over many of these classes without comment, drawing attention only to those which obviously differ from the accepted ones (so spiders aren’t insects, whales and dolphins aren’t fishes, etc.) What do get changed are the criteria for classifying; the classes are realigned and taxonomized, so that the school’s ‘educational knowledge’ becomes systematic, and can be integrated and also built upon (cf. examples in Halliday, 1998b [2004]). Eventually, in the next phase, the discipline-based ‘technical knowledge’ of the secondary school, the semantic strategies will change again, making it possible for certain selected aspects of experience to be transformed into what we categorize as ‘theory’. A general theory of meaning would include an exploration, and explanation, of how meaning has evolved, and continues to evolve, as our relationship with the ecosocial context goes on becoming more and more complex. The primary resource for meaning is language; so the centrepiece of a theory of meaning will be linguistic meaning, encompassing the various incarnations of language itself, spoken, written and signed, and including verbal art and verbal science. And now, at this late stage, I finally pick up the thread of my third extension outward from the linguistic centre. Such a theory of meaning would extend, at least, to other forms of semiosis which operate as text and share the same brain-space with language, like tables, figures, maps, plans, charts, diagrams and graphs: and perhaps – the real challenge! – to mathematics (O’Halloran, 2005). With other

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modalities – images, the visual arts, music and dance – which do not function as text, researchers have already gained significant insights by applying concepts and categories from functional linguistic theory (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; O’Toole, 1994/2011, 2005; O’Halloran, 2004; van Leeuwen, 1999; McDonald, 2005); but they really need to be theorized as semiotic systems in their own right. Those who engage with these other systems are also linguate beings, living their lives in language; so they are not unrelated, and can be glossed and described in language. But their meanings may not be such that they can be realized by the forms of language. This is an issue for the community of the human sciences. I tend to think that only with a general theory of meaning, grounded in theory of language, can we hope to put such questions on the agenda, and perhaps to gain some perspective on all the forms and domains of human knowledge and human interaction.

Notes 1 ‘The suggestion is that the material world – the IT – is wholly or in part constructed from information – the BIT’ (von Baeyer, 2003: xi). 2 As well as carrying with it the implication that all meaning can be measured, the term ‘information’ is restricted to (or, at least, clearly privileges) ideational meaning, obscuring or even leaving out the interpersonal component altogether. But a theory of meaning needs to give equal weight to these two aspects: meaning is the product of the interpenetration between them. 3 I have preferred these terms to ‘signifier and signified’ because the latter are associated more with single signs than with sign systems, and, though there is no problem with their occurring in a cycle, it seems odd to think of (say) phonology as a ‘signified’ – which it would be in relation to phonetics. These terms are also a little awkward when used in discourse in English. 4 As an example, consider the following extract from Steve Keen’s book Debunking Economics (new edition), quoted by George Monbiot in the Guardian ‘Comment and Debate’ (11 October 2011, p. 29):



It (sc. the ratio of debt to GDP) built up to wildly unstable levels from the late 1990s, peaking in 2008. The inevitable collapse in this rate of lending pulled down aggregate demand by 14%, triggering recession.

Note the nouns ‘levels’ and ‘collapse’, and the expressions ‘built up (to)’, ‘peaking (in)’ and ‘pulled down’. Even the (now typically highly abstract) prepositions ‘to’, ‘from’, ‘in’, ‘by’ originated as spatial terms.

Editor’s Introduction Jonathan J. Webster

Professor M. A. K. Halliday has always described himself as being a grammarian who is actively engaged in ‘trying to explain how language functions as a semogenic, or meaning-creating, resource’. He takes grammar to be ‘the source of energy for the semiotic process’, the ‘driving force’ behind the human potential for ‘construing and enacting the relationships of the individual, the group and the species to their social and physical environment’. In ‘On Grammar as the Driving Force from Primary to Higher-Order Consciousness (2004)’, Halliday focuses on the child’s transition from protolanguage to language, arguing that ‘the ontogenesis of grammar offers a way in to tracking the development of higher-order consciousness, or semiosis, suggesting what semiotic strategies are likely to be put in place when the human individual moves from infancy to childhood.’ Appearing in the launch issue of the journal Linguistics and the Human Sciences Halliday’s paper ‘On Matter and Meaning: The Two Realms of Human Experience (2005)’ continues to develop the idea, which also appeared in ‘On Grammar as the Driving Force from Primary to Higher-Order Consciousness (2004)’, that we inhabit two phenomenal realms, one of matter and the other of meaning. Both are necessary, as Halliday explains, ‘Meaning relies on matter to make it accessible to a receiver; in linguistic terms, meaning depends on matter to realise it.’ Not only does meaning rely on the material to be realized  – to materialize, but also our material existence is construed through the very same processes that enable us to make meaning. For it is through language that we construe our human existence, whether it be ‘the commonsense theory that is enshrined in our everyday grammar’ or the reconstrual of that experience in a scientific theory which has been ‘heavily subsidized by conscious design’. Either is ‘the output of the semogenic power of the grammar’.

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Presented at the Thirty-Seventh International Systemic Functional Linguistics conference, held at the University of British Columbia, ‘Language Evolving: Some Systemic Functional Reflections on the History of Meaning (2010)’, explores how meaning potential changes over time, evolving in the context of the speech fellowship, progressing from nomadic, to agricultural pastoral, to industrial. ‘Mountains of the Word: Construing the Architecture of Nature into Meaning (2009)’ was presented at the conference ‘The Language of Space, Light and Shadow: Language and Architecture systemically entwined’, held in Indonesia in 2009. In this paper, Halliday discusses ‘the language people use in talking, and especially in writing, about mountains’. He focuses on ‘the writings about mountains by British climbers of the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when mountains came into the consciousness of people who had new and advanced technology and a correspondingly strong commitment to material explanations and material values.’ As Halliday notes, ‘In this cultural environment, mountains appeared as a welcome and revitalizing counter-reality.’

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Written Language, Standard Language, Global Language (2006)

This is a great occasion, and I am delighted to be here to celebrate the achievements of my old friend and distinguished colleague Braj Kachru. He has generously referred to me as his teacher; and it is true that I stepped into that part when Braj was researching for his Ph.D. degree at the University of Edinburgh. But I was there as understudy for my own teacher Professor J. R. Firth, who had just retired; and all I needed to do was to watch and admire while Braj kept up the impetus that Firth had set going. It was my first year as a teacher of linguistics anyway, so I know which of us had the steeper learning curve (not that we’d ever have heard of a learning curve in those days!). But then Robert Lees came over from Illinois to spend a short while in our department; and he lost no time in securing Braj for a position on his own campus. The rest is U of I history; it’s a period of history that is now closing, but with everything on course, thanks to Braj, for an equally distinguished future.

1 I myself came from the inner circle of Englishes, the OVEs as they are called in South-East Asia; so I would like to start by reminding you that within this circle there are and always have been many different Englishes around (Kachru, 1990). I’m not talking about the relatively recent worldwide varieties – British, North American, South African, Oceanic; but about the old dialects within First published in Kachru, B. B., Kachru, Y. and Nelson, C. B. (eds) (2006) The Handbook of World Englishes. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, pp. 349–65.

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Britain itself, Northumbrian, Mercian, Wessex and Kentish at one period in the language’s history. As a child I could still hear English rather like this: Nobbut t’fireless arth an t’geeable end Mark t’spot weear t’ Carter family could mend An mek onny ilk o’ cart, Wi’ spooaks riven fra’ yak, naffs of awm, Fellies of esh, grown i’ different parts O’ Swaadil. (Smith, n.d.)1

And although my own speech was nowhere as exotic as that, I was forced at age 7 to make a fairly substantial dialectal shift. And when I moved to Scotland, though I was less than 200 miles from where I grew up, I had problems in understanding the rural talk. Braj may remember the window cleaner in George Square, who came from the Border country; I tried hard to converse with him, but it was a strangely skewed kind of conversation that took place! What I illustrated just now was North Yorkshire dialect, descended from the speech of the old English kingdom of Northumbria. It wasn’t my native speech; but I would have heard it in my great-uncle’s dairy, where he made Wensleydale cheese. I grew up in West Yorkshire, where the dialect was Mercian not Northumbrian; but in any case what I spoke was not a dialect of English but an accent – because I grew up in a city, and the city folk had given up the dialect in favour of Standard English. But it was still a local, or at any rate a regional, variety: Standard English with the phonetics, and largely also the phonology, derived from the original dialect. It was far from homogeneous, of course: different people, and the same person on different occasions, would vary between more dialectal and more standard forms. In other words, the language situation was typical of a European nation-state. Some centuries earlier, in the process – indeed, as part of the process – of England becoming a nation, one English dialect, that of London (which was South-East Mercian, with a dash of Kentish in it), emerged as the bearer of nationhood, to carry the flag, or standard, of the emerging nation. This was now Standard English, although that term was not used until the late eighteenth century; its status took it out of the category of a dialect, and ‘the dialects’ were now defined by opposition to the standard form of the language. As we all know, there is no intrinsic value in the various expression features that characterize the standard variety of a language. If the diphthongal vowels of Standard British English are preferred over the monophthongs of the northern tongues, their ascribed value is a result of the standardizing process; in no way

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can it be a cause of it, and elsewhere – for example, in the neighbouring nationstate of France – the preference might go exactly the other way. So as linguists we have always insisted that a standard language was just another dialect, but one that happened to be wearing a fancy uniform. But to say that is to leave out the historical basis of language standardization, which has to be understood in terms of the functions that a standard language takes on. If we take English, and other languages of Western Europe, as prototype (but noting that this is not the only possible route towards supranational status), the standard language evolves in the context of new demands especially in the areas of commerce, administration and learning. But these are not simply institutional demands  – that is, having to do with the relation between the language and its speakers, or users.2 They are also systemic  – having to do with the nature of the language itself, its total potential for meaning. Of course all these forms of semiotic activity had been going on for a very long time, in England as in politicized societies everywhere; but in medieval England they were generally conducted in three different languages: commerce in English, administration in French and learned discourse in Latin; so part of the job of the standard language was to take over and unify all three domains, as well as providing a uniform variety from within English itself. There is an interesting foreshadowing here of what happened much later on, in the colonial period. But over and above all this, there were new meanings to be created; new ways of meaning, in fact, commensurate with the new material conditions (which had in turn arisen from new technology, back to the horse-drawn plough and the movable-rudder sailing boat) and the new modes of production and social and political structures that evolved with them. When we think of the new resources that develop with the standard language in its construction of the modern nation-state, we usually think first of new vocabulary: exactly in the way that language planners, and planning agencies, conceived of their task of developing national languages in post-colonial nations – their job was to invent new words. Language planners soon came to realize, however, that they needed to establish the principles on which new words should be brought into being, because words do not function as individual elements but always in some systematic paradigmatic relationship one to another. Nobody planned the coining of new vocabulary in the early stages of Standard English; but as it happened there was a principle for making new words already at hand, namely that of switching into another language. This as I mentioned was already a feature of the upper-class reaches of English life, as a result of England having been colonized by the Norman French in the eleventh century; an interesting

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relic of this multilingual mode of meaning is to be found in common law, where there are a number of triplets, expressions consisting of three words, one native English (Anglo-Saxon), one Norman French and one Latin, like stay, cease and desist or bequeath, grant and devise. Here the words were no doubt intended as synonyms, although the fact that those who framed the laws adopted this practice suggests perhaps they felt each of the words meant something a little different, so that the legal interpretation would be that which was common to all three. But the principle that words of high value, words that carried weight, words of greater force and substance, could be created by borrowing from another language, one that was current among high-standing members of the community, was already present in the culture; and so the registers of the new Standard English, those of administration and centralized authority on the one hand, and those of technology and science on the other, went to Latin as the source of new terminology, building on, strengthening and expanding a repository that was already there.

2 In my title today I used the triad ‘written language, standard language, global language’ because I wanted to consider this relatively new phenomenon of ‘global English’ in its historical context. I don’t mean by this its institutional history, the socio-political events which contrived to bring it about; these have been well documented and interpreted by others who are far more competent to do so than I am. Those processes are external to language; whereas what I am looking into are the systemic processes that are going on in the language itself as it moves into these new socio-political contexts. So in that sense they are internal processes; but here there is another distinction to be made because I don’t mean the internal processes of sound change and the like – the phonological and morpho-syntactic changes that are the province of historical linguistics. These are, prototypically at least, independent of changes in the socio-political environment, being located on the plane of expression rather than on the content plane. My concern is with a more functional dimension of a language’s history, the sort of history that Kachru opened up for us when he talked of ‘the Indianization of English’ (1983). Historical semantics, and especially semantic field theory, was already pointing the way in this direction, with its interest in changes in the meaning of particular words, and sets of words, in response to changing cultural contexts. I want rather to generalize this notion, focusing on

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changes in the total meaning potential of a language; seeing this not, however, just as a response to socio-political and technological change but rather as an active agent in these historical processes – taking the view that human history is the product of these two fundamental realms of our existence, the material and the semiotic, interacting and interpenetrating at every level. The process of becoming a standard language or national language is something that we can examine historically, looking back on actual cases; and it offers certain analogies with the process of becoming internationalized, or globalized. A standard language is a tongue which has moved beyond its region, to become ‘national’; it is taken over, as second tongue, by speakers of other dialects, who however retain some features of their regional forms of expression. A global language is a tongue which has moved beyond its nation, to become ‘international’; it is taken over, as second tongue, by speakers of other languages, who retain some features of their national forms of expression. If its range covers the whole world we may choose to call it ‘global’. A standard language moves into new registers: new spheres of activity, opening up and expanding its meaning potential along the way. A global language does the same – or does it? This is an important question; and if we look at a ‘standardized’ language from this point of view, we can ask in what respects a ‘globalized’ language is, or is not, the same. If we start with the development of new vocabulary as the most obvious outward sign of the expansion of the meaning potential, we can characterize what seem to me to be the critical factors in this process by contrasting them with the simple process of inventing new words. We may identify four of these: 1. not just new words, but new word-making principles; 2. not just new words, but new word clusters (lexical sets); 3. not just new words, but new meanings; 4. not just new words, but new registers (functional varieties). Let me say a little about each of these in turn. In the first case, the ‘product’ is not a list of words, which is closed, but a set of word-forming principles whose output is open-ended. In English this meant borrowing root forms of words from Latin (and later directly from Greek); and also borrowing the morphological resources for transcategorizing and compounding them. In the second case, the ‘product’ is not words as isolates but sets of words that are paradigmatically related. There are various possible forms of such a relationship – various dimensions of paradigmatic order; the most fundamental

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and far-reaching is taxonomic order, whereby one member is either a kind of or a part of another, and this was an important feature of the new standardized English word stock, especially for technology and science. But, in the third case, the ‘product’ is not the forms as such but the meanings that these forms express: semiotic features (elements and structures) which can be construed by all features of the wording, grammatical as well as lexical. It is this that enables the construction of new forms of knowledge – and also of new forms of authority: those who master the new meanings thereby gain in power. And so, in the fourth case, the ‘product’ takes the form of modes of discourse, with their own ways of reasoning and arguing, of presenting and marshalling lines of information and control. Standard English took over the registers of administration and learning, and developed discourses which transformed these activities so that they became part of the new ‘modern’ order. All these processes can be seen as ways of opening up, of expanding the semiotic potential that inheres in every language: opening up the creation of new terms; opening up the dimensions along which these terms are organized, opening up the meaning-making resources of the lexicogrammar; opening up the modes of creating and transmitting knowledge, maintaining and strengthening authority. No doubt changes like these are going on in all languages all the time; but at certain historical moments they get speeded up, even to the extent of fundamentally transforming the semiotic power of the language. Speeded up, of course, is a relative term; in English they were able to take place, without any conscious planning, in five to ten generations. If you need to speed them up still further, you create a language-planning agency to intervene in these processes by design. Taken together, then, these are strategies for making meaning, for expanding the effective meaning potential of a language. Let us call them semogenic strategies. One way of thinking about the evolution of language is that it is a process of the evolution of semogenic strategies. We cannot generally observe this taking place  – except in its ontogenic guise: we can watch the semiotic development of children. But the evolution of a standard language does offer the chance of seeing some way into this aspect of linguistic history.

3 One way of thinking about the effects of these strategies, if we ask in what ways the meaning potential is in fact being opened up, is that they bring new

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forms of systemic order, adding further dimensions to the language’s semantic space. Let me try and clarify what I mean – again, I emphasize that I am talking about what happened in English. Every language will develop relevant semiotic strategies when the moment arises; but how each language does this will depend on a number of circumstances  – essentially, on the one hand the ecosocial environment, the material and semiotic processes that are going on around, and on the other hand the character (Sapir’s that ‘certain cut’) of the language itself, its ways of meaning and of innovating. What happens will be a product of the impact of these two forces as they appear at that historical moment. To come back to the most obvious feature, the vast quantity of new words that appeared in the course of the evolution of Standard English. What matters, as I suggested, is not the total number of words, but the resources available for making them, so that the process of word formation becomes open-ended – it has of course been going on ever since. In English, after the Norman invasion (which brought England back into the stream of post-Roman mainland European culture), the source language for most new words was at first Norman French; and then, by an easy transition as the standardization process gained momentum, Latin. So a bug, for example, becomes an insect. Why borrow a word for something already named? – because it is not, in fact, just a synonym. The popular view, among English-speaking children, is that which is embodied in the expression ‘long words’, which means words which are difficult but (therefore) more important. (This seems plausible on iconic grounds: they are longer, so carry more weight. On the other hand in Japanese, where the source of borrowing was Chinese, learned terms tend to be shorter than everyday words.) But the point is that an insect is a more abstract bug. It names a class: a class which can be defined, such that the question ‘is this (thing, or kind of thing) an insect?’ can be definitively answered  – whereas you can’t really ask about something ‘is that, or is it not, a bug?’ So an insect enters into a systematic taxonomy of living creatures, which can be elaborated by means of derivatives and compounds as such semantic structures become available: we have insectile, insectarium, insectivore, insecticide and so on. Likewise with numerous other Latin terms for familiar objects and phenomena: ignis for fire, giving ignite, ignition, igneous; aqua for water (aquatic, aqueous, aquarium, aquifer); avis for bird (avian, aviary, aviculture – and cf. aviation, aviator) and so on and so on. In all such cases, the Latin word construes some feature of our experience at a more systematic, and in fact systemic, level. But then as Standard English was evolving, another language came into vogue, namely Greek. Classical Greek learning had been preserved and built on by the

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Arabs; but for a long time it had been known in Western Europe only through Latin translations of a few of its leading scholars such as Aristotle. Greek studies were taken up just at the time when scientific knowledge was expanding and scientific discourse was becoming a significant component in the functional domains of Standard English. So Greek became another source of learned borrowing, made easier by the fact that many of the Latin terms in use had themselves been borrowed (calqued) from Greek in earlier times; Greek words came readily into English alongside those from Latin. Insects in Greek were entoma (itself the source of Latin insecta); but in English, again, they were not synonymous. The Greek term typically takes the abstraction up to an even higher level; it signifies its status as part of a theory, and therefore as an object of theoretical study: hence terms like entomic, entomophily and, as a branch of knowledge, entomology. Likewise hydro- for water (hydrogen, hydrolysis, hydrology), ornitho- for bird (ornithology) and so on. Thus the infusion of Greek extended this dimension of semantic space still further, beyond systematic taxonomy into scientific theory. And while over the centuries the distinction has become blurred, and only those interested in language now recognize which elements are from Latin and which from Greek, this vector of the meaning potential, once having been opened up in this way, is still present in the language; moreover it lies behind many of our cultural beliefs and cultural practices (such as education). Of course Standard English was never the preserve of scholars; learned discourse was only one of its manifestations, though one that was essential to the development of industrial technology. But the status and prestige that accrues to scholarly achievement becomes attached to scholarly language; and since, prior to the emergence of Standard English, Latin itself had been the language of prestige it was no great shift when that status was transferred to a kind of English that sounded like, and was obviously indebted to, Latin. Even the hierarchic distinction between Latin and Greek was carried over into this measure of status: an ophthalmologist is valued as superior to an optician, podiatry is more expensive than pedicure, ethics is a theorized form of morals. Thus latinate (or graecolatinate) discourse in English carries its own loading of prestige; and when this is combined with the authority of Standard English as the discourse of centralized administration what results, not surprisingly, is a language of power: not just in the sense that it possesses enormous power, through its expanded meaning potential, but in another (related) sense, that it gives power to those who control it, and hence serves as a means whereby power structures are put into and maintained in place. We are so surrounded today by these dominant forms of discourse that we scarcely notice them anymore;

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it seems quite natural to be told that this certificate remains the property of the corporation and must be presented on request (. . . still belongs to the body and must be shown when asked for). The internal memoranda of any bureaucratic institution often show up how the power is distributed; while as clients, we know our place when we are told that failure to reconfirm may result in cancellation of your reservations (and even if our reservations have not been cancelled, refusal to submit to screening procedures will result in prohibition on entry to the area and prohibition on boarding the aircraft). This has now become the norm, and Anglo-Saxon versions are marked as having very low status: they seem playful, or else merely childish.3 English is not alone in turning to a respected foreign language for its highly valued registers of discourse; apart from other European languages, we could cite the examples of Japanese (borrowing from Chinese), Vietnamese (also from Chinese), Thai (from Sanskrit), Urdu (from Persian, which in turn borrowed from Arabic), and the languages of southern India (again from Sanskrit). In these cases, the borrowing was associated not with standardization but with an earlier historical moment, the introduction of writing – or rather, perhaps, the development of written discourse; comparable therefore to the borrowing from Greek into classical Latin rather than that from Latin into English. But they illustrate the same principle: that when a language extends its field of operation, as its speakers, say, adopt a new religion, engage in new types of commerce, or explore new dimensions of knowledge, such changes in the ecosocial functioning of the language will always entail some expansion of its meaning potential. The writing systems that were widely borrowed (the Chinese, the Sanskrit, the Arabic) had themselves, like the Greek alphabet in Europe, been associated with fairly massive semiotic expansions when they first evolved: in religion, philosophy, technology, and also in literature where written genres displaced the earlier highly valued oral forms. Since human societies are organized hierarchically, the innovations in meaning potential that are part of these historical processes begin by being the prerogative of a favoured few. They will spread, over time, because while the few may struggle to retain their privileged status, the layers of a social hierarchy are typically permeable: castes and classes are not insulated one from another. But there will always be those who are left behind; they become the ‘marked’ category, labelled by some negative term like illiterate or uneducated; and whether or not they aspire to move in to the more highly favoured majority – they may or they may not – they are very well aware of their own lack of semiotic power. It was the illiterate peasants, in China in the 1950s, who protested most vigorously against

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the plan to abandon the charactery in favour of an alphabetic script. They knew that writing was the key to meanings they did not control; and writing meant characters – letters looked rather like a device for keeping them out. What I am wanting to bring out is that, when a language becomes a written language, and when it becomes a standard language, the change is not merely institutional; it is also systemic. The semogenic power of the language is significantly increased. We might then wonder, if a language becomes a global language, whether the same thing will happen.

4 There are various historical conditions under which some dialectal variety of a language may emerge as dominant and become ‘standardized’. In England, and in other parts of Europe, this happened as a concomitant of the ‘birth’ of the nation-state. In China, Mandarin evolved as the language of a centralized feudal authority; and its scope was likewise extended, not just in the categories of its users but in the meaning potential of its political, economic and cultural contexts of use. So if a language is not just nationalized but internationalized (and let me treat ‘global’ for the moment as the limiting case of being international), what happens then? Is this just an institutional change, with people taking it over as a supranational second language and living some portion of their lives in it? Or does it create new functions for the language, which then engender new meanings? Is its overall meaning potential increased? and if it is, then in what ways, and who for? At one level, the answer is obviously yes. One of the first examples of Indian English that Braj Kachru told me about was flower bed. This expression, familiar to the inner circle as a portion of a garden where flowers are grown (as distinct from the lawns), reappeared in an Indian English context in the sense which they would represent as marriage bed. Here ‘an old expression has taken on a new meaning’ – at least for someone who knows Hindi, or who may not know Hindi but can derive the information from the context. Whenever one language is used to describe settings that are primarily construed in another language, it is bound to take on new meanings, whether it does this by reconstruing old words or by borrowing new ones – as English did, for example, when it came to Australia and talked about bluebottles (jellyfish, not insects) and billabongs. Likewise in contexts of translation: when the Chinese

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translators of Mao Zedong’s works wanted an English equivalent for zougou, they sometimes translated it as lackey and sometimes calqued it as running dogs. Every language enlarges its meaning range when it hosts translations of foreign texts or is used to talk about cultural contexts that are different, and distant, from its own.4 But who are the meanings for? Access to them is limited: you have to know the language – English, in the case of flower beds and running dogs. But access to meanings is always limited, by inequalities in the social structure. Education is designed to increase people’s access, and it does so by steering them through these evolutionary changes in turn: first we teach children written language, then we teach them standard language (or else both at the same time, depending on the circumstances); and then, perhaps, we may teach them world language. This is the principle behind the three language policy that has been adopted in a number of countries (and sometimes even implemented, up to a point). It is a reasonable policy, and provided the teachers are trained and the necessary materials are available, children have no great problems in adapting to it. The reason it seldom succeeds is because the resources are not sufficient – or if they are, those who control them are not willing to devote them to education. But a world language could be built into the educational scheme – if it was needed. But, as language educators know, even with all the necessary resources deployed, the students don’t always learn because they don’t perceive a need for what they are learning. This can happen at all stages: some don’t see even why they should read and write. The most problematic, in this respect, is a world language. What makes people feel that they need another language? Critically, I think, in all these cases it is what we might call functional complementarity: things can be done with this language – things that they want to do – that cannot be done, or done successfully, without it. That, as we know, is the circumstance in which a global language catches on. It was also the circumstance in which writing first caught on, and in which standard languages evolve. As our interaction with each other, and with our material environment, comes to be more and more complex, we develop a more and more complex semiotic. One aspect of this process is the technology: first the materials to write on, and tools to write with; then paper and printing; and now electronic keyboards and monitor screens. But equally important were the new ways of meaning that the functional contexts demanded. Writing took the forms of calendar and divination, proclamations, lists of things and of doings, bills of lading and so on. Standard languages brought new semiotic strategies for administration and learning. And when we look into the grammar that provided

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the motive power for these strategies, in the history of English, one feature stands out as critical: namely grammatical metaphor. Grammatical metaphor opens up a new dimension of semantic space (Halliday, 1998b [2004]).

5 Grammatical metaphor is what turns move into motion, resist into resistance, fail into failure, long into length, can into possible, so (‘therefore’) into cause (verb or noun). It is metaphor because it involves cross-coupling between semantics and lexicogrammar: an expression is being used to mean something that has usually been meant by something else. (Better: a meaning that has usually been realized in one way is now being realized in another.) It is grammatical because what is being cross-coupled is not a word (i.e. not a lexical item, or ‘lexeme’) but a class: a noun is doing the job of a verb or adjective, an adjective that of a modal verb, a verb is doing the job that has been done by a conjunction. And there are others. It is this process, or rather this set of processes, that leads to wordings such as: Even though the fracture of glass can be a dramatic event, many failures are preceded by the slow extension of existing cracks.

It also gives us the kind of warnings that I quoted earlier – but also may be used to offer reassurances: Excellent safe face drying can be achieved by the same action as water was applied by regular wiping with warm hands during drying cycle.

and even in the publicity for a pop star: He also credits his former big size with much of his career success.

But it is in scientific writing that grammatical metaphor is most consistently exploited, because there it is functional at a critical level: you cannot develop a scientific theory without it. It reaches its most concentrated state in scientific abstracts, because it enables the meanings to be densely packed: Endocrine testings confirmed clinical anterior hypopituitarism. Post-traumatic hypopituitarism may follow injury to the hypothalamus, the pituitary stalk or the pituitary itself. The normal thyroid stimulating hormone response to thyrotropin releasing hormone . . . is in favour of a hypothalamic lesion. (Lim et al., 1990)

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But such a density would be dysfunctional in other registers of science; these require a less viscous flow of meaning, which is brought about by the oscillation between more metaphoric and more congruent states in the wording. Grammatical metaphor plays two crucial roles in scientific discourse. One is to carry forward the argument by packaging what has gone before so that it serves as logical foundation for what follows: for example, as cause in a chain of cause and effect. The other is to raise the argument to a theoretical level by construing not just individual technical terms but terminologies, sets of terms related in taxonomic order.5 Both of these principles are illustrated in a sequence such as the following: [F]rom 1950 to 1980, severe contamination from acid rain resulted in a drop in pH – from about 5.5 to 4.5 – which represented a tenfold increase in the acidity of the lake water. This acidification was caused mainly by the burning of coal containing high levels of sulphur. (Stigliani and Salamons, 1993: xii)

Consider the word acidification. On the one hand it ‘packages’ the preceding story about acid rain lowering the pH-value (hydrogen ion concentration) in the water of the lake, which means making the water more acid; on the other hand it forms part of a theoretical construct which includes terms such as contamination and pH-value, as well as other items in the surrounding discourse like atmospheric sulphuric acid and buffering capacity of the soil. These are linked by relational terms resulted in, represented, was caused by. Somebody burned coal, so the water became acid: two processes, linked by a conjunctive relation. But in the text, the processes have turned into things  – that is the canonical meaning of a noun; and the conjunctive relation between them has become a verb – that is, has turned into a process. What is happening here is that the grammar is creating virtual phenomena, phenomena which exist purely on the semiotic plane. This is achieved by a process of semantic junction, whereby two category meanings combine. Acidic is a quality of water, or of some other liquid; when this is nominalized, as acidity (‘being acidic’) or as acidification (‘becoming acidic’), since the category meaning of noun is a thing, or entity, the effect is of a semantic junction between quality and thing. The quality construed by the adjective acidic has been transformed, or metaphorized, into a thing, a virtual entity which can be observed, measured and reasoned about. Likewise ‘so, therefore’ is a conjunctive relation between processes; when it is construed by a verb, as causes or is caused by, since the category meaning of verb is a process, there is again a semantic junction: the (causal) relation construed congruently by

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a conjunction, like so or therefore, has been metaphorized into a process  – a virtual process, which can be located in time, negated and so on. It is the creation of these virtual phenomena, by the cross-coupling of grammatical categories with semantic features, that makes scientific discourse, and in fact scientific theory, possible. Scientists like grammatical metaphor; their lives, or at least their livelihoods, depend on it. Poets, and other creative writers, prefer metaphor in its traditional guise  – lexical metaphor. Here it is one word for another, not one class for another. But the same kind of semantic junction takes place, as rhetoricians and stylists have always recognized. So when Edwin Thumboo writes: . . . the Lord, whose other hand dispenses the dew Of sleep on Saul’s army . . . (cited from Webster, 2001)

we recognize that dew and sleep are fused into a new thing, a virtual dew  – one that is also medicinal, since it can be dispensed. This metaphoric potential is an inherent feature of human (post-infancy) language, because a language is a stratified semiotic, in which meaning and wording can be decoupled, and recoupled in new alignments. What the scientific imagination did was to combine these two fundamental resources of language: transcategorizing (deriving one word class from another, like maker from make, hairy from hair) and metaphorizing (cross-coupling of semantics and grammar). This process began in classical times, with the written languages of the ancient world (and the iron age technologies, which transformed material substances in somewhat analogous ways); but it was brought to a higher level in the standard languages of the modern period. As far as I know, every language of science has followed the same route, reconstruing the human experience by exploiting the potential for metaphor in its grammar.

6 Translation is also, as often pointed out, a process of metaphor: not a prototype, since it is a second-order semiotic activity, but perhaps the limiting case. To return for a moment to the flower bed: when this term is used in Indian English, does it bring about a comparable semantic junction? In other words, is flower bed just a new expression for an old meaning, or is it creating a new meaning, a marriage bed which is also a virtual bed of flowers – aided (though somewhat subverted)

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by the British (or inner circle?) English bed of roses? (Subverted because bed of roses is usually used in the context of a negative, such as a marriage bed is no bed of roses.) By itself, one instance is of little significance. But if a whole culture comes to be represented in a language other than its own (that is, other than that with which it co-evolved), has this now become a different language? Not just different from what it was (so much is clear), but different from either of its progenitors? Is Nigerian English just a rewording of the semantic system of Yoruba and other Nigerian languages, or is it a distinct semiotic, a metaphoric junction of two different semiotic styles? If the latter, then it embodies a new, and different, construal of the human condition.6 It is important to ask this question, I think, in the light of our previous history  – our semohistory, or history of meaning. The transitions that I have been considering  – into written language, into standard language  – were, in effect, reconstruals (that is, semiotic reconstructions) of human experience, concomitant with the increasing complexity of our interaction with the ecosocial environment. We may think of these as new functional demands on language brought about by advances in technology – which is how I myself used to think about them. But I think that was wrong. Rather, the semiotic and the material are two facets of a single historical process, neither of them driving the other, but neither of them able to take place independently. Writing came with settlement, and a certain level of political organization and material technology. What I have loosely called standardization came with a more centralized structure of authority and a higher level of technological achievement – in Europe, with the machine age, the technology of power. (In each case, vernaculars persist but do not share in the reconstruction.) So is it to be predicted that the technology of the electronic age, the technology of information, will be accompanied by a comparable reconstrual of experience? We can see that discourses are changing. Electronic text tends to lessen the distance between the spoken and the written mode; it develops features and patterns of its own, part written part spoken and part perhaps unlike either. Text can be a mix of aural and visual channels, together with components from other, non-verbal modalities. But what we don’t know yet  – or at least what I don’t know – is how far these factors affect the meanings that are being construed. One feature we can begin to observe seems to be a move back (but perhaps really a move forward) to more congruent ways of meaning, at least in the discourses of technology and science (nicely symbolized by the reinvention of biology as life science, geology as earth science); note also the Plain English movement in

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government and the law. The standard language may be revisiting its origins in everyday speech. At the same time, the ‘globe’ that provides the context for global English is for the moment at least a world in which the voices of international capitalism, with their triumphalist rhetoric about the failure of people’s first attempt to design something more humane, have learnt to exploit all the semogenic strategies that give language its enormous power. For corporations it comes as a bonus, inherited from colonial days, that the language of convenience in so many international (and even intranational) contexts is none other than English. But it is naive to imagine that if the United Nations had decreed, back in 1950, that some other language – say Esperanto, or even Malay or Korean – was to be adopted as a world language, the global situation would have been any different: whatever language was adopted would soon have been primed to function as a medium of corporate power. In that case English would have continued to serve – as French does today – as a highly valued international language in certain cultural regions and with certain clearly defined spheres of activity. The way it has turned out, English has become a world language in both senses of the term, international and global: international, as a medium of literary and other forms of cultural life in (mainly) countries of the former British Empire; global, as the co-genitor of the new technological age, the age of information. So those who are able to exploit it, whether to sell goods-&-services or to sell ideas, wield a very considerable power. Many people would like to resist this dominance of English. The strategic response would seem to be: do away with English. Don’t teach it, or do anything to perpetuate its standing in the community. But most serious thinkers believe that that won’t now work: English is too deeply entrenched, and if people are deprived of the chance of learning it they are the ones who suffer. That was not the case 50 years ago, when English was just one international language among many, and it may well not be the case 50 years from now; but for the moment that is how it is. It seems that if you want to resist the exploitative power of English, you have to use English to do it.7 It is important, I think, to distinguish these two aspects, the international and the global, even though they obviously overlap. English has been expanding along both trajectories: globally, as English; internationally, as Englishes. Both of these expansions involve what I have called semogenic strategies: ways of creating new meanings that are open-ended, like the various forms of metaphor, lexical and grammatical. But they differ. International English has expanded by becoming world Englishes, evolving so as to adapt to the meanings of other cultures. Global English has expanded – has become ‘global’ – by taking over, or

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being taken over by, the new information technology, which means everything from email and the internet to mass media advertising, news reporting and all the other forms of political and commercial propaganda. And the two seem not to have really mixed. Infotechnology seems still to be dominated by the English of the inner circle; under pressure, of course, but not seriously challenged, perhaps because the pressures have no coherent pattern or direction. If the Englishes of the outer circle had more impact on the global scene, those who monopolize the media would no longer automatically also monopolize the meanings. If African and Asian varieties of English are not simply vehicles for their regional cultures but also their communities’ means of access to a culture that is already in effect global, those who speak and write these varieties are not constrained to be only consumers of the meanings of others; they can be creators of meanings, contributors to a global English which is also at the same time international. Meanings get reshaped, not by decree but through ongoing interaction in the semiotic contexts of daily life; and these have now become global contexts, even if those who participate in them are still only a fraction of the total population of the globe. Rather than trying to fight off global English, which at present seems to be rather a quixotic venture, those who seek to resist its baleful impact might do better to concentrate on transforming it, reshaping its meanings, and its meaning potential, in the way that the communities in the outer circle have already shown it can be done.

Notes 1 nobbut ‘only’, ilk ‘kind’, yak ‘oak’, naffs ‘hubs’, awm ‘elm’, fellies ‘felloes, rims’, esh ‘ash’, Swaadil ‘Swaledale’. 2 I follow here the very useful concept of ‘institutional linguistics’ as defined many years ago by Trevor Hill (1958). 3 The technological and the bureaucratic modes of discourse may of course be combined; cf. Lemke (1990) and Thibault (1991a). 4 For the concept of semantic distance see Hasan (1984b [1996]). 5 These two motifs are brought out by detailed analysis of scientific texts; cf. Halliday and Martin (1993). 6 For views on the operation of English in an ‘Outer Circle’ environment (in this case Singapore), see Foley et al. (1998). 7 See, for example, Kandiah (2001), Pennycook (2001).

6

The Gloosy Ganoderm: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation (2009)

When we investigate translation from the standpoint of linguistic science, we are applying our understanding of language as a ‘semogenic’, or meaning-making, system in two stages. On the one hand, translation theory is a domain of research (along with, for example, literary studies) in descriptive and comparative linguistics. On the other hand, translation practice is an activity that has a high value in our social and cultural life; it requires the training of translators, the production of dictionaries and other multilingual materials, and even the setting up of special institutions for professional translators to work in. So we start by ‘unpacking’ the concept of translation, seeing it as a relation between languages, and as a process of moving from one language into another. In either of these two perspectives, translation is an extraordinarily complex achievement of the human brain. The translator may be ‘invisible’, in Venuti’s term (1995); but the translation process has to be illuminated, so that we can see it. This means that we have to direct light on it from many angles, such as are determined by the nature of language itself. In his book Towards a General Comparative Linguistics, written over 40 years ago, Jeffrey Ellis (1966) located translation as a domain within comparative descriptive linguistics. It can be seen as a fairly specialized domain, in the sense that relatively few linguists working in either functional or formal linguistics have paid explicit attention to translation; but it has been recognized as a kind of testing ground, since if your theory cannot account for the phenomenon of translation it is clearly shown up as inadequate. Here my first point of reference First published in Chinese Translators Journal 1 (An Introduction to Theories of Interpretation between English and Chinese), 2009. pp. 17–26.

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for systemic functional work on translation is another book written over 40 years ago by Ian Catford (1965); Catford used an early systemic model of language to analyse translation, and the notion of translation equivalence, in a remarkably rich and insightful way. More recently others, such as Christopher Taylor (1998) and Carol TaylorTorsello (1996), have brought translation into the compass of a functional linguistic theory; and Erich Steiner (e.g. 1998, 2004) has further enriched the field in focusing on context and on register. My main source of reference for the present paper is the book Exploring Translation and Multilingual Text Production: Beyond Content edited by Erich Steiner and Colin Yallop (2001). This is a major work all parts of which – including papers by Michael Gregory, Juliane House, Erich Steiner, Elke Teich and Colin Yallop – are central to my discussion; but first and foremost I am drawing on one particular chapter, that by Christian Matthiessen titled ‘The environments of translation’ (pp.  41–124). It is a long chapter; but then, Matthiessen is treating a long topic – or rather a whole range of topics which he has had to organize into a continuous progression unfolding as the text proceeds. Matthiessen takes as one cornerstone of his analysis the reciprocal notions of translation equivalence and translation shift – terms that were used by Catford in the course of his own discussion. Matthiessen writes ‘I shall assume that translation equivalence and translation shift are two opposite poles on a cline of difference between languages’  – from ‘maximal congruence’ to ‘maximal incongruence’ (p.  78). He adds: ‘The general principle is that the wider the environment of translation, the higher the degree of translation equivalence; and the narrower the environment, the higher the degree of translation shift.’ This is the principle of contextualization: the ‘widest’ environment is that in which the translation is ‘maximally contextualized’ (pp. 74–5) – and therefore, by the same token, is likely to be ‘maximally effective’. So what are the ‘environments’ that Matthiessen is referring to here? They are, or rather are defined by, the various dimensions along which language is organized: stratification, instantiation, rank, metafunction, delicacy and axis (see Figures 11 and 12, pp. 77 and 81, in Matthiessen’s paper). Taken together, these are what give a language its inexhaustible power of making meaning, opening up all the different vectors of abstraction, of combination, of depth in detail, of functional specialization and so on. Let me say a little about each of these in their own terms, and then go on to relate them to translation, where they define the various kinds of translation equivalence. All translators know from their own experience that there are different kinds of equivalence whose

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demands very often conflict; but beyond very general labels like ‘literal’ and ‘free’ we seldom come across a clear typology of equivalences which can put them into a coherent frame (cf. Koller, 1995). Stratification refers to the way a language is organized as a hierarchy of strata, or levels of realization: phonetic, phonological, lexicogrammatical and semantic. These are usefully grouped into two pairs, those of expression (phonetic, phonological) and those of content (lexicogrammatical, semantic), because it is at the juncture between these two ‘planes’ that translation is traditionally (and prototypically) located. ‘Same content, different expression’ is the prototype from which basic translation strategies are derived. Then, above the semantic, we may add a further stratum of ‘context’; this is outside language – it is the nonlinguistic environment in which texts come into being – but it can be modelled as the ‘upper’ stratum in the realizational hierarchy. In Matthiessen’s terms the context is the widest of the environments defined along this dimension. Instantiation is the scale linking the instance – the text, the usual object of the translation process – to the system of the language that lies behind it. The text is meaningful because it is an instance of the total systemic potential; those who understand the text do so because they control that meaning-making resource. It is along this scale that we can recognize the various subsystems, or registers, that are so critical to the effectiveness of a translation – often known in machine translation as ‘sublanguages’. The translator, of course, is moving up and down this scale all the time, retrieving from the resources of the system (perhaps with the aid of a guide to these resources such as a dictionary) some instance that satisfies the requirement of an equivalent text. My third heading was rank, sometimes referred to in structuralist terms as ‘size level’. This is again a hierarchy, most clearly defined at the inner strata of lexicogrammar and phonology; there is some apparent variation here among different languages, but within grammar, at least, the familiar hierarchy or rank scale, of clause, phrase/group, word and morpheme, together with ‘complex’ extensions of each – clause complex, phrase complex and so on – is valid for many of the languages we come to deal with, including Chinese and English. The question of a rank scale on the semantic stratum is often debated, in particular the question whether one such can be generalized across all registers (see Hasan et al., 2007); since a text is itself defined as a semantic unit, this is an issue that needs to be explored very thoroughly in the context of translation theory and translation practice. The fourth heading was metafunction, which is a dimension that, as Matthiessen points out, has long been recognized (or, at least, one aspect of it

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has) in translation studies but has seldom been addressed systematically. As the name proclaims, metafunction has something to do with function; but (here is the ‘meta’ part) not the function or functions of the text – that is built in to the notion of context – but the functional order that is a fundamental property of every language system, as the basis for the organization of meaning. Any instance of language – any text – is a complex of three orders of meaning, which we call ideational, interpersonal and textual; these can be analysed out at the semantic stratum, but in the lexicogrammar they are fused into an integrated progression of wording. The ideational is the representational aspect of meaning: meaning as the construal of experience, as narrative of the things and the qualities and the happenings of the world around us. The interpersonal is the active component of meaning, meaning as our way of interacting with other people, working on them so to speak, and introducing our own judgements and desires and our own angle on the situation. Interlacing these two strands of meaning in the text has always been seen as a problem for the translator, since this is one place where the demands of ‘equivalence’ are most likely to conflict  – priority is usually given to the ideational (‘denotative’) meaning, partly because it is felt to be more important and partly, perhaps, because it is easier to decide whether the translation is right or wrong. There is however a third component of meaning which is largely neglected in translation work, both theory and practice; this is the textual aspect, the organization of the meaning as a flow of discourse, with its balance between the old, or ‘given’, and the new, and its ongoing fabric of connections with itself and with the context surrounding it (see Ventola, 1994; Zhu, 1996). Delicacy, the fifth heading, refers to the depth of detail, in a scale running from most gross to most fine or ‘delicate’. It seems to have been relatively little explored in translation theory, though it turned up in machine translation studies under the name ‘granularity’. Delicacy has been a familiar concept in systemic functional theory for well over 40  years, in reference to what we might call ‘metadelicacy’ – the degree of differentiation that is built in to the categories of the description; it is the basic concept behind our system networks, which represent progressively finer distinctions in, for example, the grammar of a language (e.g. clause: dependent clause: :dependent clause of expansion: : : dependent clause of expansion by cause or condition . . .); but we are able to set up this scale in the description because variable delicacy is a property of language itself (not just of our metalanguage). Translators often face the problem of matching the degree of specificity found in the source language text: in other words, of maintaining equivalence in delicacy. The question becomes most obvious in taxonomies of

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things, such as animal: reptile: : snake: : : python: : : : water python . . .); but it arises throughout the lexicogrammar of every language. Matthiessen’s final heading is that of axis, which refers to the two dimensions of the semiotic space occupied by every element of the text at every stratum: the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic. We can think of this as the address of the element in the linguistic landscape. The syntagmatic environment is modelled as structure: what comes before and after – what combines, or can combine, with the element as parts in some organic whole. The paradigmatic environment is modelled as system: what could have come instead – what contrasts the element is entering into, what are the other alternatives that might have occurred (but did not). Taken together, the two axes of system and structure define the space in which the text is unfolding – at the lexicogrammatical stratum, the structures and grammatical classes, the collocations and lexical sets, which make up the context within which the translator is operating. The meaning of any element is the product of relations on both the axes; but the paradigmatic axis is what defines the ‘translation potential’, since it involves relations with things that are not present in the particular instance, but are as it were lurking behind the text. (This is why the same term ‘system’ enters into both oppositions: that of axis – system and structure – and that of instantiation – system and text.) These six dimensions  – stratification, instantiation, rank, metafunction, delicacy and axis  – are critical to any comparison of two or more different languages; and hence to the process of translation, because they are the parameters that define equivalence (and therefore also non-equivalence, or shift). We need to illustrate these at work; but first, a note about the important concept of functional variation, or register. This is not a separate dimension; it is a property, and a product, of the regular association between meaning and context: between the culturally recognized situations in which language is used and the semantic (and therefore also the lexicogrammatical) features that are ‘at risk’  – that are typically encountered in those situations. Since we assume, in translation, that the context remains the same, we can talk of equivalence in register  – that is, equivalence in the linguistic strategies that are deployed, in the selection of features (typically features of the content, but also perhaps of the expression) that the situation demands. We recognize, of course, that such equivalence may be impossible if the cultural distance is such that no equivalent situation type is readily available.1 These registers, or ‘sublanguages’ as they are known in machine translation circles, are not some special feature or outgrowth on a language. Every text has its registerial ‘profile’; registers are the varieties of discourse that have evolved within a language, characterized by the tendency

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to select some options rather than, or more frequently than, others. Following J. R. Martin’s work we have come to refer to culturally recognized, more or less institutionalized ‘macroregisters’ by the rhetorical term genres; these have become a defining feature of educational applications of the theory, and writers on translation, who have long been familiar with the term in its literary and rhetorical connotations, often use it also to designate recognizable text types; see Shore (in Steiner and Yallop, 2001: 256), ‘texts representing vastly different genres, e.g. an EU directive, a pop song, a highly valued literary text, a television commercial’ (see Martin and Rose, 2007). For illustration and discussion I have chosen two passages of translation between English and Chinese. Text A is from p. v of the Times Chinese–English Dictionary, published in 1980 jointly by Federal Publications in Singapore and by the Commercial Press in Hong Kong; A.l is the Chinese version; A.2 is the English version; and A.3 is my own translation of the Chinese version into English. Text B is a description of the ‘Tortoise and Crane’ motif, printed on a card inserted in the box in which the metal reproduction was packaged; again, B.1 is the Chinese version, B.2 is the English version, and B.3 is my own rendering of the Chinese version into English. In Text B, it is clear that the Chinese version is the original. In Text A we cannot be certain, but it is likely that here too the Chinese version was composed first. I will examine some of the comparative features of these two pairs of texts, referring in particular to cases of translation shift, where the English and the Chinese are in some respect non-equivalent (since it is non-equivalence that needs to be explained). Text A will be considered first. I will start with the hierarchies of stratification and rank, taking them up together so as to save space; and I will begin at the highest level, where as Matthiessen says the relationship between the texts is maximally contextualized and there is the greatest potential for congruence between the two languages. In Text A, the immediate contexts for the two texts are totally equivalent; they are in fact identical, since the texts appear one above the other on the same page of the same book. Interestingly, however, the titles of the two are different, not just in wording (lexicogrammatical stratum) but also in meaning (semantic stratum) – although it would have been quite acceptable for the Chinese to say 前言 ‘Foreword’, or even 序 ‘Preface’, or for the English to say ‘Publishers’ Note’. There is a shift in the contextual function which the two texts are having assigned to them. At the semantic stratum, we notice quite a lot of different ordering – much more than is required by the lexicogrammar. The flow of information in the two

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texts is quite different, particularly in the first half of the text. For example, in para. 2: English This edition, which is a joint effort . . ., aims to meet . . . This is the first medium-sized dictionary to be published locally Chinese ‘In order to meet . . ., Federal Press and Commercial Press combined’ ‘. . . revised the original to become a medium-sized dictionary, called . . .’

Compare also para. l, the location of ‘published in 1979’; and, in para. 3b: English The adaptation . . . provides a book . . . new . . . and . . . practical It will be . . . indispensable . . . for . . . It will also be useful for foreigners learning . . . Chinese . . . Chinese ‘After revision, the book will be . . . a resource indispensable to . . .’ ‘Its contents are new and . . . practical and it will provide a reference for foreigners . . . studying . . . Chinese’

Apart from these shifts in the ordering of the material, there are other cases of non-equivalence in the translation: para. 1: English lexicographical work of unprecedented dimensions Chinese ‘task of compilation and revision’ para. 2: English different needs of a wider range of dictionary users first . . . to be published locally Chinese ‘needs of a wide readership’ (or ‘wide needs of the readers’) –

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para. 3a: English – Chinese ‘Other than this, . . . still . . .’ para. 4: English over 40,000 . . . and over 40,000 Chinese ‘over 40,000 . . . total . . . over 80,000’ para. 5: English – Chinese ‘translations . . . reflect the . . . characteristics of the Chinese language’ para. 6: English for the convenience of the user Chinese –

All these are shifts at the semantic stratum; they are of course realized in the lexicogrammar, but not determined by it. Other than these, there are of course shifts in the grammar that arise from differences between Chinese and English; we can note three that are familiar. (1) At clause rank, where there are qualities that are informationally ‘New’. Chinese prefers to predicate these, while English tends to make them Epithets or Qualifiers: English ‘(provide with) a book new in content’, Chinese ‘its contents are (relatively) new’; English ‘over fifty took part’, Chinese ‘(those) taking part were more than fifty’. (The prototype for this is a pair such as English ‘she has long hair’, Chinese ‘her hair is long’, or ‘her, the hair is long’.) (2) At group rank, in Chinese all Modifiers precede what they modify, whereas in English the ordering depends on the rank: words premodify, phrases and clauses postmodify. I haven’t mimicked the Chinese in my translation, but

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of course ‘the stylistic characteristics of the Chinese language’ in Chinese is ‘the Chinese language’s stylistic characteristics’. But the shifts in ordering, already referred to, mean that there are fewer instances of this difference than would otherwise be expected; for example, ‘the first dictionary to be published locally’ would come out in Chinese as ‘the first locally published dictionary’, but in fact this item of information is left out. (3) At the ranks of clause and group: there may be a shift between the two. In Text A there is slightly more nominalization in the English than in the Chinese, but not very much – although sometimes the Chinese neutralizes the distinction. In para. l, English ‘is an adaptation of ’ corresponds to Chinese ‘is adapted from’; but in para. 3b, where English has ‘the adaptation is an attempt to provide’, the Chinese has 经过改编后 ‘having gone through adaptation’ or perhaps ‘after having been adapted’. Lexically there is a high degree of equivalence, but with some shifts; for example, 精华 in para. 3a is not equivalent to ‘approach’ but rather to ‘essence’ or ‘essentials’; and in the same paragraph 词条 is not equivalent to ‘allusions’, but to ‘(dictionary) entries’. There are one or two shifts in delicacy: English ‘this edition’, ‘this dictionary’, where the Chinese spells out the full title; English ‘asterisked’, Chinese 标出 ‘marks out’. Other lexical shifts are the omissions already referred to, where an item occurs in one version but not in the other. So let me turn to our fourth heading, that of metafunction. Ideationally, apart from shifts already mentioned, there is a high degree of equivalence. Textually, there were the shifts in the ordering of information, and also one or two shifts in clausal Theme, for example (para. 5), English ‘Emphasis was placed on using modern Chinese . . .’ Chinese ‘In the compilation of this dictionary . . . modern Chinese is given priority’. But the most striking metafunctional shift is in the interpersonal, where English has (para. 1) ‘work of unprecedented dimensions’, (para. 2)  ‘the first medium-sized comprehensive . . . dictionary’, (para. 6)  ‘for the convenience of the user’, none of which figures in the Chinese. This gives the English a noticeably more boastful quality; even something like ‘Over fifty specialists, both Chinese and non-Chinese . . .’ sounds more hyped up than the Chinese equivalent. This presumably reflects the fact that the intended market, those who are being targeted to buy the book, are anglophones rather than sinophones. And there is one reversal: the Chinese has ‘. . . (translations) reflect the stylistic characteristics of the Chinese language’. This is not in the English, which leads one to wonder why not. But perhaps we can suggest why not. Let me remark here that I selected this passage just to show the linguistic theory at work; but (as so often happens when

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you are dealing with texts!) once you analyse, you find unexpected matters of interest. Consider the first point we noticed, namely the title: ‘Foreword’ in English, but ‘Publisher’s Note’ (or, more exactly, ‘Publisher Explanation’) in Chinese. Now, under this Chinese heading we expect to read a factual account of the work, and its origins, written by the publisher to introduce it. But under the heading of ‘Foreword’ we expect some evaluation, telling us that ‘this is a great work’; and the Foreword is always written by someone else. So here, despite an identical context of situation, the two texts have different functions with respect to that particular context. This explains the special features in the English, which we noted: it has features of positive appraisal, or ‘plugs’, encouraging you to buy the book. What the Chinese has, and the English has not, is the clause just cited, about the English translations reflecting the stylistic characteristics of the Chinese language 汉语的语体特点. Now tèdiǎn 特点contains the morpheme tè 特, which means ‘special’. But the anglophone customer doesn’t care about reflecting the stylistic particularities of the Chinese, and may even be put off by the idea; so that bit is left out. And now we can account for some of the differences in the information flow; for example, the Chinese ‘to suit the needs of a broad readership, these two publishers combined’, in contrast to English ‘this book (a collaborative work) aims to meet the needs of a broader readership’, which is a significantly different message to put to the reader. Now let me look briefly at another example, ‘Crane on Tortoise’s Back’ (Text B). Contextually the Chinese and the English are equivalent, not only systemically but also instantially – that is to say, not only could they function in the same context, in fact they did: they were on the two sides of the same card, inserted in a box together with the object being described. It might be questioned whether they have the same function within that context; the Chinese might be designed more as sales promotion (‘give this as a gift to your foreign friends’ – that is how we got it), and this would be reflected in the shifts that we observe when we consider the stratum of semantics. Semantically, at the rank of the text the two versions are largely equivalent, except for the title and the blurb at the end, both of which occur only in the Chinese version. The organization of the rhetorical units, however, shows some shifts which we could summarize as follows (for ‘rhetorical unit’ see Cloran, 1994): English description maker || source meanings 1,2

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Chinese descriptionπsourceρmeaning general, meaning1 meaning2

The Chinese omits the height of the ornament; and also, curiously, the maker’s name (though that may have been printed on the outside of the box). The English omits much more: it leaves out much of the descriptive detail, the reference to the folk tradition, the fact that the piece is ‘rich in meaning’, and much of what that meaning is, notably the reference to the interpretation of crane as female and tortoise as male. In the lexicogrammar there are some striking differences. The Chinese text is made of clauses; many of them are relational, with processes realized by verbs, such as yìyù რ໧ ‘symbolize’, dàibiǎo ‫ז‬। ‘represents’, wéi 䢠 ‘is’, yǐ . . . zhī yì ‫ א‬. . . հრ ‘has the meaning of ’, rútóng . . . bān ‫ ٵڕ‬. . . ౳ ‘is like’, but some are material: gēnjù . . . ér chéng ௅⇕ . . . ۖ‫‘ ګ‬is produced according to’, lì yú . . . shàng ‫م‬Պ . . . Ղ ‘stands on’, kǒu xián Ց像 ‘holds in the mouth’. In the English, the whole of the first paragraph is presented as a nominal group complex (in that respect being more like the title in the Chinese). The second paragraph is presented as three written sentences; the grammar is clausal, all five clauses being relational – the only material process is the rank shifted (embedded) clause beginning at ‘displayed’. The English is thus much more static: ‘proposed’ and ‘made by’ are non-finite, while the material processes equivalent to ‘standing’ and ‘holding’ are realized not by verbs but by prepositions (‘on’, ‘in’). By contrast, the Chinese text creates a history, unfolding in the course of time. Here the Chinese text is obviously the original; the shifts take place in the translation into English. The English is clearly intended to be equivalent in register, and it largely is. The words ‘proposed’ and ‘imitation’ are probably translation shifts; they have no equivalent in the Chinese, but I take it that ‘proposed’ is an ideational error for ‘designed’, while ‘imitation’ is interpersonally wrong because it is negatively loaded – it should have been ‘reproduction’. But the one item that is strikingly out of place is the ‘gloosy ganoderma’. This leads us to consider the limits, or rather perhaps the fringes, of the translation process; the gloosy ganoderma will serve as the way in. Of course it’s a misprint; ‘gloosy’ should have been ‘glossy’. And ‘glossy ganoderma’ is what the translator would have found in the dictionary as the English equivalent of língzhī 㦦॒. Its Latin name is Ganoderma lucidum. But here it is quite out of register: there is a violent shift, with the meaning of língzhī being realized in the lexicon of a different subsystem. In this respect a closer equivalent would be ‘wonder iris’ or ‘miracle iris’.2

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This matches the registerial mode of the rest of the text, as in the words ‘crane’, ‘tortoise’, ‘youth’, ‘elixir’ and so on. We could perhaps retain the word ‘glossy’; but the text doesn’t have ‘glossy’, it has ‘gloosy’, with a shift at the strata of expression, both orthographic and phonological. Now, most translation does not provide for equivalence in phonology, though it may need to be taken into account. One of my earliest published works was an English translation of the well-known Chinese song jiào wǒ rúhé bù xiǎng tā? 叫我如何不想她; my translation was done for performance at a recital by a singer, so it had to fit the music – it had to match the rhythm of the Chinese. I rendered the title line as ‘How should I not think of her?’ Even here, however, it would not be thought necessary to consider the articulation – the vowels and consonants; they are usually regarded as neutral, just automatized realizations of the wording. But perhaps we should explore this a little further. The word ‘gloosy’ doesn’t exist in English. But it could exist, and we can have a good idea of what it would mean if it did. Note the initial consonant cluster /gl-/. Words beginning with /gl-/ often have to do with light, typically momentary and bright, like ‘gleam’, ‘glint’, ‘glimmer’, ‘glitter’. These have a front vowel; with a back vowel, the light is faint, as in ‘gloom’ and ‘gloomy’; and perhaps ‘gloaming’, though with a more open vowel the light seems to be more diffuse, like in ‘glow’ and ‘gloss’ and ‘glare’. But what about the  –oosy /-u:zi/? This is fuzzier; note ‘woozy’ meaning ‘half asleep’, ‘snoozy’ meaning ‘sleepy’, ‘boozy’ meaning ‘fuddled with drink’, and also ‘oozy’ meaning ‘muddy and slow moving’. When we put /gl-/ and /-u:zi/ together, this suggests wandering around sleepily with only a very dim light. This kind of pattern is known as phonaesthesia, or sound symbolism. It is not onomatopoeia; there is no imitation involved, because these meanings have no sound to imitate. There is just a direct line from phonology to a lexicalized semantic field. I think there is something similar in Cantonese, where nasal initial /n-/, /m-/ or /n-/ plus high front vowel often means squeezing or pinched tight, as in the following words: niù 杪 nit 臲 nip 捻 nip 鑷 nip 凹

‘slender’ ‘grasp’ ‘pinch’ ‘pincers ‘ ‘press flat’

nín 撚 mì 寐 ngit 齧 nì 閕 nìm 拈

‘squeeze’ ‘close (eyes)’ ‘nibble’ ‘hide’ ‘carry in fingers’

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(I first noticed these when learning Cantonese many years ago. The characters and English translations given here are taken from the dictionary I was using at the time, The Student’s Cantonese-English Dictionary published by the Field Afar Press, New York, in 1947.) Sound symbolism figures prominently in the phonology of English. There is a website listing a large number of phonaesthetic series; not all of them are convincing, to me at least, but that still leaves a considerable number that are. They tend, naturally, to carry more semiotic force in spoken language  – but also in those varieties of written language that are designed to be read aloud, particularly books written for young children. They might seem to be only of marginal interest in the present context – except that such books are in great demand as texts for translation. As the humorous writer Paul Jennings said many years ago, ‘Paradoxically, the more a work expresses some special national genius, the more it attracts translators’ (1963: 32/cf. note above). Jennings’ ‘special national genius’ was not defined; but he gave examples from Beatrix Potter’s stories for children which contain many instances of phonaesthesia. An example is the ‘Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies’. With the name ‘flopsy’, it was clear that these bunnies were laid-back, easy-going and rather idle (compare ‘flat’, ‘flabby’, ‘flaccid’, ‘floppy’, ‘flighty’); they took neither themselves nor anything else very seriously. The German translation was ‘die Geschichte der Hasenfamilie Plumps’ (the story of the rabbit family Plumps). If they had been ‘Plumps’ in English, the effect would have been very different; they would have been rather pompous, taking themselves very seriously (think of ‘plummy’, ‘plushy’, ‘plume’ as in ‘plume oneself ’; also ‘plumped up’, and many words ending in -ump).This would have had a different effect on the whole story. The question is, what is ‘equivalence’ in this situation? Do we simply say that it is verbal humour, a form of punning and therefore untranslatable? With a pun there can be no equivalence, in another language, in the meanings that share the same sound, except by the occasional ‘happy coincidence’. For the same reason it is impossible to translate cryptic crossword puzzles, which depend entirely on verbal play. Not all verbal humour involves punning, of course; there are other kinds without word play, such as the mixed cliche like ‘(I had to do) the lion’s share of the donkey work’ or ‘(I suspect you’re) skating on the thin end of an icy wedge’. But they all make problems for the translator, for a combination of two reasons: one, there are seldom any equivalent forms of wording; the other, different cultures have different ideas about what’s funny. This is in principle no different from the problem that arises at the other extreme – at the upper end of the traditional scale of textual value, in the translation

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of literature. In translating poetry, the translator may choose to produce what is simply a gloss on the meaning of the original. But some translators seek to create a text of equivalent value, matching (say) lyric poetry with lyric poetry, if there appears to be an equivalence between the genres. But where, in terms of our model, is the equivalence established? For many decades now there has been a tradition of translating Japanese haiku and tanka into English while retaining the syllable count: 17 syllables in the haiku, 31 in the tanka. But the syllable in English is a very different matter from the syllable, or ‘mora’, in Japanese; the equivalence here is quite illusory. Meanwhile, however, both these forms are now being written as original works in English; this has become a recognized genre in its own right (my daughter-in-law has won many prizes for hers), but evaluated according to what are perceived as the essential semantic motifs of the original Japanese model. Translators of Chinese lyric poetry, the shī 诗 of the Tang dynasty, have never (as far as I know) tried to preserve the syllable count of the original Chinese, though one could – the Chinese syllabic rhythm is much more like that of English (cf. Huang, 2002 [2006]). Here is a version of one of the best-known Tang lyric poems, which is a quatrain with five syllables per line, rhyming AABA, and with each syllable realizing one simple (monomorphemic) word: Bed foot, bright moon’s shine – Ground seems decked with rime. Head raised, watch bright moon; Head bowed, home thoughts chime.

The problem here, for translation theory, is that while there is near equivalence on the dimensions of strata and rank, even down to the monosyllabic construction of the verse lines, there is in the English a kind of built-in exoticism, which is not present in the Chinese. There is not enough grammar in the English, which needs pronouns and determiners and prepositions – of course, there is grammar (it is quite clear what it means), but not the outward signs of it, which are needed for comfort in English, but not in an East Asian language such as Chinese. Translators of Chinese poetry sometimes use imperfective non-finite clauses, which sound a little less exotic because they are used by English poets; they avoid the need for Subjects, and for choosing a particular tense. Here is an alternative rendering in this manner: Before bed, bright moon shining – Ground beneath frost reclining? Head raised, watching bright moon; Head bowed, for old home pining.

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But this still remains a marked option by contrast with the finite, whereas there is no such markedness in the Chinese – in fact no system of finiteness. So here there is a shift on the paradigmatic axis: either the systems are not equivalent, or, if they are, there is shift in the pattern of marking. I have considered two texts, Text A and Text B. each in two versions, one Chinese and one English; together with a third version which is my rendering of the Chinese into English. Text A provided illustration of some fairly straightforward patterns of equivalence and shift; Text B, on the other hand, led us out towards the fringes of translatability. This has been a very brief exercise in comparative discourse analysis, whereby it is possible to be reasonably precise in locating the patterns of equivalence and shift between the two related versions. It does not matter how such texts have been produced – whether by translation one from the other, human or mechanical, or by separate composition given the same contextual specifications; the analytic method is the same. Such a linguistic analysis has, I think, a value in the teaching of translation, and thus in the training of translators, because it enables teacher and learner to direct attention to all the relevant issues, knowing exactly what it is they are talking about. This is not as easy as it sounds, and it makes the analytic effort worthwhile. What about the evaluation of the product? Does the linguistic analysis help us to say whether, and why, a translation is effective, or one translation better than another? One way to explore this is to take two or more translated versions of the same text where you feel that one is clearly better than another, and observe what emerges from the analysis. Your judgement will have something to do with the degree of equivalence; but there can be no exact correlation – it is impossible to give an overall measure of equivalence because, as we have seen, equivalence is of so many different kinds. But that itself suggests a further step: that different kinds of equivalence have differential value, and that the value accorded to different kinds of equivalence will vary according to the context, both the context of situation and the context of culture. Matthiessen postulated the general principle that on the hierarchical scales of stratification and rank, the ‘higher’ levels tend to carry the higher value. On the other dimensions, we may assign value to particular instances or classes of translation: we might say, for example, that in translating lyric poetry equivalence in the interpersonal metafunction takes precedence, or that equivalent delicacy is essential in a medical treatise but only secondary in a tourist guide. Juliane House, in her paper ‘How do we know when a translation is good?’ (Steiner and Yallop, 2001), makes a key distinction between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ translation,

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and sets a different scale of values for the two. An ‘overt’ translation is one that proclaims itself clearly as a translation, and makes no attempt to operate, and no claim to operating, in the same functional context as the original; it needs to be equivalent in register, and also in what House calls the ‘language/text level’ (semantics and some lexicogrammar), but not necessarily in ‘individual textual function’. With a ‘covert’ translation, which pretends not to be a translation at all, ‘individual textual function’ must be held equivalent, if necessary with the insertion of a ‘contextual filter’, but equivalence in ‘language/text’ can be dispensed with. Interestingly, she then uses the overt/covert distinction as itself the bearer of value, and criticizes a particular translation of a children’s story from English into German because it was covert, where in her view an overt translation would have been more appropriate. It is important, as Juliane House says ( Steiner and Yallop, 2001: 156), to maintain the distinction between linguistic analysis and value judgement, however much the two are interdependent. The analysis in systemic functional terms is a resource for interrogating the text – in this case, for interrogating a pair of related texts, by comparing the one with the other. Only certain parts of the analysis are likely to be relevant to evaluation. But we shall not know which parts these are until we have looked into them all or at least gained some idea of where there is equivalence and where there is shift, and related these findings to our overall impression of the texts in their respective functional contexts. I chose the gloosy ganoderm as an eye-catching (and ear-catching) instance which would open up several of the dimensions of our analysis, in a way that was rather different from, and perhaps complementary to, the features of the Times Dictionary text. Between them they provided illustrations of a general theory of language as a resource for translation studies. Translators are all the time exploring the potential that is defined by all these parameters of a language; when we make them explicit, our discussion of the issues and problems involved in the translation process becomes very much more focused and effective. As linguists, we are always concerned to distinguish between the indicative and the imperative stance – between describing what is and evaluating, and perhaps prescribing, what ought to be. Traditionally, the linguist’s theory of translation has been descriptive, the translator’s has been evaluative. But in real life, texts carry value, and we need to explain that value in terms of what we know about semiosis – about meaning and how meaning is made. This is true of all analysis of discourse; but in translation studies it is the central issue. A linguistic theory of translation cannot avoid the challenge of becoming – or at least supporting – a theory of good translation.

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Notes 1 This is always a matter of ‘more or less’; there is no absolute equivalence or absolute non-equivalence. In the translation of the Bible, for example, the text may play a large part in bringing about the context of its use; cf. the role of translated texts in developing new registers (of science, administration, etc.) in languages that had not previously operated in these functional contexts. Cf. Yallop (Steiner and Yallop, 2001). 2 I think it is a kind of iris, though dictionaries have different views: one dictionary told me that it was a ‘fungus’, and another gave ‘lotus’. Whatever it is, the translator needs to find a word from the general, not the learned, vocabulary.

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附录

Text A.1 出版说明 《时代汉英词典》是根据1979年出版的《汉英词典》改编的。原书由 北京外国学院英语系编写; 先后参加编写、修改等工作的中外专家有五十 多人。 为了适合广大读者的需要,新加坡联邦出版社和香港商务印书馆合作, 将原书改编成为一部中型词典,称为《时代汉英词典》。 《时代汉英词典》保留了《汉英词典》的特色和精华,只删去了原书里 冷僻单字、词条和具有强烈地方色彩的例句。此外,改编本还特别标出汉 语中最常用的二千个单字。经过改编后,这部《时代汉英词典》将成为各 阶层读者、教师、学生和翻译工作者不可缺少的汉英工具书。它内容较 新又切合实用,也可供外国人士学习和使用汉语时参㌳。 《时代汉英词典》收汉语单字条目五千多,其中包括极少数的音变字。 收入的多字条目四万余,连同合成词、词化短语及例证等八万余。 本词典的编写,在汉语方面,以现代汉语为主; 本词典的编写,在汉语方面, 以现代汉语为主;义力求准确、简明,例证力求实用; 英译尽可能反映汉语 拼音的语体特点。 词典正文的单字和多字条目按汉语拼音顺序排列。正文前附有部首检 字;书末附有汉语拼音方案,汉语拼音各威妥玛(Wade)式拼法音节表等附 录。

Text A.2 FOREWORD The Times Chinese–English Dictionary is an adaption of The Chinese–English Dictionary. The original edition, published in 1979, was compiled and edited by the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute. Over fifty specialists, both Chinese and non-Chinese, took part in this lexicographical work of unprecedented dimensions. This edition, which is a joint effort of Federal Publications, Singapore, and The Commercial Press, Hong Kong, aims to meet the different requirements of a wider range of dictionary users. This is the First medium-sized, comprehensive Chinese–English Dictionary to be published locally.

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This DICTIONARY incorporated the special features and approach of the original edition. Only rare words, unfamiliar allusions and strongly localized illustrative examples have been deleted. The 2,000 most frequently used Chinese characters are asterisked. The Adaption of this DICTIONARY is an attempt to provide the learners and users of the Chinese language with a reference book comparatively new in content and more suited to practical use. It will be an indispensable linguistic tool for general readers, teachers, students and translators. It will also be useful for foreigners learning or working in the Chinese language. There are over 5,000 single-character entries, including a small number of characters with variant tones, besides over 40,000 compound-character entries and over 40,000 compound words, set phrase and examples. Emphasis was placed on using modern Chinese, and modern English was taken as the basis of all English translations. Care has been taken to ensure that definitions of words and expressions are clear and precise and the examples practical. All entries are arranged in alphabetical order according to the Chinese Phonetic System. A Radical Index has been placed before the text of the DICTIONARY for the convenience of the user. There are six appendices, including the Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet and the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet and Wade System.

Text A.3 Publishers’ note ‘The Times Chinese–English Dictionary’ is adapted from ‘The Chinese–English Dictionary’ published in 1979. The original work was compiled by the English Department of the Beijing Foreign languages Institute: the Chinese and foreign specialists taking part in tasks of compilation and revision from beginning to end were over fifty in number. In order to suit the needs of a wide readership Singapore Federal Publications and the Hong Kong Commercial Press have cooperated in revising the original work to become a medium-sized dictionary called ‘The Times Chinese–English Dictionary’. ‘The Times Chinese–English Dictionary’ retains the special features and essentials of ‘The Chinese–English Dictionary’, merely eliminating uncommon

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simple and compound words and examples having a strong local colouring. Other than this, the revised edition still specially marks out the 2,000 most frequently used characters in Chinese. Having undergone revision, this ‘Times Chinese–English Dictionary’ will become a Chinese–English resource book that readers, teachers, students and translation workers at all levels will find indispensable. Its contents are both relatively new and geared to practical use; and it will provide a reference for foreigners when they are studying and making use of the Chinese language. ‘The Times Chinese–English Dictionary’ has over 5,000 single-character entries, including among them a very small number with tonal variants. It incorporates more than 40,000 multi-character entries; together with compound words, set phrases and illustrative examples the total reaches more than 80,000. In the compilation of this dictionary, on the Chinese side Modern Chinese is given priority; on the English side, Modern English is taken as the norm. The meaning of terms is explained with emphasis on accuracy and clarity; the examples are chosen with emphasis on practical use; the English translations as far as possible reflect the stylistic characteristics of the Chinese language. The entries for single characters and multi-character expressions in the main body of the dictionary are arranged in alphabetical order in Hanyu Pinyin. Before the main body there is an index ordered by radicals; at the end of the book are appendices including a table of Hanyu Pinyin and a table of syllables in Hanyu Pinyin and Wade transcriptions.

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Text B.1 龟鹤衔芝 此器根据明皇宫陈设的吉祥物龟鹤延年缩小而成。为一仰头挺胸的仙鹤 立于四头仰望的老龟背上,口衔灵芝,意味深长。民间传统鹤意喻长青,龟 代表长寿,而灵芝为返宅还童之仙药。一意为延年长青不老; 二意以鹤为 雌、龟为雄,有爱情如名仙鹤立龟般长青不老之意。 长安青铜 底蕴无穷 商周秦汉 王者风范

Text B.2 Crane on Tortoise’s Back with Gloosy Ganoderma in Mouth, Ming Dynasty, ornament height-43  cm, proposed and made by Five Rings Cultural Relics Imitation Co., Ltd. The article is a miniature of the mascot – Crane and Tortoise displayed in the Imperial Palace of Ming Dynasty. Crane stands for youth, tortoise for longevity, and gloosy ganoderma for elixir. The image vividly represents love everlasting.

Text B.3 Tortoise and Crane with Iris in Beak This piece is a miniature based on a talisman representing tortoise and crane, for prolonging life, displayed in the Imperial Palace of the Ming Dynasty. It has a red-crowned crane with head up and breast thrown out, standing on the back of a tortoise with its head turned back, looking up, and with a wonder iris (‘glossy ganoderma’) held in its beak. It is rich in meaning; in folk tradition the crane symbolizes eternal youth, the tortoise represents long life, and the wonder iris is an elixir which retards ageing and restores youth. One meaning is that of prolonging life and remaining young; a second meaning takes the crane as female, the tortoise as male, signifying love never ageing, like the crane on the tortoise’s back. Changan bronze Shang Zhou Qin Han

Unremitting search for the inner meaning Styled and modelled fit for a king

7

Putting Linguistic Theory to Work (2010)

1 First, my warmest thanks to the Association, which I believe is known affectionately as ‘triple-A.L.’, and in particular to Heidi Byrnes, for inviting me, and for exerting some pressure – the tenderest pressure – on me to join in this important event. I was uncertain what contribution I might be able to offer – and also uncertain about what sort of gathering to expect, more especially how many people to expect for the occasion (you know the problem: the larger the audience, the more elementary the humour has to be; you can’t use subtle irony if you’re addressing more than about 25 people). My friend Pauline Gibbons, who spoke at your conference several years ago, said it would be ‘just a small gathering’; but there may have been some evolution since that time? Trying to choose some topic, some motif that could be relevant and appropriate in this environment, where there are likely to be many different applications of linguistics on your agenda, I thought I should engage with applied linguistics at its most general level, namely the conception of (as I said in my title) ‘putting linguistic theory to work’. This has always been my primary concern; in recent years I have taken to characterizing this approach by the term ‘appliable linguistics’. The word ‘appliable’ causes a problem to editors and others – in fact to anyone working under the tyranny of language technology, where there are devices for suppressing any originality (aptly called ‘spell checkers’, because they check the spell, taking all the magic out of the writing process). These devices never let me get away with ‘appliable’; they replace it with ‘applicable’, which is not at all what I mean – I am talking about a general characteristic of a theory, not its Presented in American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference 2010, Georgetown University.

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application ‘to’ this or that particular issue. Such checking systems embody the naive notion that language consists of old words in new sentences, the idea that words form a limited set which can be neither expanded nor played games with (with ‘grammar checkers’ even the originality of sentences is under threat). An appliable linguistics, as I understand it, is a theory which tackles problems and tries to answer questions – but questions that are asked, and problems that are raised, not by professional linguists so much as by other people who are in some way concerned with language, whether professionally or otherwise. There are large numbers of such people: educators, translators, legal and medical specialists, computer scientists, students of literature and drama, . . . ; and it is their ‘take’ on language that is being addressed, at least to the point of clarifying what sorts of questions can usefully expect to be asked, and whether or not there is any hope of coming up with an answer. In order to try and suggest what I mean by this I am going to draw on my own personal history, illustrating how I myself was led in to exploring questions of language by certain specific interests I had and by certain specific jobs I was called upon to do. I will try to show how these particular quests for understanding opened up – prised apart, as it were – the various dimensions of language that make up the framework of such an ‘appliable’ linguistic theory. The story as I shall be telling it is of course not a chronicle – it is a fable, distilling meaning and order out of processes that were (and always are) disorderly, often misdirected, and above everything interactive. They are social, conversational processes in the way that learning typically is. What I hope to bring out by using this strategy is a way of thinking about language; and, more particularly, how this way of thinking arises from the need to engage with language in specific ecosocial contexts.

2 There were four main strands in my own personal background whereby language came to stand out in focus of attention: literature, foreign language learning and teaching, machine translation, and the broad issue of undervalued languages and varieties. English literature, especially poetry and drama, was a notable feature of life both at home and in school. My father was an English teacher, for whom language and literature were never kept ritually apart; I shared his love for the outstanding poets and dramatists, and I wondered why it was that my teachers never explained how language could be made to achieve such magical effects. At one point I explored the school library and found a book on language written

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by someone with the name of Bloomfield; but it was all much too far above my head. (If only I had known David Abercrombie at the time!) I can date the encounter with Bloomfield at age 15; from that point the other three experiences with language began one after another at roughly five year intervals. I first became a foreign language teacher just after my twentieth birthday, teaching Chinese in the British armed services; at 25 I joined a marxist linguistics group working on a variety of topics such as the development of newly decolonized languages of Asia and Africa; and at age 30 I became a member of the Cambridge Language Research unit, investigating how to operationalize language for the purpose of translation by computer. Put in a list like this, these four interests (literature, language teaching, unrecognized languages and machine translation) might seem to be largely unconnected; but in my own thinking they all combined together; and some combinations appeared in the form of specific tasks along the way, such as when I was teaching, or translating literature in a foreign language. The overriding impression I carried with me (without formulating it, of course) was that it was essential to strive towards a comprehensive account of language such as would accommodate all these various perspectives – in other words, which would be robust enough to match up to all of the demands that practitioners of language might make on it. You don’t want to devote a lot of time and energy to some language-centred task only to find that the model you are using collapses as soon as you go round the back and look at the problem from a different angle of vision. It dawned on me (but it was a gradual, drawn-out dawn, temperate rather than tropical) that I was positioning myself in some complex, multidimensional space, in which it was extremely easy to get lost. At the same time, however, many of the tasks I was faced with had one feature in common: they all demanded close encounters with text – what we would now subsume under the name of ‘discourse analysis’. Now, at that time ‘language’ and ‘text’ tended to be thought of as two different orders of phenomena; and when Chomsky’s influence took over, the worst insult that one linguist could hurl at another was to accuse them of being ‘data-oriented’. This artificial dichotomy, between language as system and language as text, was the bane of mainstream twentieth-century linguistics, and it continues to cause trouble right up to the present day. I was fortunate in that my two outstanding teachers, Wang Li and J. R. Firth, did not subscribe to that dichotomy, although neither did they entirely transcend it; and even more fortunate in that (entirely against my wishes at the time) I was assigned a research task which involved writing the grammar of a language on the basis

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of a single medium-length document – in other words, transforming text into system. This relation between system and text was (I realized later) one critical dimension of the multidimensioned space in which I found myself: the dimension we now call ‘instantiation’, using ‘instance’ as the general term for that which, in language, takes the form of text. Work on my Ph.D. thesis (for that is what it became) made it clear to me that text and system were simply language seen from different observer positions. ‘system’ is ‘text’ seen from a vaster distance – from so great a distance that it becomes possible, and in fact necessary, to theorize it. In other words, the text is transformed on to another level of reality, the level of virtual entities on which every scientific theory exists. Every ‘instance’ of text perturbs the system, so the system is in a state of constant change. Usually the perturbations are very minute, so the system changes very slowly – though, to anyone of my age, the systemic changes that can take place in one lifetime are obvious and indeed quite striking. Now and again, however, there may be some more catastrophic disturbance, as can happen when one language impacts rather suddenly on another, the way Chinese did on Japanese around AD 600–800, or Norman French on English some centuries later. In my teaching I used to use the analogy of climate and weather: climate is the system – it is our theory of weather. Climate is instantiated as weather; it will change, typically rather slowly but sometimes catastrophically as is happening with today’s global warming. Let me just mention two contexts which nudged us towards thinking about the relation between system and text. Now and again people intervene in the evolution of the system. They introduce design, with some form of language planning, perhaps to speed up the extension of a new ‘national language’ into education, government and the law. This often doesn’t work very well – because they fail to take account of text, of how people actually create new meanings in the course of their daily lives. New meanings are typically created in the undervalued and unnoticed regions of the language: in spoken language, especially informal conversation; in non-standard dialects, when, for example, new techniques are being introduced in agriculture or industry, as in the early industrial revolution. Our reflections on these topics led into the second of the two contexts just referred to: how are we to understand the functional varieties of a language that evolve as one component in such social changes? We needed a name for these in our group, so we called them ‘registers’. There has always been register variation in language, just as there has always been dialect variation; but we needed to study it systematically, and the question was: how? How do we

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conceptualize it? Do we treat ‘a register’ as just a collection of instances, a set of texts which somehow look alike; or do we treat it as a subsystem, a principled pattern of organization within the total resource, the total meaning potential of the language? You may remember that the analogous question was asked about global warming in the 1990s: is it a repetitive pattern in the weather, or is it a blip in the climate? The term ‘register’ was introduced for theorizing functional variation in language: it identified a variant as a subsystem, while a collection of similar instances could be labelled a ‘text type’. Both are valid perspectives; but they construe the phenomenon in very different guises. More specifically, if it’s a register then it needs to be explained.

3 The notion of system in language was grounded in Saussure’s concept of paradigmatic relations. It was central to Firth’s thinking, in his theory of language as system and structure, though Firth rejected any application of the term ‘system’ in reference to a language as a whole. Hjelmslev, in his formal theorization of the Saussurean project, gave equal weight to syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, and this proportionality appears clearly in Sydney Lamb’s relational network theory. In none of these accounts could a language be reduced to an inventory of syntagmatic structures. On the other hand, a language could be represented as a network of interrelated systems  – of choices, with structures being the organization of these choices into constructions of grammar and phonology. These choices together constituted the ‘meaning potential’ of the language; a text was meaningful because every one of its features was the instantiation of some conjunction of systemic choices within that potential. The basic unit of description, therefore, was a single system in lexicogrammar or phonology. The system consisted of an environment (an ‘entry condition’), a set of mutually exclusive options (the ‘terms’ in the system), and an output, the contribution of each of the terms to the total structure (the ‘realization’ of each of the systemic options). I wanted to make the system (in this sense) the basic unit for machine translation; but my colleagues in the Unit wouldn’t have it – it was too abstract, too remote from the readable source text. But it was the basic unit for my grammar and phonology of Chinese; and the implication of this was, that every feature is meaningful because it is a term in some system. You do not describe ‘negative’, or some category labelled ‘negation’; you set up a system of POLARITY with the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. Not ‘declarative’ but a system

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of MOOD with (in English; these are descriptive categories, not theoretical ones) terms ‘indicative/imperative’; then a system INDICATIVE MOOD with terms ‘declarative/interrogative’, and so on with increasing delicacy (we have called this ‘delicacy’ since the year 1960, so I will retain it in preference to ‘granularity’). Networks of systems do not form strict taxonomies, because some offspring depend on either or all of several parent systems. English question tags, for example, are available to either declarative or imperative clauses: they came back again, didn’t they?

come back again, won’ t you?

Tags also illustrate another point: that the same formal contrast may realize different systemic options. There is (still talking about English) a system of TAG POLARITY where the formal opposition is between positive and negative: they’re coming back again, aren’t they?

they’re coming back again, are they?

But the terms are not ‘positive/negative’, they are ‘reversed/constant’: the systemic contrast is that between switching the polarity and retaining it unchanged. (There are of course many other systems interacting with the choice of polarity, especially those realized by intonation; and dialectal variation in the combinations that are typically heard. But the polarity contrast is not affected.) This opposition between constant and reversed is familiar also in phonology, where the choice is that between maintaining a given posture, or a given resonance, and switching over to the opposite: this is a significant feature in modern Mandarin (as I found when teaching pronunciation to foreign learners!): both oral/nasal RESONANCE and y/w (palatal/labiovelar) POSTURE function systemically as systems of ‘constant’ versus ‘reversed’. These little illustrations, each in itself relating to a particular descriptive domain, bring out a general feature of ‘appliability’: that almost all applications of linguistics on the one hand implicate grammar, while on the other hand driving the grammar as far as possible in the direction of semantics. In other words, they are concerned with language as a system of meaning. Which is exactly what it is: a semiotic and, critically, a semogenic system, one which is not just made of meaning (a ‘meaning potential’) but which actually creates meaning (a ‘meaning potential potential’, as Christian Matthiessen put it). This has various consequences, one of which has been the topic of this present section: that the most theoretical representation of the grammar needs to be abstract enough to be freed from constraints of structure – hence the system as the organizing concept, with the system network as the basic form of organization. The other main consequence relates to the nature of explanation; this I will return to

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later. But here the question arises: if a language is theorized as an assemblage of system networks, how do we locate these networks in our multidimensional space? Where are the choices made?

4 I have said enough, I think, to suggest how the contextualizing of a theory – the demands that are being made on it, the questions that are being asked – influence not only its priorities but the whole conception of what a theory is. My personal way in tells one side of the story; it is, by definition, one-sided; over the years, there have been, and continue to be, many other pressures and demands. I will refer to one or two examples of these later; meanwhile let me detach myself from the narrative and go on filling out the other dimensions of the framework. Each system has its entry condition within the network, its environment of other systems; but eventually we reach one that is the point of origin for the network as a whole; and here another dimension is involved, that of ‘rank’ (or ‘size level’ as it was sometimes called, perhaps in recognition that its significance was not just a matter of its size). There are only certain locations in the grammar of every language (as also in the phonology) which serve as the point of origin for systemic choices. In the grammar, we typically find a rank scale made up of clause, phrase, group, word and morpheme; this may vary among languages (and there will always be some leeway in how we choose to model it); but all variants derive from the original separation between a word and a configuration of words (a clause) such as we find with infants as they move (from their protolanguage) into the mother tongue. Each system network within the grammar has its origin at one or other of these ranks; or else at a ‘complex’, such as a ‘clause complex’, the entity that has given us our modern orthographic sentence. Sometimes there will be more than one primary class at a given rank, such as ‘verbal’ and ‘nominal’ as primary classes of the group, where each has a network of its own. The concept of rank can be defined by the fact that each unit is the locus at which systemic choices are made. The units identified by the rank scale are of course syntagmatic constructs; so in renewing contact with these by traversing a system network, in serial fashion, we are setting up a cycle of system and structure, as did Firth  – though his examples were all situated in phonology (and their interrelations were rather less clear). Phonological units likewise constitute a scale of rank, such as tone unit, rhythm unit (or ‘foot’), syllable and hemisyllable or phoneme; and grammatical

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units may also serve as point of origin for phonological systems (the prototypical example being the word in ‘vowel harmony’ languages). The steady nudging of the grammar in the direction of meaning (the pressure ‘from above’, in our terms) has several other significant consequences. In the first place, it neutralizes the distinction between grammar and lexis, requiring a unified stratum of ‘lexicogrammar’ where meanings are distributed all the way along a continuum from ‘most grammatical’ (small, closed systems with very general scope) to ‘most lexical’ (large, open sets with very restricted scope); meanings may move in either direction over time (cf. the recent grammaticalization of -free in English, or the lexicalization of ‘not’ in many contexts such as refrain (from)). While there is obviously much in common among different languages, there is also considerable variation; and much indeterminacy, especially with interpersonal meanings which often appear semi-grammaticalized, as lexical items operating in more or less systemic choices (see Martin and White on English ‘appraisal’ systems). Secondly, this nudging of the grammar towards meaning enables us to integrate prosodically formed systems, those realized by intonation and rhythm, fully into the grammar, interacting with other, non-prosodic systems such as those of mood and modality; again, of course, with much variation among different languages. And in the third place, the progressive semanticization of the grammar draws attention to – in fact forces attention on – the multiple nature of meaning in language, the fact that every instance of more than a single word ‘means’ in more than one way: there are three strands of meaning, of different kinds, woven into every grammatical structure. This was clearly in some sense a manifestation of the intrinsic functionality of language. Each ‘line’ of structure  – each voice in the lexicogrammatical composition – was operating in a distinct functional domain, independently of (i.e. largely in free association with) the other two; this was an essential feature of the way meaning was construed and organized, more general and more abstract than ‘function’ in the usual sense. With some misgiving – and with apologies to classical purists – I introduced the distinctive term ‘metafunction’.

5 It had seemed clear to me from early on that in all these various enterprises what was needed was a ‘functional grammar’: a theory of language that was functional in it, orientation (‘systemic’ was expanded to ‘systemic functional’ in the late

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1960s, under pressure from Ruqaiya Hasan). But what exactly did this mean? Most obviously it meant taking account of the way people use language: the functions, or uses, that language is called upon to serve in daily life – not just as an afterthought, but as a determinant of the whole approach. This is where we have to incorporate the notion of ‘context’ – context of situation as instance, context of culture as system – as one stratum on the dimension of realization. Secondly, a ‘functional grammar’ is one in which structures, grammatical and phonological, are represented as configurations of mutually defining functions – as in the origins of European grammatical theory recorded from ancient Greek thought, with configurations of Theme + Rheme, and Subject + Predicate. These divergent analyses used to be thought of as alternatives, such that only one of them could be right; or, more recently, as typological variants (‘Subject–Predicate languages’ versus ‘Topic–Comment languages’); in fact, such structural patterns are co-present in all languages, in some form or other, and as a general principle every element in a grammatical structure is multifunctional, with the functions being combinable in many different ways, perhaps with Subject = Actor = Theme as the prototypical startingpoint for the clause. The recombination of structural functions is a major resource for expanding the meaning potential of the grammar. And this leads directly into the third sense in which we recognize a theory as ‘functional’: a functional theory is one in which explanations are given in functional terms. In its most general sense, this means that the grammatical system of every language is ultimately shaped by the functions in which language first evolved: the twin motifs of construing human experience and enacting human relationships. This is the explanatory concept that I referred to as ‘metafunction’; and I referred to these two dimensions of meaning as, respectively, ‘ideational’ and ‘interpersonal’. Every instance of a major clause (i.e. of a clause other than minor clauses such as invocations and greetings) embodies selection in both these metafunctional networks: typically, in a system of transitivity (some form of process, with participants and circumstantial elements) and in a system of mood (some exchange of speech roles with the listener). Each of these contributes its own input to the structural configuration. These selections are operationalized, so to speak, in conjunction with a third, whereby the meanings are mapped in to the flow of the discourse, in terms of relative prominence, news value and the like. Here we have to recognize a third metafunctional component in the system, which I referred to as the ‘textual’, with its echo of both ‘text’ and ‘texture’. These three functional aspects of the lexicogrammar are theoretical constructs; they are a property of language as

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such, and embody the principle that language has been shaped by its evolution, as at one and the same time a theory of human experience and a mode of human interaction; the two coming together by virtue of a third pressure, that of configuring these meanings into a discourse that makes sense given the verbal and non-verbal environment in which it is unfolding. But as well as offering a functional explanation for the organization of language as a whole, we may examine specific features of some particular language to see whether the metafunctional model can suggest some insights there. When I was teaching a foreign language, I was well aware of the sorts of question that learners ask – or would ask if they knew how; I should say, rather, the sorts of thing that puzzle and confuse them. Faced with features of a language that, to the learner, seem quaint or even perverse, teachers tend to fall back on half-baked ‘cultural’ explanations, trying to relate individual grammatical or phonological features to some aspect of the speakers’ material culture or their patterns of behaviour or of belief. Some of these are familiar as qualities ascribed to a language as a whole, either by foreign teachers or by the native speakers themselves (whose views may or may not coincide!); explanations such as ‘the French are a very logically minded people; they won’t tolerate ambiguity such as is commonly found in English (in an expression such as foreign language teacher . . . for example!)’. Harmless enough, no doubt. But such casual ‘explanations’ deflect attention away from the real issue, which is that of whether one feature of the grammar can be related to other features as part of some general pattern. There may be internal consistencies, perhaps extending across the different metafunctions, which suggest an explanation in functional terms. Because patterns of this kind inevitably involve a number of different grammatical systems, it is difficult to illustrate the point very briefly. But let me take up just one example from modern English which causes considerable irritation to foreign learners of the language: the massive preponderance of what are commonly known as ‘phrasal verbs’. Is there any general pattern to which they conform, which could at least give the learner a sense of ‘well there is some reason behind these oddities’?

6 Why does English favour phrasal verbs, like take away rather than remove, or throw out, put back, turn down, call off, bring up, think over, set aside, take in, see through, rather than discard, replace, reject, cancel, mention, consider, disregard,

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deceive, complete? and why are they especially preferred in the spoken language, much more so than in writing? There are many hundreds of such pairs in common use, and their relative frequencies in speech and in writing seem to be fairly constant. Foreign learners of English find them a nuisance, because they cannot predict the meaning of the whole from consideration of the parts. There is a syndrome of unmarked, or ‘default’, conditions in spoken English which can be summed up as follows. The typical ‘ranking’ clause (i.e. clauses other than those which are rankshifted, but including those that are dependent) is mapped on to one tone unit; and within this tone unit the locus of tonic prominence is at the end, more specifically on the final lexical item in the clause – this is the typical place of focus of ‘new’ information. If there is only one participant in the clause, this will typically be the Subject; the Predicator – the verbal group – will then come last, as in the covers have been removed. But if there are two participants; with English being a so-called SVO (subject–verb– object) language one of the participants will follow the Predicator, as in you need to remove the covers – with the unmarked focus on the covers. But suppose you want to get the focus on the Predicator, perhaps contrasting ‘remove’ with some other process such as ‘adjust’. You could do this by putting the tonic prominence on remove: you need to remove the covers; but this is highly marked, and suggests that it is a rather unexpected thing to do. You really want to have the verb right there at the end. You could say the covers you need to remove; but that is marked in another way: the covers is now a marked Theme, suggesting another contrast such as ‘the padding can stay where it is’ – again, not at all what is being implied. So how can you get the verb to the end of the clause, in an entirely neutral way and without any additional semantic loading? – split it in two parts: you need to take the covers off. That is the natural way of saying what you want to say: make the Predicator a phrasal verb. The phrasal verb is essentially a device for getting the Predicator at the end of the clause; it makes a significant contribution to the local flow of the discourse – that is, to the ‘textual’ aspect of the meaning. This consideration does not apply to the written language  – or only very indirectly. Writing does not directly encode intonation; and the written language has other ways of organizing the discourse flow. Here there may be pressure in the other direction: not only is there no advantage in the phrasal verb, but the one-word equivalent may actually be favoured, because (if it is latinate, as it typically is) it is more easily nominalized; we might have a written version such as removal of the covers is recommended. And we can conjure up mixed forms of wording which combine both spoken and written patterns, like what we

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recommend is removal of the covers. All these variants differ in textual meaning – in the organization of the clause as discourse. These are the kinds of explanation that a functional grammar is able to suggest for many seemingly arbitrary or problematic features in the grammar of a living language. Not every single feature, of course; there are many aspects of every language that will remain unexplained in any terms – often, as Hagège described them, bits and pieces of building material left over by generations of language builders, perhaps retaining traces of earlier patterns of consistency. Where some functional explanation does present itself, it will not be in terms of cause-&effect as in a physical system; semiotic systems are based on realization, not on causality. The search for cause leads to an endless recursion into history: a given feature of the modern language is ‘explained’ by reference to how things were in late Middle English, and so on back as far as we can go. Such sequence in time may become part of an explanatory pattern where functional consistencies are also involved, as in the familiar move from Subject = Actor to Subject = Theme in late Middle to early Modern English; but the synchronic relations that enter into such a picture – those among the different strata (context, semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology) – are relations of realization (‘metaredundancy’ as Lemke theorizes it), not relations in any kind of causality. In his discussion of the robustness of realizational systems, Butt has suggested that, where recent work in systems safety has brought out many instances of systemic failure previously assumed to arise from errors on the part of people working in the system, this failure often seems to occur where some value-&token (realizational) relation has been misinterpreted as one of cause-&-effect. This suggests that there may still be no very clear general conception of the true nature of semiotic systems. Yet now that we have moved on from the age of machines to the age of information, such understanding is vital if we and other species are to survive – as was our forebears’ ability to reinvent themselves when they moved out of the farms into the factories. Perhaps it would help if instead of the ‘age of information’ we referred to our new condition as the ‘age of meaning’.

7 Let me quickly and briefly cite some other examples of the demands that may be made on an appliable linguistics. Recently Ruqaiya Hasan has been revisiting some of her early work undertaken for Basil Bernstein in the 1960s, and representing the later research from the 1980s in which she examined the effects

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of social class and sex (now coyly referred to as ‘gender’) – that is, the social class position of the family and the sex of the growing child – in the transmission of culture across the generations; and the significance of the early home experience for the child’s performance in the school. Her semantic networks (networks of systems identified at the semantic stratum) were devised to handle a massive quantity of data so as to reveal any statistically significant differences in the ways of meaning taken up by her subjects. They did, with strong association with both these social variables. When Jim Martin in the early 1990s moved on from studying primary school writing to working with teachers on the language problems of different subject areas in the secondary school, he built on the notion of register (functional variation) to identify and describe the different genres that the learners were being required to control. Detailed studies of the language of educational knowledge showed much consistency within each discipline but notable differences across the disciplines, especially between the natural sciences and the social sciences and humanities. For example, in the use of grammatical metaphor: in the natural sciences, this was used to distil knowledge into taxonomies of theoretical ‘objects’, whereas the humanities used it to assign value to critical organizing concepts. Martin’s subsequent work on ‘appraisal’ in the interpersonal metafunction arose out of this experience, and has led on from genre-based pedagogy to research on such issues as the political discourses of conflict and reconciliation. A major source of pressure on the theory has always been the demands made in the course of the processing of language by computer, especially in the context of text generation and parsing. Both Robin Fawcett and Christian Matthiessen, using different systemic descriptions corresponding to their somewhat different priorities, vastly extended the scope of system networks so that they became comprehensive theoretical models of lexicogrammar. Matthiessen and his colleagues have continued to extend this work to encompass multilingual text generation; this and other aspects of Matthiessen’s work, in the systemic profiling of individual texts and of text types, and in the functional typology of languages, have demanded a close and explicit integration of the concept of metafunction with other concepts and dimensions of the theory. These are just some of the highlights of what is a very considerable body of both practical and research applications of our systemic functional version of an appliable linguistics. For a comprehensive survey of the range and scope of its ‘appliability’, see the two volumes of Continuing Discourse on Language, edited by Hasan et  al. and published by Equinox in 2005 and 2007. This will make clear how all the features of the theory, and specifically its dimensionality, which is the framework that contextualizes all the more specific features that appear,

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ultimately derive from its use in a variety of tasks in a variety of professional and research activities. The principle of functional variation, or register, for example, is challenged and so extended in Erich Steiner’s work in translation theory, and in the training of professional translators. The place of a metafunctional grammar in different stages of a foreign language teaching programme is critical to the work of Kazuhiro Teruya (as well as to that of your President Heidi Byrnes). And in discourse studies, different components of the metafunctional organization stand out as critical in different contexts; for example, the interpersonal in Martin’s work already mentioned, the textual in Peter Fries’ studies in composition and literacy teaching, the ideational in Matthiessen’s research on language and the construction of knowledge, and also in my own studies of grammatical metaphor and its role in the discourses of science. This is starting to sound like an inventory of components, which is not the perspective I want to give; if anything, the keynote to all this work has been people’s ability to vary their focus and the direction of their thinking; to shift from the text to the system, and then back to the text, seeing each instance in the context of its alternatives of what might have been meant but was not; and to adopt a trinocular vision, looking at any phenomenon ‘from above’, ‘from below’ and also ‘from round about’. The scale of above/below may be in rank, seeing a nominal group, for example, from the standpoint of its role in the clause, its make-up as a configuration of words, and its own network of possibilities in deixis, numeration and so on. It may be in stratum: for some piece of wording, for example, what semantic features does it realize, how is it itself realized, and what is its own lexicogrammatical environment. This kind of pinpointing, zeroing in on the exact location that needs to be attended to while being aware of all the surrounding topology, is something a functional grammar allows us to do which is valuable, I think, in literary, clinical, forensic and other domains of applied discourse studies.

8 It all seems very complicated, when you try to present it all at once. It is complex because language is complex – one of the most complex phenomena we know of, because the complexity of language is the complexity of the human brain with which it co-evolved, and there is no virtue in pretending that language is simple. We seem to show some inconsistency in our thinking when it comes to the educational implications of this complexity. On the one hand we say ‘physical

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systems – systems of matter – are very complicated; so we must start teaching the grammar of physical systems – mathematics – at an early age, right at the onset of schooling’. On the other hand, we say ‘semiotic systems – systems of meaning, like language – are very complicated so we can’t teach their grammar – grammatics – until the children are much older’. In other words, we make it as difficult for them as we can. Perhaps what we should be saying is ‘semiotic systems are very complicated; so we should start teaching grammatics at an early age, round about primary two as we do with mathematics’. A few years ago Geoff Williams, with his primary teacher colleague Ruth French, did just that: they started teaching functional grammar in Year 2. Children are good at reflecting on language at that early age, and can readily pick up and run with a functional analysis of the experiential structure of the clause, in terms of concepts like Actor and Process (they may give them other names, but they’re not frightened of technical terminology). For comparison, Williams and French tried introducing grammar in Year 6; starting at that age, the children found it much harder to come to grips with. Now, semiotic systems are not like physical systems; and the relation between their ‘grammatics’  – the traditional arithmetic, algebra, geometry  – and the systems of matter that embody these principles is different from the relationship between lexicogrammar, semantics, phonology, phonetics and the system of language. Perhaps some case could be made for learning the principles of grammar along with the principles of music and dance, building on the complementarity between meaning and moving which has been a feature of all children’s lives since birth, and probably before. In this way we would be putting language in the context of other semiotic systems, in a multimodal (or ‘multisemiotic’) perspective. This is a flight of fancy, of course; but something that could be thought about. And that may be a good point to end on. An appliable linguistics is a way of thinking about language: that is, its immediate scope and context of application. But to be appliable to real-life situations and real-life tasks, it has to be good to think with: that is, a resource for investigating these various domains and spheres of activity – not just their forms of discourse, important as these are, but their essential nature as systems-&-processes of meaning. We still have some way to go in order to achieve a theoretical understanding of the nature and organization of semiotic systems; that is something that is on the current agenda, to be thought about. Not only because, a hundred years after Saussure, we might bring the Saussurean project to fruition, but also because, if we live in an age of information, it might be helpful if we knew what information really is.

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Pinpointing the Choice: Meaning and the Search for Equivalents in a Translated Text (2012)

1  Meaning as choice At a time when meaning was largely excluded from the discourse of what was then becoming ‘mainstream’ linguistics, my teacher, J. R. Firth, perversely proclaimed that all linguistics was, in effect, the study of meaning. He used various metaphors along the way; one was that of the spectrum of visible light. Meaning was dispersed across the spectrum of language, which included the levels of phonetics, phonology, lexis, grammar and context (‘context of situation’). The linguist took account of all of these; and strategies for doing this constituted, collectively, the ‘technique of semantics’. Firth’s throwaway examples tended to obscure the message: when he said that ‘part of the meaning of a Frenchman is to sound like one’ it made the observations seem trivial. Firth’s point was that all the strata of language are implicated in the making of meaning. This is the nature of the semiotic process, and of the kind of system that is associated with such a process: a realizational system, one whose working parts are related not as cause and effect but as signified and signifier, or (as I prefer to generalize it) as value and token. In a sense what binds a theory to its applications is this relationship of value and token: a theory is made manifest, or ‘realized’, in the processes of being applied. If all aspects of the phenomenon that is being theorized – in this case, language  – are implicated in the making of meaning, then any application of First published in Mahboob, A. and Knight, N. K. (eds) (2012), Appliable Linguistics. London, Continuum.

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the theory will also involve some kind of operation with meaning. Of course, ‘applications’ of a theory will vary in where their energies are directed; some are what we would probably think of as ‘practical’, such as teaching foreign language skills to a class of technology students, while others will be of a research nature, such as the linguistic analysis of literature, where we try to explain how a text, or a canon of texts, comes to carry a particular value. But all are based on the premise that the task is in some way or other one of working with systems of meaning. Given the demands we make on language, in almost everything we do, it is not surprising to find a great range and variety of activities where a theory of language can be of use: where it can contribute to formulating and understanding a problem, and may sometimes even point towards a solution. One recent publication which gives an overview of more or less the whole of this extensive territory is the two-volume Continuing Discourse on Language, edited by Hasan, Matthiessen and Webster and published by Equinox (2005, 2007). This is a rich source of information about the scope of an ‘appliable’ theory of language. I use ‘appliable’ because ‘applied linguistics’ has come to function in some kind of opposition to ‘linguistics’ (meaning ‘linguistics proper’, or theoretical linguistics), whereas I want to reject that opposition; I want a single concept which unifies the two. And I don’t say ‘applicable’ because that suggests ‘applicable to’ some particular sphere of activity or other, whereas I want a general term which gives the sense of something that is capable of – having evolved in the context of – being applied. My own way into linguistics was, in fact, as a search for something to think with when faced with certain fairly specific tasks. One was my work as a foreign language teacher, teaching what was to the learners – as it had been to myself not long before – a seemingly rather exotic foreign language: teaching Chinese to (largely monolingual) speakers of English. Another was my work in the British Communist Party, as one of a group searching for a marxist, or at least marxism-compatible, linguistics: one which would give value to what were at that time undervalued languages and varieties: spoken versus written language, non-Indo-European languages especially those emerging as national languages in former colonies, minority languages, so-called dialects as opposed to ‘standard’ languages, and so on. Another task came from my love of English literature: it seemed obvious to me that literature was made of language and so must be appreciated as language, and I wanted to find out why some texts were so effective, so compelling and so timeless. And then, fourth, I was involved in a very early machine translation project, at Cambridge in the late 1950s; this had

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a great effect of focusing the mind on how the whole traffic system of language actually worked. So I really needed a bag of tools that would let me come to grips with this varied set of language-grounded tasks. If there was one motif that emerged as salient in all these different contexts, it was that of choice: language as meaning, and meaning as choice. In teaching a foreign language, one was always guiding the learners through networks of choices, opening up  – or helping them to open up  – an expanding range of meaning potential, increasing the delicacy of the choices they were making as they went along. One of my own constant questions as a language learner was, ‘What’s the difference between . . .?’; as a teacher I had to field this question all the time. In translation, whether human or mechanical, the basic problem for the translator is the problem of choice – as is the decision of a writer whether to prefer this form of expression over that one. But these are just the occasions where the choice is, or can be brought, under focus of attention, as we can see in poets’ notebooks, or in think-aloud protocol records of translators – they are choices that are made consciously. In fact, all use of language is the exercise of choice; most of the time the choosing remains ‘unconscious’ – that is, below the level of our conscious attention and awareness. It is nonetheless a process of choice. If we look into some of the other domains where linguistics is being ‘applied’, the principle of choice is always likely to be in the foreground. In clinical linguistic work, where one has to identify and to track disorders such as aphasia arising from dementia or from some trauma such as a stroke, the sufferer may partially lose access to their normal range of lexicogrammatical choice; lexically, for example, being unable to retrieve the word tennis, they will search out a superordinate term like ball game, or a cohyponym such as netball; or they may face a more complex dislocation of systems within the grammar, morphological or syntactic (impairment of time systems, for example), which are not easy to pinpoint with any certainty. Most sufferers will work hard to remain in the discourse – this may be unconscious, or it may be a process requiring considerable conscious effort; but in either case it is the search for a meaningful alternative choice. The therapist seeks to locate the disorder within the overall system of the language. In the discourses of psychiatric treatment, such as conversational therapy, the therapist will often attend not only to the choices made by the patient but also to those he is making himself, and perhaps make some linguistic analysis of the discourse to track the course of the therapeutic encounter. In a forensic context, where, for example, a linguist is being asked as expert witness whether a particular confession, or a purported suicide note, could

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have been written by a particular individual, the question is one of determining whether the choices made lay within that individual’s meaning potential. My former colleague John Gibbons was consulted at some length on the selection of the most appropriate choice of wording for the caution used by the police on making an arrest. Matching specimens of handwriting is perhaps the furthest removed from a concern with choice in meaning, although even here it will be assumed that the writing is the realization of some meaningful text (Gibbons, 2003). All use of language is a process of meaningful choice; and many of the applications of a linguistic theory depend on bringing out the specific choices that have been made, or that need to be made, in particular situational and textual contexts  – in other words, on locating them in their function in the overall system of the language. This is what I meant by ‘pinpointing the choice’ in the title of this chapter. One form of activity in which the process, or processes, of choosing will be most clearly foregrounded is translating from one language to another; since I have lately been engaging in a translation task, let me draw on this as a repository of instances of different kinds of choice. My text is one from what is now called the ‘culture industry’ – or should be; in fact it often gets called ‘cultural industry’ instead, and that is itself an interesting example to consider: ‘culture’ here needs to function as Classifier in the nominal group, not as Epithet, and the adjectival form cultural is ambiguous in this respect, and could be interpreted in the somewhat oxymoronic sense of an industry which is itself of cultural value. The discourse of the culture industry includes varieties like museum texts (Ravelli, 2006), tourist guides and brochures, promotions and programmes of events like concerts or sporting ventures, and so on. The text I am working on is a tourist guide to the Chinese city of Guilin – or rather the city and its surrounding region, which is one of China’s most outstanding beauty spots. There was already an English version of the guide, and my original undertaking was just to polish up the English translation as a token to the friend who gave it to me, who happens to be advisor and consultant to the Guilin Tourist Bureau.1 I had thought this would be a fairly simple task, but it turned out that what was more appropriate was a new translation from the original Chinese text (which was both lavishly produced and very beautifully illustrated). I shall assume that we can discuss translation in terms of equivalence and shift, taking these terms from Catford’s (1965) splendid little book on translation but more particularly as they are expounded and theorized by Matthiessen (2001) in the book edited by Erich Steiner and Colin Yallop. If x in the source language has been translated by y in the target language, we ask whether the two, x and y,

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are equivalent, or there has been a shift. Of course, this opposition will always be ‘with respect’: it is the job of a linguistic theory of translation to specify and explain the ‘respects’ in which we may establish equivalence and shift, and this is what Matthiessen proceeds to do. These are what he refers to as the environments of translation. Matthiessen writes (2001: 78), ‘I shall assume that translation equivalence and translation shift are two opposite poles on a cline of difference between languages’, from ‘maximal congruence’ to ‘maximal incongruence’. ‘The general principle’, he adds, is that ‘the wider the environment of translation, the higher the degree of translation equivalence; and the narrower the environment, the higher the degree of translation shift.’ This is the principle of contextualization: the ‘widest’ environment is that in which the text is ‘maximally contextualized’ – and therefore, by the same token, is likely to be ‘maximally effective’ (Matthiessen, 2001: 74–5). Matthiessen’s ‘environments’ are defined by the dimensions along which every human language is organized: stratification, rank, instantiation, metafunction, delicacy and axis. I shall refer mainly to the first two of these, stratification and rank, in looking at some examples from my bilingual tourist text (actually quadrilingual, because it includes also versions in Korean and Japanese). What I am seeking to do is to identify points of translation shift in explicit linguistic terms, so as to be able to discuss the issues that are involved when we consider possible alternatives. This means locating particular instances in their contexts in the systems of English and of Chinese  – primarily, here, in terms of their location in stratum and rank. This exercise is related to, although not identical with, the ‘error analysis’ that was popular in language teaching, or rather in linguistics when applied to language teaching, in and around the 1970s. Error analysis went out of fashion fairly quickly, because it turned out that there were nearly always a number of different ways of repairing a linguistic error. This made it unpopular with teachers; but it is precisely this feature that makes it interesting to linguists, and it is a useful exercise to perform with students of linguistics since it helps them to become conscious of the various dimensions along which languages are organized. A translation shift is not the same as an error. Indeed there will almost always be shift on some dimension or other, because there is seldom total equivalence between choices in two languages; the translator shifts here to gain equivalence there, according to the value inhering in equivalence of different kinds in the nature of the task in hand. Of course there are simple errors, mistakes in the

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target language (we will start with one or two of these). But while these also can be usefully pinpointed, they lie outside the range of (normal) translation equivalence. In the second part of this chapter I will discuss some examples taken from one paragraph of the English translation of my tourism text. Text A below is the Chinese original; Text B is the English translation. The two were clearly identified as being equivalent, as they appeared one beneath the other in a single column (not all portions of the text were displayed as matching paragraphs in this same way). I shall try to keep in focus the concept of choice, seeing each example as the output of choices made at some particular locations in the target language. We cannot know, of course, what steps the translator may have traversed in arriving at the published translation; that is not the issue here. What I am trying to do, in ‘pinpointing the choice’, is to use the analytic tools of linguistics, and particularly perhaps of grammatics, to examine the significance of alternative renderings for a reader of the English text. In the table of examples (Appendix 8.1), each of the four centre columns takes a step towards pinpointing the problem in linguistic terms. The first column, headed ‘point at issue’, gives an informal characterization of the instance that is being highlighted: ‘English error’, ‘unmotivated shift’, ‘unnecessary word’, ‘unclear meaning’, and so on. The next three columns locate the point at issue on each of three dimensions in the ‘architecture’ of language: the stratum (phonetics, phonology, lexicogrammar (syntax, morphology, lexis), semantics, context); the rank (in syntax – morpheme, word, group, phrase, clause or some complex of any of these; in lexis – lexical item, collocation); the metafunction (ideational (experiential, logical), interpersonal, textual). On all these dimensions, more than one location may be involved (e.g. rank: clause/verbal group). The final column suggests how an alternative choice might be made which would improve the effectiveness of the translation. To make this discussion more accessible to those who do not read Chinese, I have added a transcription of the paragraph in the roman alphabet, using Hanyu Pinyin (the authorized spelling of standard Chinese), including the tone marks as an essential component. I have not thought it necessary, or even desirable, to add an interlinear gloss on the Chinese words, because these will be explained in the discussion of the examples in which they occur. There too I have used the Pinyin transcription, as well as the Chinese charactery. For the Chinese characters, rather than the simplified I have chosen the full (elaborated) variants, since these are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan (and also Japan), as well as being easily accessed electronically on the mainland.

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2  Some examples of choice in translation In its cultural context, as a tourist guide, the text describes tourist attractions and other amenities of Guilin and its surrounding country, while at the same time encouraging visitors to come and helping them to spend their money. Much of the Chinese original is descriptive and informative; but it is generously flavoured with cliches, ritually praising the environment in lyrical and romantic terms. The English reader is not familiar with them and does not expect them in a tourist guide. The Chinese translator (author of the English version) in fact left many of them out; but then he left out many other things as well. One could try to look out some suitable quotations from English poets, such as perhaps Tennyson or Wordsworth; but that would be just another kind of translation shift, and in general I have also left them out. This is a shift in semantics (and also of course in lexicogrammar) designed to achieve equivalence of the text as a whole, in the sense of operating with the same function in the same context as the original. Catford regarded this as one of the possible types of translation. To try to achieve equivalence at a lower stratum, even that of semantics, in a case like this would compromise the effectiveness of the text, introducing a component of exoticism that is entirely absent from the original. The problem of the unwanted exotic is a familiar one in translation, which also needs to be pinpointed with some care. It is related to, though not identical with, the problem of the unintended humour: passages in a translated text that a reader is likely to find funny. Here are two examples from another tourism text, this time a small brochure devoted to just one particular location: As a matter of fact, this temple is a rock cave. Its ceiling is made of rock and, therefore, it is also called ‘one piece of tile’. (The) Concert Hall was built in 1989. The design of the hall is so good that in every seat music can be heard.

Here the humorous effect comes from the semantic incongruity: the anomaly between the stated cause (therefore; so good that) and the lack of any perceived causal relation: why would you call something a ‘piece of tile’ if it’s made of rock? And music being audible from every seat is a minimal requirement of a concert hall, not something to be picked out as a claim for special merit. When we talk of ‘pinpointing the choice’, in the theory and practice of translation, this means locating, within the systems of the two languages concerned, the moments of equivalence and shift that come to our attention. These may, of course, be almost any moments in any pair of texts that are related

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as source and target texts in translation, since equivalence on all dimensions is rather improbable. At the same time, the concept of translation, as process and as product, depends on the search for equivalence and the assumption that equivalence can be achieved in at least certain respects. There will always be a trade-off, such that we are able to say that, in the given context, the greatest value is carried by equivalence of this or that particular kind: usually in some combination of stratum and metafunction. (My first published translation was an English rendering of a Chinese song; since this was done for performance at a recital, it had to fit the rhythm and spirit of the music.) The translator will give these forms of equivalence priority, in making choices, and accept the resulting shift in other locations. All work of translating is the exercise of choice, conscious or unconscious. But then, so is every other performance of language. When we talk of an ‘appliable linguistics’, this means a way of engaging with language, that is theoretically robust and at the same time serviceable  – capable of being put to use in addressing a range of problems and tasks. These two requirements support each other, because the robustness of the theory derives from its long association with activities where language plays a central part – including some educational (e.g. language across the curriculum), some computational (natural language processing) and others; while its appliability comes from its consistent grounding in theory – in this case, a theory offering functional explanations both for the system of language and for each instance of language use, and locating any feature of language in its paradigmatic context, as selection from a multidimensional meaning-making resource. Translation is one area where it is valuable to be able to reflect on what we are doing, and to explore the meaning potential of a language – of two or more languages as they are brought into contact – in an explicit and recoverable way. Translators often protest that they find little or no use for linguistics; so it is perhaps a challenge to what seeks to be an ‘appliable’ kind of linguistics to put it to work in this domain.

3  Texts Text A: Chinese original, (i) in characters, (ii) in Pinyin romanization (i) 中心區域景點是以百里漓江為中軸線，輻射兩岸著名的自然風光、人 文景觀，構成桂林山水的精華。其中有以漓江風光為代表的5處國家級 4A 景區，有世界最大的ᄑ塑創作營地愚自樂園; 有世界最大的虎熊養 殖基地雄森熊虎山莊; 市區的兩江四湖更是構成了‘一水抱城流’的城 市大公園。其問千峰矗立，風情萬種，令人神凝形釋，流連忘返。

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(ii) Zhōngxīn qūyù jǐngdiǎn shì yǐ bǎi lǐ Líjiāng wéi zhōng zhóuxiàn, fúshè liǎng àn zhùmíng-de zìrán fēngguāng, rénwén jǐngguān, gòuchéng Guìlín shānshuǐ-de jīnghuá. Qízhōng yǒu yǐ Líjiāng fēngguāng wéi dàibiǎo-de 5 chù guójiājí 4A jǐngqū, yǒu shìjiè zuìdà-de diāosù chuàngzuò yíngdì Yúzì Lèyuán; yǒu shìjiè zuìdà-de hǔ xióng yǎngzhí jīdì Xióngsēn Xióng Hǔ Shānzhuāng ; shìqū-de liǎng jiāng sì hú gèng shì gòuchéng-le ‘yī shuǐ bào chéng liú’-de chéngshì dà gōngyuán. Qíjiān qiān fēng chùlì, fēngqíng wànzhǒng, lìng rén shén níng xíng shì, liú lián wàng fǎn. Text B: English translation given in the tourist guide The scenic sports of central area is taking the 100 miles of Li River as central axes, covering the famous natural landscapes and human-culture scenes on both banks which form the soul of Guilin’s landscape, including five national level 4A spots in which the scene of Li River is representative; the biggest sculpture creation campsite in the world – Yuzi Paradise; the biggest tigers & bears raising base – Xiongseng Tiger & Bear Villa; the Two-River and Four-lake scenery area form a big city-park of ‘a river flowing around the city’. In this area, there are thousands of upstanding hills and a lot of charming attractions which make your pleasure and forget to return. [sic, passim]

Note 1 My warmest thanks to my friend Bao Jigang, Professor of Geography and Tourism at Sun Yat-sen University, for bringing this book to my attention – and for presenting my wife and myself with a handsomely bound copy on the occasion of our visit to Guilin.   The Chinese text and the examples were set up for me by Joe Chen (Chen Jiansheng). I am most grateful for his assistance.

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Appendix 8.1 Example

Point at issue

Stratum

Rank

Metafunction

Possible alternative choice

the scenic spots of central area English error is taking . . .

lexicogrammar (syntax)

clause

interpersonal

correct number concord: Subject + Finite

2

. . . is taking the 100 miles of Li River as central axes

lexicogrammar (syntax)

clause/verbal group

ideational (experiential/logical)

select present (simple) as unmarked choice in relational process

mischoice (of tense)

Note: Translator’s choice of tense is possibly due to Chinese 是以 shì yῐ (but this is not equivalent). The English use of present in present tense is highly marked in this process type; it would suggest on this occasion for the first time. 3

. . . as central axes, covering the unclear structure famous natural landscapes . . .

lexicogrammar (syntax)

4

covering

lexicogrammar (lexis) / word (lexical item) semantics

unmotivated shift

clause complex

logical

clarify relationship of non-finite clause to previous (primary) clause

experiential

select word more equivalent in experiential meaning (/register)

Note: The Chinese has 輻射 fú shè ‘radiate’. There may be a semantic prosody of technicality in the terms used to describe the topography; cf. 軸線 zhóuxiàn ‘axis’ (軸 zhóu = ‘axle’ 線 xiàn = ‘line’); if so this is also a shift at the semantic stratum. 5

. . . and human-culture scenes

overspecificity; loss of balance

lexicogrammar (lexis)

nominal group

experiential

omit human and balance natural with cultural

Note: the Chinese has 人文景觀 rén wén jĭng guān (where 人文 is short for 人類文化 rénlèi wénhuà), scenes/landscapes of human culture. English does not need human before culture; in the Chinese, the balance is between 自然 zìrán ‘natural’ and 文化 wénhuà ‘culture’ 6

. . . form the soul of Guilin’s landscape

unmotivated shift

lexicogrammar (lexis)

word (lexical item)

Note: essence is more nearly equivalent to 精華 jīng huá and is appropriate in collocation and register

experiential

form the essence of

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1

7

. . . of Guilin’s landscape, including . . .

change in sentence division (punctuation)

graphology/ lexicogrammar (/ semantics)

clause complex/ nominal group

logical/textual

new sentence Among them, there are . . .

Note: in the Chinese these are presented as independent clauses; in the English they are downgraded to become a list of nominal groups in a dependent elaborating relationship to the soul of Guilin’s landscape, following including. This reduces their prominence in the discourse (and suggests that there may also be others). 8

five national level 4A spots

awkward group structure

lexicogrammar (syntax/lexis)

nominal group

ideational (experiential/logical)

move ‘national level 4A’ from Premodifier to Postmodifier; replace level by grade

9

spots

omission and shift

lexicogrammar (lexis)

word complex

experiential

replace spots by scenic sites

Note: the Chinese text has the word 景點 jĭngdiăn ‘scenic spot’, ‘beauty spot’ frequently throughout, but not here. 景區 jĭngqū is ‘scenic region’, or in this context perhaps scenic site. 10

the biggest sculpture creation campsite in the world

unnecessary word

lexicogrammar

nominal group

ideational (experiential/logical)

the world’s biggest sculptured campsite [see next]

Pinpointing the Choice

Note: Chinese has 5 處國家級 4A 景區 wŭ chù gúo jiā jí́ 4A jĭngqū ‘five national grade 4A scenic sites’. English could retain this as Premodifier leaving out the national; if national is retained it becomes unclear whether the meaning is ‘sites of national grade 4A’ or ‘national sites of grade 4A’. The alternative would be ‘five scenic sites of national grade 4A’.

Note: the Chinese has 雕塑創作 diăosù chuàngzuò where diăosù ‘sculpture’ alone would be too general, so ‘works of sculpture, sculptural artefacts’. But English sculpture can refer by itself to an individual artefact. 11

campsite

choice of equivalent lexicogrammar (lexis)

word (lexical item)

experiential

select less restricted word camp ground

Note: Chinese has 營地 yíngdì ‘campsite, camp(ing) ground’; English campsite suggests a location that is used today, where this is (I think) a historical location for quartering troops – even barrack ground perhaps.

Appendix 8.1  Continued 153

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Appendix 8.1  Continued

12

Example

Point at issue

Stratum

Yuzi paradise

choice of proper lexicogrammar (lexis) name (institutional/ topographical)

Rank

Metafunction

Possible alternative choice

word (lexical item)

interpersonal

select more appropriate word, e.g. Park

13

the biggest tigers and bears raising base

order of elements of lexicogrammar structure (syntax)

nominal group

logical group as ‘word complex’

the world’s biggest breeding station [see next] for bears and tigers.

Note: the Chinese nominal group admits only premodification (no Postmodifiers). The Premodifier is awkward here in English and, if retained, would need bear and tiger in the singular. 14

raising base

meaning unclear

lexicogrammar (lexis)

15

[whole of last sentence]

string of set phrases context/semantics

nominal group/ collocation

experiential

clause/phrase/group interpersonal as absolutes

select collocation: breeding centre, or breeding station modify to achieve greater contextual equivalence; or delete.

Note: Out of 20 morphemes (characters) in this sentence, 16 are in set phrases, tetramorphemic (4-character) expressions of literary origin used with an interpersonal loading – in this text, predominantly positive appraisal. The translator has retained some of these (c.f. my ‘literal’ rendering of the paragraph); I have attempted to do so here, but they are out of place in an English tourist guide, and in much of my own translation I have simply left them out.

Halliday in the 21st Century

Note: Chinese has 樂園 lèyuán, which is used as translation of paradise; but the meaning is ‘pleasure garden’, or even ‘playground’. As a proper name, English prefers Park or Pleasure Park/Garden if the sense of ‘pleasure’ is required.

Editor’s Introduction Jonathan J. Webster

Professor M. A. K. Halliday has always described himself as being a grammarian who is actively engaged in ‘trying to explain how language functions as a semogenic, or meaning-creating, resource’. He takes grammar to be ‘the source of energy for the semiotic process’, the ‘driving force’ behind the human potential for ‘construing and enacting the relationships of the individual, the group and the species to their social and physical environment’. In ‘On Grammar as the Driving Force from Primary to Higher-Order Consciousness (2004)’, Halliday focuses on the child’s transition from protolanguage to language, arguing that ‘the ontogenesis of grammar offers a way in to tracking the development of higher-order consciousness, or semiosis, suggesting what semiotic strategies are likely to be put in place when the human individual moves from infancy to childhood.’ Appearing in the launch issue of the journal Linguistics and the Human Sciences Halliday’s paper ‘On Matter and Meaning: The Two Realms of Human Experience (2005)’ continues to develop the idea, which also appeared in ‘On Grammar as the Driving Force from Primary to Higher-Order Consciousness (2004)’, that we inhabit two phenomenal realms, one of matter and the other of meaning. Both are necessary, as Halliday explains, ‘Meaning relies on matter to make it accessible to a receiver; in linguistic terms, meaning depends on matter to realise it.’ Not only does meaning rely on the material to be realized  – to materialize, but also our material existence is construed through the very same processes that enable us to make meaning. For it is through language that we construe our human existence, whether it be ‘the commonsense theory that is enshrined in our everyday grammar’ or the reconstrual of that experience in a scientific theory which has been ‘heavily subsidized by conscious design’. Either is ‘the output of the semogenic power of the grammar’.

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Presented at the Thirty-Seventh International Systemic Functional Linguistics conference, held at the University of British Columbia, ‘Language Evolving: Some Systemic Functional Reflections on the History of Meaning (2010)’, explores how meaning potential changes over time, evolving in the context of the speech fellowship, progressing from nomadic, to agricultural pastoral, to industrial. ‘Mountains of the Word: Construing the Architecture of Nature into Meaning (2009)’ was presented at the conference ‘The Language of Space, Light and Shadow: Language and Architecture systemically entwined’, held in Indonesia in 2009. In this paper, Halliday discusses ‘the language people use in talking, and especially in writing, about mountains’. He focuses on ‘the writings about mountains by British climbers of the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when mountains came into the consciousness of people who had new and advanced technology and a correspondingly strong commitment to material explanations and material values.’ As Halliday notes, ‘In this cultural environment, mountains appeared as a welcome and revitalizing counter-reality.’

9

On Grammar as the Driving Force from Primary to Higher-Order Consciousness (2004)

1  Introduction Having worked for half a century in a discipline-based academic culture, with which I never felt really comfortable – I was never happy with the way language was constructed as an object of study exclusively by linguists – I feel privileged to be taking part in a transdisciplinary conversation about language. Not that I am claiming myself to be able to transcend the boundaries between disciplines; by nature (if not strictly by training) I am a grammarian, and my contribution will be that of a grammarian who has studied children’s language. But perhaps what I understand by ‘being a grammarian’ is not quite the same as what that meant either in the received tradition of grammatical studies or in what is sometimes called the ‘syntactic age’ of (predominantly Chomskyan) linguistics. To me being a grammarian means trying to explain how language functions as a semogenic, or meaning-creating, resource; and it means looking at language from the outside as well as the inside: from the point of view of the significance it has both for ordinary people (including children, who are also people) and for researchers in any field where language is involved. Earlier I tried to relate my work to questions raised by educators and by sociologists; on this occasion I hope to dialogue more with neuro-scientists and evolutionary biologists. And I should perhaps mention here that my ‘grammar’ means lexicogrammar, as one integrated stratum within the linguistic system; I shall not be separating out syntax and lexicon as distinct orders of phenomena. First published in Williams, G. and Lukin, A. (eds) (2004) The Development of Language: Functional Perspectives on Species and Individuals. London: Contiuum. pp. 15–44.

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I started working on children’s language in the mid-1960s. I had read some earlier work such as that of M. M. Lewis (1936 [1951]), W. F. Leopold (1939– 49) and A. D. Watts (1944); I explored the research done by psychologists in the 1950s, and Ruth Weir’s recent (and now classic) study Language in the Crib (1963); and then, following through the much earlier tradition of language diary studies, I undertook an intensive study of one child from shortly after birth up to the age of 3½. This last has remained my primary source of information; but it has been strongly reinforced through subsequent research especially by Clare Painter (1984, 1989, 1996) and by Jane Torr (1997; under previous name Oldenburg 1986, 1990), as well as in specific studies by Joy Phillips (1985, 1986, 1988), Qiu Shijin (1985a, 1985b) and others. (Joy Phillips in fact used my data; but she used it in a highly original way which I had never thought of.)1 Early on in my own observations I was struck by the fact that, long before embarking on the mother tongue, before being able to construct language in anything like the form in which we recognize it, children have typically developed a rich and highly functional semiotic system with which they engage in meaningful exchanges with the small number of others – normally mother, perhaps father, other carer, an older sibling or two  – who constitute their immediate family, their ‘meaning group’ so to speak. I had found no name for this in what I had read – in fact I had found no reference to it at all as a systematic phenomenon; so I labelled it ‘protolanguage’, and set out to describe, in as much detail as I felt was needed, the protolanguage of this one individual child (Halliday, 1969, 1975 [2004], 1978, 1979). The protolanguage is a systematic semiotic resource that develops before the mother tongue. It is not a form of the mother tongue: its mode of meaning is very different – for one thing, it does not refer. Developmentally, it goes with crawling, or at least self-propulsion in some style or other, such as bottom-shuffling, that is not yet two-legged. It is not static, but constantly changing throughout the period it is in play (which was roughly 10–18 months, in the case of Nigel); it overlaps with the beginning of the mother tongue, but at the same time it has rather clearly defined functional properties of its own. Appendix 9.1 includes specimens of protolinguistic conversation, with Nigel talking his protolanguage and those around talking in typical adult English: of a kind that is addressed to a child, of course, but clearly language, not protolanguage. As I reported at the time, sometimes other people, such as uncles who are not in the child’s meaning group, will try serving his protolanguage back to him, to tease or to make a claim for intimacy; but from what I saw such attempts were either ignored or else indignantly rejected.

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In this discussion I want to focus mainly on the transition from protolanguage to language because that is where grammar starts. But first I need to look back to the period of time before the protolanguage: very roughly, the first nine months of life. I will do this in summary form; I spoke about this, taking in the period from birth up to the beginnings of the protolanguage, in a conference at Monash University on ‘Representing the Child’ (see Halliday, 2004). The context there was different, because we were talking about ways of representing infancy and childhood in all their multiple aspects; it was our language about children, rather than children’s own language. But the perspective there was also transdisciplinary; and although I myself was talking about representing childhood in its linguistic, or rather semiotic, aspect, I was looking in, as it were, from the outside, at the changing role of meaning in the life of the developing child. I shall take it that the human condition is a constant interpenetration between our two fundamental modes of being: the material and the semiotic. This simply means, of course, that we inhabit these two phenomenal realms, of matter and meaning. These are more usually referred to, perhaps, as ‘matter’ and ‘information’; physical scientists tend to characterize them in terms of how they are measured: matter in dimensions of space, mass, density and so on, information in bytes. But ‘information’ in that sense is a rather special kind of meaning; most meaning cannot be measured in numerical, quantitative terms. So I shall refer to the two realms as those of matter and meaning, with the corresponding adjectives ‘material’ and ‘semiotic’. Even before birth the infant inhabits both domains, being impinged on by the rhythms and airstream mechanisms of its mother’s speech, and possibly also by the interpersonal meanings that go with them. But I will start rather at the moment when we can observe the baby performing in these two phenomenal realms – that is, at birth.

2  Before the protolanguage What we observe within a few weeks of birth, as demonstrated by Colwyn Trevarthen in the early 1970s (1977, 1979), is an animated exchange of attention: the newborn baby, as its mother comes into view, gazes at her face and animates its whole body, particularly the arms and legs but also the facial muscles. If the mother’s attention is withdrawn, the baby subsides into an inactive and inexpressive state. Whether we want to call these movements meaningful is a matter of choice; they are interactive, but they are not symbolic – the point being

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that, at this stage, moving and meaning are not yet distinct activities. To use Paul Thibault’s (2004) conceptual frame, the signifying body is not yet distinguished from the body as material actor. Within 2 to 3 months both moving and meaning become directed, and this is when they start to separate. Movement of the limbs can be directed towards some object, in the action of reaching, touching and grasping. By the same token, a cry becomes a yell: that is, it can be directed towards some person – it can be addressed. And here is a significant difference: the yell is not addressed to an object. Movements may be directed towards either persons or objects; meanings are directed only to persons. Thus with a sighted child (and I shall assume the child is sighted; I do not know how these steps are taken with a child who is born blind) the visual mode – visual perception – mediates the distinction between moving and meaning, as well as enabling both to be directed towards some entity that is perceived as being outside the child’s own body, the people and things that constitute (following Lemke, 1993) the ‘ecosocial environment’. Changes in perception, in how things are perceived in the child’s changing visual orientation, continue to mediate in the ongoing parallel development between moving and meaning. There are perhaps three significant steps leading up to the emergence of the protolanguage: expressed in terms of movement, of the child’s increasing control of the body as material actor, these are rolling over, sitting up and crawling. Already by lifting his head the infant is beginning to impose his own perspective on the environment. (Since my subject was a boy I shall use the modern rather than the post-modern form of the neutral gender.) But the first movement that is critical in this respect is that of rolling over: tummy to back, and then back to tummy. Visually this means that the child can now switch between two contrasting perspectives; in other words, he can vary his position as an observer. Of course, he has seen the world from most of the possible angles already; but involuntarily, so to speak, at (and in) the hands of others, so that he has not yet associated a particular view of the world with the posture of his own body. Now he does, and (since in principle this movement can be repeated indefinitely) he can now begin actively to explore the material environment. It was at this moment that Nigel produced his first systematic act of meaning, which was also (like his movement) exploratory: a clearly identifiable expression of curiosity, used now and again over a period of about three weeks. In my notes it appears as ‘v.h.p.s.’, which stood for very high-pitched squeak. This was a directed meaning, triggered by some commotion such as a sudden noise or bright light, addressed to whoever of the meaning group was within range; it was interpreted as a

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request for explanation, and the addressee responded accordingly, ‘Yes, that’s a bus – isn’t it noisy!’ or whatever. Nigel was now being admitted as a semiotic agent, one that could initiate a conversation. But it is with sitting up that the semiotic potential comes to be significantly enlarged. Here again the critical factor is the child’s own agency: he can now voluntarily take up a position from which he sees the environment consistently as landscape, with the material effects of gravity becoming clearly apparent. He will soon begin to conduct his own experiments with gravity, dropping anything he can lay his hands on and watching how it falls  – much to the irritation of those who think they are expected to pick it up. In this phase the child is in fact extending his control on three fronts: first, control over his own body, and then two forms of control over the material environment – one directly by action (it is much easier to manipulate objects once you can sit upright), the other indirectly by acts of meaning – it was at this phase that Nigel developed his first true signs. A sign is a meaning/expression pair, in which the expression may be sound or gesture or some combination of the two; with it, the child can act semiotically on any aspect of his ecosocial environment. He can interact with people, to create and maintain togetherness; he can also, by addressing people, act indirectly on things. He now has two ways of getting hold of something he wants: either reaching out and grabbing it, or else telling someone to give it to him. The signs are not yet referential – there is no naming; so the material range over which this added semiotic resource gives control is not very greatly enlarged: you cannot ‘tell’ what it is you are wanting. In fact with Nigel at this stage the effective ranges of the two strategies were identical, since both depended on his being able to touch the object he sought to obtain. Nevertheless the two modes of performing were categorically distinct. Acting materially, he would grab the object and pull it towards him; or if he didn’t want it, he would push it or knock it away. Acting semiotically, on the other hand, if he wanted to be given the object he wrapped his fist around it, held it for a moment and then let go, but without withdrawing his hand; if he did not want it, he tapped it very lightly and then withdrew his hand back towards his body. These gestures were clearly iconic; after all, they had to be understood by the other person, who might not be very quick on the uptake. But they were gestures: the distinction between the body as actor and the body as signifier was now clearly established once and for all. (This feature is very characteristic of moves in semiotic development. Such a move often does not in itself (i.e. in the context in which it is made) enlarge the child’s control over the environment. But it is a ‘trailer’: it expands the potential for control, which will be exploited in the next developmental phase.)

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That little set of differentiated signs – Nigel had five or six of them altogether, used over a period of about three weeks – opened up the way to the protolanguage. Figure 9.1 summarizes the steps the child has taken so far, and foreshadows the further steps to be discussed below. Next, the child learns to crawl: to move himself, under his own power, from one location to another. He can now examine his environment, and the various objects in it, from every angle, gaining a truly three-dimensional picture; and he now starts meaning in earnest. The signs now rapidly increase; but it is not the increase in number that really counts. What is critical is the way the signs become organized into a sign system; and it is the system to which we can give the name of protolanguage. The key to the system is its functionality, the way meaning is built up around a small number of functions-in-context. With Nigel at 10½ months I was able to identify four such systemic functions, which I called ‘instrumental’, ‘regulatory’, ‘interactional’ and ‘personal’, glossing these as ‘give me!’, ‘do for me!’, ‘you and me together’ and ‘I wonder’. The networks for these systems are shown on Figure 9.2. The detailed account of these ‘microfunctions’ was given in my original publication (1975 [2004]); here I would just like to locate them in terms of two fundamental oppositions. One is the opposition between reflection and action: between how things are and how I want them to be (one could label these in grammatical terms as ‘indicative/imperative’, but it is important to bear in mind that the protolanguage has no component of grammar in it). The other opposition is that between outer and inner experience; or, to put that another way, between orientation towards objects and orientation towards people (again there is an analogue in grammar: the inner, or better perhaps ‘inward’, orientation is that of first and second person, while the outer, or ‘outward’, is that of third person). These then form a little matrix with rows and columns as in Figure 9.3. (My term ‘personal’ was unfortunately chosen, in this context. I meant by it the child’s Moving

agitate

reach &

roll over

sit up

crawl [move

walk

[material

limbs;

grasp

[shift

[world

vantage

upright

action]

cry

[directed

perspective]

as

point]

movement]

landscape]

Meaning

exchange

yell

‘!’ ‘?’

signs as

protolanguage

language

[semiotic

attention

[directed

[express

isolates

[primary

[higher

cry]

wonder]

semiotic

order

system]

semiotic

action]

system]

Figure 9.1  Moving and meaning

FUNCTION

CONTENT SYSTEMS

EXPRESSION:

demand, general

GLOSS

Articulation

Tone

na ---

mid

give me that

mid

give me my bird

mid

do that (again)

Instrumental demand, special (toy bird) Regulatory

command, normal

˜

do that right now!

narrow mid

initiation

intensified (impatient)

mid

nice to see you (& shall we look at this together?) nice to see you—at last!

Interactional

low

yes it’s me

low

that’s interesting

low

looking it’s moving (? a dog, birds)

low

that’s nice

low

that tastes nice

narrow low

I’m sleepy

response interest

general specific (movement)

participation

general pleasure

Personal withdrawal

specific (taste)

a

Figure 9.2a  NL 1: Nigel at 0;9–0;10½

On Grammar as the Driving Force

wide ; ff

normal (friendly)

command, intensified

Note: All above on falling tone; mid = mid fall, narrow low = low fall over narrow interval, &c. Similarly in below, except where otherwise shown. At 0; 9, Nigel had two such meanings, both expressed as [ ø ] on mid or mid-low falling tone; one interactional, ‘let’s be together’, the other (usually with the wider interval) personal, ‘look. It’s moving’. He also had another three meanings expressed gesturally: two instrumental, ‘I want that’, grasping object firmly, and ‘I don’t want that’, touching object lightly; and one regulatory, ‘do that again’, touching person or relevant object firmly (e.g. ‘made that jump in the air again’). The gestures disappeared during NL 1 -- 2.

165

In this and subsequent Figures, favourite items are indicated by *, and rare or doubtful items by ?. Where two or three items are related in both meaning and sound these are shown by =, accompanied by an index number where necessary. --- indicates that the syllable is repeated. (-), (--) indicate typical number of optional repetitions.

CONTENT SYSTEMS

EXPRESSION : Articulation

demand, general Instrumental

toy bird

GLOSS

166

FUNCTION

Tone mid

give me that

mid

I want my bird

demand, special mid

I want some powder

command, normal

mid

do that (again)

command, intensified

wide ; ff

do that right now!

high level

Anna!

object-oriented

mid

look (a picture) !

person-oriented

mid

low long

nice to see you (& shall we look at this?) nice to see you - at last! what’s that?; there it is (that’s want I wanted) yes, it’s me; yes,i see

mid; ff

yes ?

mid

look, that’s interesting

dog

mid low

a dog !

ball

mid low

a bus !

aeroplane

mid low (both)

an areoplane !

nose

mid low

a nose !

general

mid low

that’s nice

taste

low

that tastes nice

[?]

narrow low

[?]

narrow low

I’m sleepy

powder Regulatory

initiation

normal (friendly) greeting, general

mid

intensified (impatient)

Interactional engagement (& response to gift) response

mid

to interaction to regulation

a general

interest

specific

participation pleasure Personal withdrawal

Figure 9.2b  NL 2: Nigel at 0;10½–1;0

Halliday in the 21st Century

greeting, personalized

On Grammar as the Driving Force ORIENTATION MOOD Action

Reflection

Outward (third person/ object)

inward (first and second person)

instrumental

regulatory

‘give me!’

‘do for me!’

personal

interactional

‘I wonder’

‘you and me’

167

Figure 9.3  Mood and orientation in the protolanguage

expression of his own persona, taking the form of a reaction of either curiosity or (dis/)liking towards different phenomena of experience. But the orientation was definitely outward; these ‘personal’ meanings are significant in the child’s construction of reality, involving as it does the clear separation of the self from what is ‘out there’.) The child is now positioning himself in relation to the ecosocial environment, and so already has a clear sense of ‘self ’ in contradistinction to that of environment. Not, of course, at the ‘self-conscious’ level of explicit awareness; that is a feature of higher-order consciousness, whereas what we see here is a fully developed primary consciousness, analogous to that in other species. It is interesting in fact to compare the infant protolanguage with communication patterns in other species, where the signs are similar in kind; small children get on very well with cats and dogs – I used to say that each party recognized that the other had the same mode of meaning as themselves.

3  The protolanguage The infant protolanguage, as a manifestation of fully developed primary consciousness, is an important means of learning and of interacting: learning about, and interacting with, the different elements that make up the ecosocial environment. But it is also a major step on the way to the mother tongue, language in its ‘adult’ (i.e. post-infancy) sense. Here what is critical is its systematic nature: we are able to model it systemically, and, this implies two things. On the one hand, there is now a clear line of instantiation: each occurrence of a sign is an instance of (a term in) an underlying system. (Note that this semiotic ‘thickening’ takes place at the birth of the symbolic sign; before that, there is no dimension of instantiation. In my observations I required three clear instances

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before recognizing some vocalization or gesture as a systemic element.) On the other hand, there is a clear dimension of opposition: sets of signs contrast with one another (perhaps modelled on the elementary opposition of polarity, between ‘it’s this’ and ‘it’s not that’, and between ‘I want’ and ‘I don’t want’). Both these features, instantiation and systemic contrast or opposition, are going to be essential preconditions for the later move into grammar. In order to follow this move, we need perhaps to pause for a moment to consider the nature of the protolanguage in relation to the human body  – including of course the human brain. What is significant here is that the ‘adult’ (post-infancy) members of the child’s meaning group have consistently been tracking his semiotic development. They don’t speak his language, as I said, but they know what it means, well enough to hold extended conversations with him, even though it is changing all the time; and he knows if they haven’t got the message right, and has ways of telling them so. The reason the others can do this is the same reason they can master any semiotic system: that they approach it from three different angles  – from above, from below and from round about (I have referred to this as a ‘trinocular’ perspective). Figure 9.4 represents the protolanguage so as to accommodate these three angles of vision. I have labelled the point of vantage for the view ‘from below’ the bodily environment because it is clearly the body that is the locus of the expression facet of the sign: that is where gestures and vocalizations are produced. The view ‘from above’, on the other hand, is that of the ecosocial environment, the world of experience and interpersonal relationships that provides the locus for the content facet of the sign – including the context of situation, which is simply the instantiation of this ecosocial environment. In fact, however, the body is involved at both ends, both the lower and the upper bounds, as the custodian of the human brain. What the brain is doing, at both these interfaces, is effecting a transformation between the two phenomenal realms – the material and the semiotic. When Nigel says *[’dò’dò] his brain is distilling a complex of features from his experience of the world, of the objects and the people in it, and transforming these into a quantum of meaning. Like all meanings, it is strictly ineffable – because it only means itself; but we do our best, as I did, by glossing it with something like ‘nice to see you; now let’s look at this picture together’ – or, in terms that are less situation-bound: ‘let’s be together by sharing a common experience’. This, in turn, is transformed into the material realm, again of course by the brain, as muscular movements of the articulatory organs and the vocal cords, modulating the egressive airstream coming from the diaphragm. Analogous transformations

On Grammar as the Driving Force

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Ecosocial environment

Meaning

Expression

Bodily environment

Figure 9.4  Protolanguage and its environment

are taking place, in the reverse direction, in the brain of whoever is attending to what Nigel says. These instances are dependent on the memories of both parties; I understand that imaging has shown that the neuronal energy required tends to diminish as ‘the same’ act of meaning is repeated, and if so this is a function of the system, the ‘meaning potential’ that defines what are, or are not, instances of the same. Given that the system is maintained, and ongoingly developed, by this constant translation between the material and the semiotic that is taking place in the brain, it is not surprising that the various phases of semiotic development should be so closely integrated with the physical development of the body, especially when we take into account the mediating effects of the child’s progressive visual mastery of his environment. But body and brain are now maturing fast, and suddenly our infant stands up and moves about on two legs instead of on all fours. The moving body has undergone a revolutionary change, leaping over hundreds of generations of biological evolution. What happens to the meaning body at this time? When the brain says ‘get up and walk on two feet’, it precipitates the final phase in the dimensioning of the child’s perception of the environment. This combines the two advantages of sitting up and of crawling; but the combined effect is qualitatively different from either taken by itself. The child now processes a cinematic, 3-D landscape; and, for the first time, the seen environment comes to be virtually limitless.

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At more or less the same time – not surprisingly – the semiotic potential is also thickened, redimensioned for the latest time, so that now it too becomes indefinitely large. And the source of energy for this revolution is grammar. Grammar transforms protolanguage into language, likewise in the process shortcutting hundreds or thousands of generations of human semiotic evolution, and propelling the child forward from primary consciousness to a consciousness of a higher order. The protolanguage is an impressive resource; but it has very great limitations. It consists only of one-to-one mappings of a content (meaning) onto an expression. You can go on adding to the inventory of signs, up to what kind of maximum we do not know (probably less than a hundred); but that is the only way of increasing its power. You can use it to point; but you cannot use it to name things – it does not refer; hence you cannot make generalizations, or isolate and combine independent variables. You can use it to initiate and respond; but you cannot open up a dialogic role system or develop systematic modes of appraisal. You can string signs together (Nigel’s maximum was three, and that noted on one occasion only); but you cannot construct a narrative or any other structured

Ecosocial environment Semantics

Lexico grammar

Phonology

Phonetics Bodily environment

Figure 9.5  Language and its environments

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form of discourse. Some richer, open-ended kind of semiotic system is needed for the child to be able to construe the complexity of his experience and enact the complexity of his interpersonal relationships. What makes such a system possible is grammar. A grammar (always in the sense of lexicogrammar) is a stratum of purely abstract semiosis that is interpolated in between the content and the expression. By ‘purely abstract’ I mean that it has no direct interface with the environment. If we redraw the diagram in Figure 9.4, it will now look as in Figure 9.5.

4  The emergence of grammar How does a grammar actually come into being? I have written elsewhere (e.g. 1993b) about how Nigel took this critical step. At 14 months, shortly after he had taken to walking as a useful mode of propulsion, he had in his protolanguage some 40–50 signs, distributed around the range of functions that I referred to earlier: instrumental, regulatory, interactional and personal. Each sign had its expression in sound, which was some complex of articulation and intonation; see Figure 9.6. The articulation at this stage is postural rather than phonemic; to our more phonemically attuned ears it sounds unstable, but actually it was remarkably consistent. Likewise, the prosody was consistent: each sign had a fixed intonation pattern associated with it, usually falling but with some signs standing out as different, for example [mng] ‘I like that’ which was (fall-) rise-fall. Just at this time Nigel introduced three new signs, marked for the three people who were closest to him: [ama] [dada] [an:a]. These were, respectively, ‘mummy’, ‘daddy’ and ‘anna’; but they were not yet names, they were interactive expressions of togetherness, meaning something like ‘me-and-you’ with the ‘you’ specialized out according to the person. And they had their own special tone: uniquely, they were all high level. Now at a certain moment, over a period of two or three days, Nigel replaced these with the system shown in Figure 9.7, where 9.7 (a) is before, 9.7 (b) after, the change. The articulation had not changed; what had changed was the patterns of intonation, with the uniform high level being replaced by two distinct patterns with a systemic difference in meaning: either stepping up (mid-level followed by high level), or moving down (falling high to mid, followed by mid-level). The first was used when the person was not present: it was a question tone, meaning ‘where are you? I want you’; the second was used when the person was in or

CONTENT SYSTEMS

EXPRESSION : Articulation initiation

demand, general response Instrumental

~

object present ?a:

service or non-visible object

GLOSS Tone high fall, ff

give me that!

high squeak

yes I want that

high rise-fall

yes I want what you just offered yes I want some powder I want (to go and get) the clock

powder

mid fall

clock

mid fall

demand, special

do that (again)

high fall, ff

do that right now !

---

low fall

yes (let’s) do that no don’t (let’s) do that

go for walk

---

mid fall (both syllables)

draw curtains

da

mid fall

It’s dark; let’s draw the curtains

high level

Anna !

high level

Daddy !

low fall high rise+mid fall (downjump) high rise+high fall (upjump)

don’t be cross with me look, a picture; you say what it is another piture; now say what that one is

mid high level+ fall (no jump)

nice to see you (and shall we look at this?)

command, general response

Regulatory command, specific

greeting, personalized

normal intensified

a

positive negative

Anna da; dada

Daddy response to reproof

Interactional

normal

engagement

object-oriented initiation person-oriented

Figure 9.6a  Nigel at 1;1½ -- 1;3

subsequent

let’s go for a walk

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mid fall or level

initiation

172

FUNCTION

FUNCTION

CONTENT SYSTEMS

EXPRESSION: Articulation general

GLOSS Tone mid high level 1 fall (no jump)

look, that’s interesting

da

mid fall

a dog !

bird

ba

mid fall

birds !

bus

ba

mid fall

a bus !

aeroplane

mid low fall

an aeroplane !

cat

high rise-fall

there’s the cat

pottie

mid fall

there’s my pottie

mid fall, frictional high rise-fall [tone 5]

that’s nice

excitement

very high level

look at that !

disgust

low fall

a lot of talk !

narrow low fall or low level

I’m sleepy/ Let’s pretend to go to sleep

song

high sung

tra-la-la

jingle

mid level 1+...+ 1 mid fall

cockadoodledoo

movement/noise specific familiar object interest pleasure participation

Personal

surprise

that’s funny (look where it’s gone !)

withdrawal

pretend-play Imaginative

On Grammar as the Driving Force

dog

Figure 9.6a  Nigel at 1;1½ -- 1;3 (Continued) 173

CONTENT SYSTEMS

EXPRESSION :

initiation

Articulation

Tone

m

short high fall, ff

give me that

mid level+high level

that’s new; let me see it

mid level+mid low level high squeak mid level+mid fall

somebody fo something

rusk

proclitic+mid fall

I want a rusk

toast

mid fall over 2 sylls.

I want some toast

proclitic+mid fall mid fall

I want the powder I want the clock

proclitic+mid fall mid fall or level high fall, ff

I want my pottie do that (again) do that right now

low fall

yes (let’s) do that

normal exploratory plaintive

demand, general response Instrumental

food

general specific

demand, specific

pottle initiation command, general

powder clock normal

a;e

intensified

a

response

Regulatory command, specific

suggestion (joint) request general

greeting

Figure 9.6b  Nigel at 16½ months

let’s go for a walk

draw picture draw curtains come for lunch initiation

la

response

a:

Anna Mummy Daddy seeking

an: a ama dada

specific personalized

Interactional

go for walk

finding

yes I want that where’s my food ?

(intonation of name)

mid fall

let’s draw a picture

(mid rise+) mid fall mid fall mid level+low rise+ mid level or rise high level high rise-fall

It’s dark; draw the curtains come & have your lunch hullo

(see next system) mid-high level+high level mid fall+low level

and hullo to you hullo cat Anna Mummy Daddy where are you ? there you are

Halliday in the 21st Century

ritual object

GLOSS

174

FUNCTION

FUNCTION

CONTENT SYSTEMS

EXPRESSION : Articulation

response engagement initiation

[Heuristic]

mid narrow fall

bird

mid level+high level high rise-fall slow high fall, glottalized mid rise or step up+ fall (no jump) mid rise or step up+ fall (upjump) mid fall mid fall

bus

mid fall

car

mid fall

a car

aeroplane ball

low fall mid fall

an aeroplane there’s my ball

stick

mid fall

there’s my stick

teddy

mid fall

there’s my teddy that’s interesting

favourite object or picture

mid high level+fall (no jump) high rise high rise-fall very high level high rise-fall proclitic+slow high fall mid fall, slow mid narrow fall high rise proclitic+mid level+ high fall narrow low fall or level mid level+ . . . +mid fall

I’ve hidden it

normal subsequent

dog

familiar object Personal

intereset pleasure expression of feeling

surprise excitement ritual joy

mirror

warning complaint game-play pretend-play

Imaginative

peep-o hunt the . . .

play jingle

and what’s that ? a dog birds a bus

that’s nice that’s funny look at that that’s my best . . . that’s me there careful, It’s sharp(rough,&etc.) I’m fed up peep-o

On Grammar as the Driving Force

observation

[sole repsonse whatever he is asked to say] there it is yes I see let’s be said; It’s broken, come off look, what’s that ?

to ‘say “ . . . ”!’ to ‘where’s . . . ?’ to ‘look!’ shared regret shared attention

movement/ noise

GLOSS Tone

let’s pretend to go to sleep cockadoodledoo

Figure 9.6b  Nigel at 16½ months 175

Note: Here there occurs for the first time a set of options which do not form a simple taxonomy. The personal names Anna, Daddy, Mummy combine either with stepping up high level tone, meaning ‘where are you? I’m looking for you.’ or with mid fall plus low level tone, meaning ‘hullo, there you are!’ This involves a level of coding intermediate between content and expression.

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Nigel at 13 months: no separation of articulation and prosody; terms not yet referential Meaning

Expression

mummy!

[ama]

daddy!

[dada]

anna!

[an:a]

(all on high level tone)

Figure 9.7a  Nigel’s system of naming: not yet stratified Nigel at 14 months: articulation and prosody separately variable; terms (system 1) referential -- proper names, (system 2) modal -- 'seeking' versus 'finding'

(1)

(2)

Meaning

Expression

mummy!

[ama]

daddy!

[dada]

anna!

[an:a]

‘where are you?’

(mid level + high level, i.e. rising to high)

‘there you are!’

(high fall + mid level, i.e. falling from high)

(no fixed tone)

Here for the first time a system of experiential meaning (three personal names) become separated from, and freely combinable with, a system of interpersonal meaning (two moods). This is the child’s first step towards a lexicogrammatical stratum.

Figure 9.7b  Nigel’s first stratification of the content plane

came into sight, meaning ‘it’s you – there you are!’ By taking this little step, Nigel became a certified member (a novice certainly; but fully accredited) of the species homo grammaticus. He had separated out two systemic variables: one a system of interpersonal meaning, realized by the prosodic opposition between rising and falling tone, the other a system of ideational meaning, realized by contrasts of articulation; and the two systems were freely combinable. Now for the first time [ama] and so on were true names, referential meanings analysed out from the interpersonal meanings contrasting seeking with finding (or, more generally, anxiety with reassurance; interestingly, this is also the developmental ‘moment’ when fear sets in, anxiety if an unknown person appears or if the intimates are no longer around). Looking back on this step from later on, we recognize in it the forerunners of transitivity and mood. Here for the first time a system of experiential meaning (three personal names) becomes separated from, and freely combinable with, a system of interpersonal

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meaning (two moods). This is the child’s first step towards a lexicogrammatical stratum. Nigel now knew about grammar: he had taken the first step into a higherorder, stratified world of meaning. And, as was typical, he left it at that. It was as if – something that happened several times – he had learnt the way forward, mastered the principle, and would now keep it in reserve until he was ready to start using it in earnest. In our adult timeframe, of course, it was not very long before he did set out in earnest on the evolutionary journey into the mother tongue – I will need to tell one more story to show how he crossed a further developmental frontier. I tell Nigel’s story because I observed it all happening, at first hand (and being in at the birth of language was perhaps the most exciting experience of my intellectual life); but every child has to find his or her own way to becoming a grammatical creature. The grammar of every natural language is two things at once: it is a theory of human experience, and it is simultaneously an enactment of human relationships; and we can see how Nigel’s little game with syllables and tones established this principle at the very beginning. You can’t have one kind of meaning without the other; this is a principle that is built into the architecture of our higher-order consciousness. We call these two aspects of grammar the ‘experiential’ and the ‘interpersonal’; the experiential is then backed up by a component of grammatical logic, so we use a different term ‘ideational’ to refer to the immensely powerful combination of these two motifs. So what is the next frontier that I referred to? Children need a strategy for enabling the mother tongue to take off, for getting the whole system airborne. What they seem to do, by some means or other (the tactics vary, of course, but the principle has been widely recognized), is first to systemize this duality, that of grammar as reflection versus grammar as action, so that every utterance is assigned just to one of these two functional types. And here once more, if I may, I will let Nigel take over the narrative. By 16½ months his protolanguage had grown to over 50 signs; but by this time the pattern is beginning to break down, and by 18  months he has embarked on the transition to the mother tongue. Some signs are disappearing, while the others have become lexicalized and have formed the basis of a rapidly expanding vocabulary, now around a hundred items. But these words (as we may now call them) have appeared in different contexts: some in contexts of action (‘give me . . .!’, ‘let’s play with . . .!’), others in contexts of reflection (‘there’s a . . .’, ‘that’s a . . .’); while none of the words has yet appeared in both.

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In the month from 1;6 to 1;7 Nigel’s lexicogrammatical resources expanded very quickly, extending beyond single words to utterances of two words and then three; and again each wording functioned in one or other of the two contexts, but none in both of them. All wordings were on a falling tone. In the next two weeks, however, a remarkable change took place, a change which set in and was completed (that is, became totally consistent) within a period of five days. What happened was that, with all utterances in the reflection mode, where Nigel was commenting on something he was seeing, or else remembering (‘construing’ experience, in our terms), the tone remained as falling. But now all those in the action mode, where he wanted to be given something, or to have someone do something for him, or simply to be with him (‘enacting’ personal relationships and social processes)  – all these utterances were switched into a rising tone. Examples are given in Appendix 9.2. The difference in intonation was clear, categorical and fully consistent. The contrast was reinforced by Nigel’s accompanying behaviour. Any rising tone utterance demanded a response, and would be repeated, with increasing urgency, until it got one – not necessarily a compliance, of course; the response might be ‘no you can’t’; but this was just (well: almost!) as acceptable as ‘yes you can’ because it completed the meaning cycle set up by the rising tone. A falling tone utterance, on the other hand, while it might be acknowledged by a hearer (‘yes that’s a green bus’, ‘no it’s not green, it’s blue’, and so on), was semiotically self-sufficient and with these Nigel did not press for a response. I labelled this opposition ‘pragmatic’ versus ‘mathetic’, mathetic meaning ‘having a learning function’: with mathetic utterances the child is using the grammar to make sense of the jungle of experience, whereas with the pragmatic he is saying ‘somebody do something!’. This systemic distinction picks up the motif we found in the protolanguage; but it has been grammaticalized  – moved on to a higher level of abstraction by being systemized within the grammar. The two categories are discrete, with every utterance being assigned to one or the other. The same strategy was found by Clare Painter (1984) in her study of Hal, and by Jane Torr (1997) in her study of Anna. There were differences in the mode of expression: where Nigel used a rising tone, Anna used a creaky voice quality, and Hal some combination of the two; but in every case the functional distinction was the same. Interestingly, the pragmatic was always the marked term in the opposition; a striking bit of evidence for this in Nigel was the way in which, in the one small class of pragmatic utterances where he continued to use a protolinguistic sign (the demand for music, realized by beating time with the right arm), the utterance tone was falling, showing that the falling tone remained the default choice.

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As long as the two sets of wordings are non-overlapping, such that each possible utterance is specialized to just one function or the other, the opposition is really only semi-grammaticalized. Within a few weeks, however, Nigel had fully grammaticalized the distinction, such that any wording could in principle take either the mathetic or the pragmatic mode. Of course, an expression such as more meat is more likely to be pragmatic, one such as green bus more probably mathetic; but the alternative combination was now entirely possible. The first recorded instance of the same wording occurring in both functions in a single dialogue happened when Nigel was waiting for his father to get ready to take him out. ‘Dada ready now’, he said (falling tone). ‘No’, said his father, ‘I’m not ready. You’ll have to wait.’ Nigel switched to the other mood: ‘Dada ready now!’, with rising tone – in other words, ‘well then get ready’. Here one can pick up the echo of that much earlier pair of utterances with which the enterprise of grammar was set in train. Nigel’s system of mathetic versus pragmatic was maintained throughout his transition into the mother tongue – except of course that it was transformed along the way. At first, it was like a prototype of declarative versus imperative, with the proviso that imperatives in adult English do not usually take a rising tone. By about 1;10 Nigel was learning to ask questions; he didn’t use the interrogative in this function (he had mastered the interrogative syntax perfectly well, but he used it as a special kind of declarative), but since a question is also pragmatic  – it demands a response, even though in the form of information rather than goods-&-services  – questions went along with commands in having a rising tone. Being able to ask a question depends on having crossed yet another developmental threshold: the child had to realize that the power of grammar was such that you could use it to tell people things that they didn’t already know. This was where the interrogative came in. Up to that time (at around 1;9½), Nigel’s observations about things and events were grounded in shared experience: that is, they were always addressed to someone who was or had been a party to them; and when these were construed clausally, they were declarative with (being mathetic) falling tone. So when he started using language to inform – to tell someone about an experience he knew they had not shared  – he grammaticalized the distinction between the two, using the interrogative for this new kind of semiotic act. Questions began as pragmatic declaratives, and remained this way until the system was transformed once more, taking on its ‘adult’ guise. The critical step, in the transit to the mother tongue, is that whereby language comes to be used to exchange information. Giving and demanding goods-&-

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services is not problematic; it has a correlate in the material realm, and the child has been using language in such contexts for quite a long time. Giving and demanding information is more complex, because there language is being used to exchange itself. Once the child has mastered this mode of meaning, the grammar can assume its full post-infancy form. In this process the opposition between pragmatic and mathetic develops, through various stages (according to the child) into the system of mood; while the representational content of both pragmatic and mathetic develops into the transitivity system (in its extended sense as the grammar of processes and their configurations). The grammar now has its ‘metafunctional’ semiotic order, simultaneously construing the child’s experience and enacting his interpersonal relationships.

5  Some features of the grammar-brain Any attempt at characterizing the grammar-brain must depend, as Matthiessen (2004b) points out, on an account of the ontogenesis of language which makes sense of human evolution without lowering an opaque symbolic curtain between ourselves and the rest of creation. We know that the brain has evolved in the context of the increasing complexity of our relationship with our environment; this has to mean both the natural and the social environment, without privilege to either one of the two. (There is a danger here of being trapped in the oscillations of fashion. Two or more decades ago, when this was becoming understood, it was only the physical environment that was being considered; this has now been corrected, with the recognition of social intelligence, but it is important to maintain a balance between the two – not simply that they both count, but that they interpenetrate to such an extent that you cannot ‘mean’ one without the other. The grammar will not let you.) Here is the origin of what, when first drafting system networks, I started referring to (with apologies for the Graeco-Latin hybrid) as the metafunctional foundation of the grammar. This duality of perspective is built in to the architecture of language. But it is not simply a matter of representing these two aspects of the human ecosocial environment. The grammar-brain manages them in complementary ways: it construes the eco, whereas it enacts the social. These are our ‘experiential’ (or, more broadly, ‘ideational’) and ‘interpersonal’ metafunctions. (The remaining one, the ‘textual’, is the grammar’s way of organizing itself to carry out this complexity management). It is precisely, and only, because the two are different semiotic modes that their meanings

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can vary independently, so that any ‘reflection’ can be the occasion for any ‘action’. Meaning, in turn, depends on instantiation: the principle that each act of meaning instantiates numerous underlying systems. As noted in section 2 earlier, this depends on memory: the system is the potential that is itself built up as an abstraction from different instances, and which defines what is a ‘repetition’ of ‘the same’ semiotic act. It may be already from the moment when the infant first distinguishes meaning from moving (a semiotic act from a material act) that it begins to construct its meaning potential in this way. The move to a higher-order semiotic depends, further, on stratification. The primary semiotic, the protolanguage, already involves realization, as the fusion of a content with an expression. But by introducing a stratum of grammar into the picture, the grammar-brain expands the meaning potential to an indefinite extent, because there can be many-to-many mappings at each interface, and at at least one interface (that between the grammar and the expression) the realization can be wholly conventional, with no requirement of an iconic link between the strata. (In the event, the realization is largely but not wholly conventional below the grammar and largely but not wholly iconic above it.) So when the brain is transforming from the material to the semiotic and back again, any movement of the body as signifier can realize any element in the brain’s constitution of the environment (using ‘constitution’ to include both construal and enactment). Whether construing or enacting, the grammar has to categorize, to determine in what respects phenomena are to be constituted as alike or different. So let me finally make a few observations about the grammar-brain’s strategies for categorizing. The earlier view was that the categories of our experience were natural classes; a more recent view has been that there are no natural classes, and all categories have to be imposed by the grammar. I would rather say that there are indefinitely many natural classes: everything is like many other things in some respect or other. The grammar selects those among the possible analogies that are plausible, in the sense that the resulting categories collectively constitute a world that humans can live in – that favours survival under the current ecosocial conditions. This is a job of what today is called the management of complexity; and it inevitably involves strategies such as cross-classification, compromise and complementarity. If phenomena are to be transformed into networks of meaning potential, they have to be multiply classified; and the very complex areas of experience, like learning and suffering, will have numerous different addresses –

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different locations around the grammatical map. In particular, phenomena of all kinds tend to look different when seen from different angles of vision; the view ‘from above’ (focus on function) and the view ‘from below’ (focus on form) yield different alignments, and the grammar is always compromising between these two perspectives. And in modelling those pervasive categories that are associated with almost every aspect of experience, like time, or agency, the grammar resorts to complementarities: mutually contradictory interpretations of which both have to be adopted in order to provide a rounded or ‘thickened’ account. These are not special properties of the language of technology and science; they are features of our commonsense understanding, part of the grammar of daily life, which the child is engaging with from the very beginning of the transit into the mother tongue. Wherever the lines are drawn, on the grammar’s mapping of experience, there will be indeterminacy – not as a regrettable shortcoming but as a necessary and entirely positive feature. All categories across the lexicogrammatical continuum are fuzzy; this seems a shortcoming when we try to label them in our metalanguage, but it is essential to the metastability of the whole. By the same token the arrangement of categories into sets and systems of alternatives also depends on indeterminacy – as a function of choice. The varying frequencies with which one or other option is ‘chosen’ whenever we speak represent the underlying probabilities of the language; these quantitative patterns are critical for children learning their mother tongue; and they allow for the grammar to evolve over the course of time, as probabilities change (and may sometimes reduce to certainty).2 For grammar to be successful, as a way of life, it is important that its options should not be equally likely: we rely on this to interact in conditions of noise. Curiously, Shannon and Weaver (1949  [1964]) may not have been far out in suggesting that language had an overall redundancy of roughly 50 per cent. I say ‘curiously’ because what they had in fact measured was the redundancy of written English analysed as consisting of 26 letters and a space. But my own quantitative studies of a few very general grammatical systems in English at least leave open the possibility that what they found was a special instance of something that is a feature of language as a whole. Finally, indeterminacy also means ‘play’, in the sense that the system has a great deal of play in it, the elasticity of both semantic and phonetic space. Children moving from the postural phonetics of the protolanguage towards a more digitalized pattern of articulation have to constrain the parameters; but it is still a highly elastic space that they end up with. And analogously with the

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semantic space: its parameters also are more closely defined than those of the protolanguage; but there are many more of them, and such multidimensional space cannot help but accommodate virtually unlimited play. If we view the evolution of the language-brain in a grammatical perspective, the ontogenesis of grammar offers a way in to tracking the development of higher-order consciousness, or semiosis, suggesting what semiotic strategies are likely to be put in place when the human individual moves from infancy to childhood. This perspective is a metafunctional one, taking account of the critical parts played by language in human lives, construing and enacting the relationships of the individual, the group and the species to their social and physical environment. This meaning potential has to be ‘learnt’ – it has to be constructed; and it seems, if I understand aright, that in constructing it the child is also, not just at the same time but also in the same operation, constructing the pathways of the brain, in the personalized form that is the product of the uniqueness of the individual experience, mediated by the culture, and transformed into the meaning potential that evolved with the species. If I have called grammar the ‘driving force’, this is because I think it has a special place as the source of energy for the semiotic process.3 (Summary in Figure 9.8.) 1.

Dimensionality (thickness) ideational (construing experience ['reality construction'])

Metafunction interpersonal (enacting relationships ['social intelligence']) Instantiation

systemizing meanings ('grammaticalization') iconic (material/semiotic interfaces)

Stratification conventional (within semiotic) 2.

Category selection (principle of multiple perspective) Cross-classification Compromise Complementarity

3.

Category organization (principle of indeterminacy) Fuzziness Probability and redundancy 'Play'

Figure 9.8  Patterns in grammatical energy

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Notes 1 Phillips studied Nigel’s development of ‘sameness, similarity, difference, opposition’ from age 1;6 to 2;6. She drew up system networks for the final stage (2;3–2;6); then, using these as traces, gradually blocked them in, showing how this aspect of Nigel’s meaning potential was built up step by step over the 12-month period. See Phillips (1985), and on the development of modality and hypothetical meaning, see Phillips (1986). 2 Clearly the grammar-brain is responsive to relative frequencies observed over large numbers of instances. The findings of Hasan and her colleagues are crucial in this respect because they show how young children recreate in their own speech the frequency patterns characteristic of the particular familial environment in which they have learnt their mother tongue. See Hasan (1991, 1992a, 1996); Hasan and Cloran (1990 [2009]). On quantitative studies in grammar, see Halliday (1993b). 3 I should make it clear that I am not a student of the brain and have no specialist knowledge in this area. From my limited reading, two recent studies standout as presenting a picture with which I feel my work on the ontogenesis of language is entirely compatible: those of Deacon (1997) and Lamb (1999). The work that first led me to read about brain evolution was that of Edelman (1992), from which the notions of primary and higher-order consciousness are derived.

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Appendix 9.1  Examples of protolinguistic conversations [from Halliday, 1978] One year, six months Nigel was waiting for his lunch. He picked up his fork and tried the prongs on the palm of his hand. ‘ooh’ he said in a low, breathy voice. It meant ‘ooh, it’s sharp’. He dropped the fork on the table. ‘oo’ It was a short, high-pitched squeak. ‘Ooh,   dropped it’, I said. ‘Is it sharp?’ Anna came in, with lunch. ‘Do you know what it is?’ said Anna. ‘You’re having fish.’ ‘“lù”, said Nigel. “lù”’ ‘Lunch, yes’, said Anna. ‘It’s fish.’ ‘vò’ (fish) Nigel set himself to eat his lunch. Some fish fell off the fork. ‘ô ô’ It was another very high-pitched squeak. ‘Ooh you lost a big bit then’, said Anna. ‘Where did it go?’ ‘bâiba’ Nigel looked up at Anna, inviting her to share a memory ‘âiba . . . bâiba’, he said. ‘Yes, all the trains went away, and you said ‘byebye’, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘bâiba’, said Nigel sadly, waving his hand. He finished off his lunch. ‘nōumò . . . nōumò’ ‘Where has it gone?’ Anna asked him. Nigel turned his attention to the salt. ‘adīdà’, he asked. ‘That’s salt’, said Anna. ‘Salt and pepper.’ ‘ùh . . . ùh’ (‘I want it’) Anna passed it to him. ‘That’s salt.’ Nigel poked the hole in the top with his finger. ‘lôu! lôu’ (‘a hole!’) ‘Yes, it has a hole in it’, she said. ‘ adīdà ‘ ‘It’s salt.’ ‘lò’

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‘Salt.’ ‘lò’

One year, three months Nigel was in his high chair; his mother gave him a piece of toast. ‘There you are, Bootie’, she said. ‘Toast.’ ‘dòu’ said Nigel, picking it up. ‘dòu’ He looked over at my piece. ‘dòu’ he said again. ‘Yes, I’ve got a piece of toast as well.’ Nigel finished his piece. ‘dòu’ he said firmly. ‘Do you want some more?’ ‘n’ It was a short, very high-pitched squeak, with lips spread, meaning   ‘yes I do’ or ‘yes do’ in answer to an offer of goods-&-services.

His mother started to butter another finger of toast. Nigel watched her with growing impatience. ‘ùh . . . ùh . . . mng!’ (‘I want it, I want it. Give it to me!’) ‘All right, it’s coming! You want some butter on it, don’t you? See! That’s butter’, ‘bàta’

There was a plop and a miaow, and the neighbour’s cat appeared at Nigel’s side. She was a regular visitor.| ‘abæ̂ . . . abæ̂’

It was a greeting to the cat. Apart from Anna, his mother and me, the cat was the one other being with whom Nigel exchanged meanings. They spoke the same kind of language.

Twelve months Nigel and I were looking at his book together. Nigel took hold of my finger, and pressed it lightly against one of the pictures. ‘èya’, he said. The meaning was clear: ‘You say its name.’ ‘It’s a ball’, I said.

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‘è- e- eh’ Nigel gave his long, drawn-out sigh, meaning ‘yes, that’s what I wanted you to do.’ He was pleased that his meaning had been successful, and he repeated the procedure throughout the book.

Later he was looking at it all by himself. ‘dò . . . èya . . . vèu’

This was Nigel’s first complex utterance, and the only one for many months to come. But it made excellent sense. He had picked up the picture book, opened it at the ball page, and pointed it at the picture. It was just as if he had said in so many words, ‘Look, a picture! What is it? A ball!’

Ten and one-half months Nigel was sitting on my knee. On the table in front of us was a fruit bowl with an orange in it. Nigel struggled to reach it. ‘nà nà nà nà’ he said. It meant ‘I want it’, ‘Give it to me.’ I gave him the orange. He made it roll on the table; it fell off. ‘nà nà nà nà’ he said again.

When the game was over, he got down, crawled away and disappeared along the passage, going boomp-boomp-boomp as he went. Then silence. His mother began to wonder where he was. ‘Nigel!’ she called. ‘ è – e- eh’ It was his special response to a call: ‘Here I am.’ ‘Where is he?’ said the mother. ‘Nigel!’

She went to look for him. He was standing, precariously, by the divan, looking at his picture cards that were hanging on the wall. ‘dòh’ he said as she came in. it meant ‘Hullo – shall we look at these pictures   together?’ ‘dòh . . . dòh’ ‘Are you looking at your pictures?’ his mother asked him. ‘dòh . . . dòh’

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Appendix 9.2  Examples of pragmatic and mathetic: Nigel 1;6–1;9 (a) pragmatic

(b) mathetic N. calling for help in freeing toy train

find fóryou

‘I’ve lost something; find it for me!’

throw úp low wáll

molasses nòse

‘I’ve got molasses on my nose’ (with accompanying expression of delight)

‘throw the rabbit up in the air again’

big bàll

frequent when playing with ball; also: little ball

mummy bòok

high wáll

N. about to jump off suitcase, asking to be caught; first used when jumping off walls, low and high, in park

frequent on picking up book and finding no picture inside (‘it’s Mummy’s book’)

red swèater

on seeing it: red jumper (same object)

squéeze

‘squeeze the orange for me’

black brùsh

gláss

‘I want my milk in a glass’

also green, red, blue, yellow, with stick, light, peg, car, train, etc.

orange lèmon

‘sing “Orange and lemons”’; accompanied by music gesture, which is alternative realization of pragmatic; hence falling tone

bìg one

applied to goods train, bubble; tonic on big as in adult form.

baby dùck

in picture; also mummy duck

turn aróund

N. repeating instruction given when fitting shapes into puzzles: ‘is that what I have to do?’

too bìg

play chúffa

‘let’s play with the train’

open fóryou

usual form of request for box, etc. to be opened

frequent; sometimes appropriate, as when trying to push object through wire mesh; sometimes inappropriate, as when trying to reach ball with stick (=‘too far’)

back tóothpaste

‘put the toothpaste back in the cupboard’

that bròke

‘that’s broken’

Halliday in the 21st Century

chuffa stúck

also: more omelet, -lettuce, -tomato, -bread, -bun, etc.

bounce táble

‘I want to bounce my orange on the table’

cárry

‘carry me!’

háve it

(usual form of ‘I want that thing’)

tóast

‘I want some toast’; also breakfast, tomato, etc.

hit flóor

‘I’m going to hit the floor with hammer’

that sóng

‘sing that song you’ve sung’

háve that

(same as have it above)

hedgehog bóok

‘I want the book with the hedgehog picture in it’

play ráo

‘I want to play at lions’

toothpaste . . . òn tòothbrush

falling tone on on and again on toothbrush; not fully formed as a single structure

train under túnnel . . . getit fóryou

both halves rising tone

tree fall dòwn

later: big tree fall down

loud mùsic

frequent comment as loud passage starts

chuffa stòp

in game (Father bouncing N., N., being ‘fast train’); Father stops

two green pèg green stick fìnd

‘the green stick’s been found’

old green tràin . . . green old tràin

both halves falling tone; the second, though less probable, would have been the appropriate one in the content.

dada black brùsh

‘Daddy’s black brush’

no more wàter

dada got bàll . . . nila got bàll

dówn . . . table . . . ‘put the sugar down on the table for me to put my ball go under càr sugar . . . spóon spoon in it’; rising tone on down and spoon.

cf. water gone plughole

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more grávy

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10

On Matter and Meaning: The Two Realms of Human Experience (2005)

1 This chapter is about the nature of happenings, and more particularly the happenings that constitute the human experience. What happens becomes history; someone who studies and tells what happened is a historian. I am not a historian – I can enjoy reading history free of the sense of entanglement that goes with reading in your professional domain; as a youth, my greatest feeling of discovery came from reading Gordon Childe’s What Happened in History, and thanks to my near-contemporaries such as Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm I have always been able to refresh that feeling when I needed to. ‘Telling’ means selecting, ordering, interpreting, explaining, in some proportion or other; but, as Hobsbawm puts it, ‘what historians investigate is real’ (1997: viii).1 Of course, we can construct imaginary, ‘virtual’ happenings, such as those in dreams; but even those are modelled on experience of the real. As a student, many years ago, my encounter with history was with the history of China; and since I am writing this in Hong Kong, where Chinese and English history met, let me draw an example of happening, and telling about happening, from these two sources. The motif is a familiar one: it is that of cycles, cyclical patterns in the ordering of historical events. Chinese history has traditionally been interpreted in terms of cycles, as each new dynasty first flourished, then matured, and then declined, only to be overthrown by a successor which then went through the same sequence of events. A typical cycle lasted about 250– 300 years. First published in Linguistics and the Human Sciences 1.1, Jan 2005. pp. 59–82.

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England likewise went through a number of cycles, as it tended to drift away from the European continent and then get forcibly reabsorbed, in this case about once every 500 years. First (in history) came the Celts, having travelled a long way from their earlier home in the east; 500 years later the Romans arrived; after another five centuries the Anglo-Saxons; and then, just one thousand years ago, the Norman French. Each of these invasions reaffirmed England’s place as part of Europe (as it had been physically before the ice melted); and in between each it gradually moved away again, taking on a distinct identity of its own. In the past 1,000 years this cycle has continued; but the invasions have taken a different form: not physical force, but intellectual and political pressure. We can see this happening today, with England being dragged, more or less reluctantly (depending on one’s viewpoint), into the European Union, the Eurozone and all the rest. The Eurocycle has come round once again. But there was one cycle in between, 500 years ago, that Europeans called the Renaissance, the ‘rebirth’ of the spirit of inquiry when new forms of knowledge began to emerge; this started in Italy but soon spread throughout Europe, leading on in England to what came to be known as the ‘industrial revolution’. It is well known that in China, already in the Southern Song dynasty, many of the conditions prevailed that in Europe, several centuries later, formed the point of departure for industrialization: in textiles, there was large-scale factory production, with advanced machinery driven by a reliable source of energy, namely water power. Historians, both Chinese and foreign, have often asked why China, which had been ahead of Europe in technology since Han times, did not take this next critical step into the machine age; and various considerations have been put forward to explain it (Needham, 1978–95; Elvin, 1973). Or we could ask the question the other way round: why did such a development take place in Western Europe? What were the circumstances that led to the evolution of a capitalist economy and scientific – industrial technology? Now I am obviously not going to suggest an answer. What concerns me here  – the reason for bringing up one of these questions of history  – is the kinds of explanation that may be offered. In the broadest terms, some of the discussion has foregrounded the technological and other material conditions that obtained at these places at these times; some has emphasized rather the belief systems, social relationships; forms of discourse and the like. Needham many years ago suggested a connection between the European idea of God as the ultimate agent and the search for scientific explanations of material effects once God was no longer being appealed to in this role. ‘Marxist’ explanations are often assumed to be purely in material terms, based on some form of economic

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determinism, although as Hobsbawm points out (1997: ch. 13)  Marx fully recognized the importance of ideas as a historical force; he just insisted that they were not independent of a society’s economic base. Most historians would seek an explanation in some combination of the two: the material and the – let us say – non-material historical conditions. But what are the ‘non-material’ conditions? They can be thought of in ideological, religious, social, psychological, cognitive, cultural and no doubt other terms as well; there are many headings under which they can be described and usefully explored. But to what extent does the non-material constitute a coherent, unified domain of human experience? I think there is a unifying concept, an underlying factor that is present in all such manifestations: namely, meaning. The two phenomenal realms that we inhabit, as human beings, are the realm of matter and the realm of meaning. Human history is the unfolding of a constant interplay, and a constant tension, between these two. From matter, we can access the adjective ‘material’. From meaning we cannot derive any adjective; so we have to go to Greek and call it ‘semiotic’. The two realms that we inhabit, then, are the material and the semiotic; and both are involved in all the regions of our experience.

2 I have said I am not a historian; nor, I must add, am I a philosopher. By training, I am a grammarian  – by training, but also by inclination: I tend to think grammatically, especially where I meet problems that need to be solved. This does not mean that I am going to suggest a grammatical explanation for the above historical problem. I do not believe that, if the scientific–industrial revolution took place in a part of Europe rather than in a part of China, despite similar technological conditions, this had something to do with the differences between Chinese grammar and the grammar of English or other European languages. Every language has the potential of being the vehicle of scientific thinking and theorizing; and Chinese had already gone a long way along this road – in AD 1200 probably only Arabic, Latin and Sanskrit had travelled so far. Of course, every language realizes this potential in its own way, and certain steps may require less expenditure of grammatical energy in one language than in another, and at one stage in a language’s history than another  – although this is highly likely to balance out in the long run. For example, if we compare modern Chinese with modern English, as used in the discourses of science, then

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(i) technical terms, and technical taxonomies, require less grammatical energy in Chinese than in English; (ii) compound nominal expressions require less energy in English, while (iii) logical (tactic) sequences take up about the same amount of energy in both (Halliday, 1993a). We can reject any suggestion that there is something about the grammar of English (or Dutch, or German, or French) which enabled speakers of these languages to construct scientific theories and steam engines; or something about the grammar of Chinese which inhibited Chinese scholars and engineers from advancing along the same paths.2 In what sense, then, does grammar come into the picture? Not, of course, the image of ‘grammar’ that many people carry around with them (including some who are sophisticated, theoretically minded scholars in other disciplines). This is still often the grammar of the primary school, where they were taught that a language is a set of rules to be obeyed, whether in speaking and writing their mother tongue or in struggling to master a second or a foreign language. This is rather as if my image of mathematics was struggling to prove that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle was equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides, with no idea of why I was being required to do so. A language is a highly complex system  – perhaps one of the most complex in the known universe. This is what makes grammar such a powerful tool for thinking with. But by the same token, in investigating how language works we are inevitably drawn into abstract realms of thinking and reasoning, requiring a technical discourse with its associated conceptual taxonomies. People often resist technical terminology about language, even though their primary school mathematics and science were already loaded with batteries of specialized terms – which cause no serious problem to the brain of an eightyear-old child. A language is a system of meanings: a semiotic system, to give it a technical name. But it is more than that; it is a system that makes meanings: it is not only semiotic but semogenic. There are many systems of meaning in our lives, but not all of them are meaning-creating. A system of railway signals, for example, or traffic lights, is semiotic, but not semogenic. There are other semiotic systems which do create meaning: forms of visual art and music, for example; but probably language is unique in the extent of its semogenic power. I emphasize this because, again, like the notion of grammar, it is not in harmony with received notions about language. The usual way we talk about language is by saying that language ‘expresses’ meaning, as if the meanings were already there – already existing, in some formation or other, and waiting for language to transpose them into sound, or into some kind of visible symbols. But meaning is brought

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about by language; and the energy by which this is achieved, the source of its semogenic power, is grammar. One of the sources of complexity is that there is more than one kind of meaning in a language; so the grammar is doing more than one job at once. Expressed in functional terms, the grammar both construes and enacts: it enacts the social process, our relationships one with another; and it construes the human experience. We refer to these in systemic functional linguistics as metafunctions: the interpersonal metafunction and the experiential metafunction.3 Here I want to consider meaning in its experiential aspect: meaning as the construction of human experience. Human experience is extraordinarily rich and varied, mediated through different senses on various levels; what the grammar does is to transform this experience into meaning. Since all human beings live on the same planet, and all have the same brains – the same neurophysiological make-up – there is much in common to the ways in which this transformation of experience into meaning is brought about, in every language. But there is also room for variation; some of it motivated by the different ecosocial environments of different human groups, some of it arising out of the self-organizing strategies of the system, and some of it simply random. Our interaction with our environment is so complex and multidimensional that there has to be a lot of ‘play’, or indeterminacy, in the construal for it to be able to work at all. What does it mean to say that the grammar ‘transforms experience into meaning’? Another way of putting this would be to say that grammar is a theory of human experience. The lexicogrammatical representations, or wordings (I should make clear that ‘grammar’ includes vocabulary, the more specific elements of the wording) – that is, the bits of discourse that we recognize as speech, or as writing, construe fragments of experience, real or imaginary, in ways which relate each instance to this overall theory. So if someone says to me, as they did a few weeks ago, That window was blown open by the typhoon (or, since it was actually in Chinese, Nage chuangzi gei dafeng chuikaile), this is not simply a record of an event, observed or narrated – not simply an act of annotation; it is an act of interpretation, a construal in terms of the theory, which is a complex construction involving processes and agency and shared (or, again, imagined) visual space, of phases and aspects in time, of entities and forces and the categories to which these are to be assigned, and so on. It thus relates this particular phenomenon to innumerable other phenomena in innumerably many ways. So the reason that one can say with confidence, as I did earlier on, that every language has the full potential for scientific reasoning and theorizing, was that every language in its ordinary everyday grammar already incorporates a highly

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complex theory of human experience. The meanings construed in wordings like blown open and was and by, or the Chinese chuikai and le (liao) and gei, or even window and typhoon, are part of a very sophisticated model of ourselves and our environment; such a model did not emerge all at once, but evolved over the ten thousand or so generations of homo sapiens – who in turn inherited the foundations for such a model from an even remoter ancestry in the hominid line. Once given this construal we can then retheorize it at a different level, referring to materials and structures and forces, all of which can be accurately measured, and computing the mathematical relations among them. This is what we call a ‘scientific’ theory, as distinct from the commonsense theory that is enshrined in our everyday grammar. A scientific theory is also the product of long evolution, although in this case heavily subsidized by conscious design; whereas the commonsense theory operates below the level of conscious awareness – that is, until you become a grammarian. The elements of a scientific theory are of a more abstract nature – they may be virtual entities, existing only on the semiotic plane and with no direct analogue in the material world; but such a theory is still ultimately the output of the semogenic power of the grammar.

3 In formulating the title of this chapter, I had in mind a quotation from a discussion by the biologist George Williams, where he said (1995: 43): Evolutionary biologists . . . work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter.  . . . These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term ‘reductionism’. You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms, because they both have mass and charge and length and width. You can’t do that with information and matter. Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimetres. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes. You can’t measure so much gold in so many bytes. It doesn’t have redundancy, or fidelity, or any of the other descriptors we apply to information. This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.

I have cited and commented on this passage elsewhere (Halliday, 1998b [2004]). The key point here is the notion of two distinct phenomenal realms, each an

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essential component of the human condition and neither reducible to the other. They are defined, for Williams, by the properties whereby they can be measured: matter by mass, density, extension in space; information by bytes – kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and whatever may come after. I have a problem with this notion of information: not with the phenomenon itself rather, or with its measurability in bytes, but with the notion that information defined in this way is an ultimate phenomenal realm on a par with the realm of matter. I want to replace ‘information’ here by ‘meaning’: the two realms of matter and meaning  – the material and the semiotic. This is not just because I think like a grammarian, though that is obviously a factor in my underlying rationale; it is because I don’t think all meaning can be measured. There is no doubt that some kinds of meaning, or at least some manifestations of meaning, are measurable; it seems sensible to reserve the term ‘information’ for just that part of the realm of meaning that can be measured in bytes  – or in terms of information and redundancy (which incidentally can be used very profitably in quantifying grammatical meaning (Halliday and James, 1993)). But it is not, I think, an essential property of this second realm that it can always be expressed in quantitative terms. This is why I prefer the more general concept of ‘meaning’: matter and meaning, rather than matter and information. These are the phenomenal realms which we as human beings inhabit. We inhabit a world of matter, and we inhabit a world of meaning. To return to the historical perspective with which I started: at any given moment in history, the environment of any human group  – the ecosocial context in which they are located – is some particular intersection of these two realms, the material and the semiotic. This environment is at once both enabling and constraining: it contains within itself both a potential for action and a limitation on what actions are possible. Perhaps if we accumulated enough data we could express these in terms of probabilities. Neither the material conditions alone nor the semiotic conditions alone are determining; it is the interplay between these two which defines the human situation  – whether for the individual, the social unit, the state, or for the human race as a whole. China had developed movable block printing five centuries or so ahead of Europe. By the time of the Yuan dynasty Chinese scholars had developed all the ‘styles of scientific thinking’ (identified by Crombie, 1994)  that evolved in Europe, with the exception of the probabilistic mode (Elvin, 2002). But, as Elvin pointed out, there was a weakness in their recording and transmission of knowledge: Chinese scholarship lacked the dimension of continuity, of successive development, such that meanings could be seen to accumulate through time.

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We may contrast this with the strong sense of succession that came about in Europe, with the chain of knowledge linking Copernicus, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Galileo and Newton. But we might also note that for a thousand years before this Europeans had largely failed to build on the learning of classical Greece; it was the Arab scholars who picked this up and ran with it. Clearly the current systems of thought and belief, and the forms of social interaction, all play a part; these too are ways of meaning  – ways of exchanging meaning, since semiotic processes, like material processes, are essentially processes of exchange. And the semiotic systems that underlie them, like material systems, are both enabling and constraining, and show the same tendency to shift from one to the other over time. Ideologies which start by opening things out end up by closing things down. But I have been taking the notion of meaning, of semiotic systems-&processes, rather much for granted; and it needs to be problematized and discussed. Probably people of all cultures are aware of a non-material plane of existence, which has its own parameters and its own hierarchies of value. This awareness takes a wide variety of institutional forms, from esoteric mysticism at one end of the scale to a code of social morality at the other; and it is construed in terms of various dualities such as body and soul, or matter and mind, physical and mental; and at a more theoretical level in schemata such as materialism versus idealism. We can investigate this sensibility grammatically, in terms of the grammar’s theory of process types; when we examine these we find that many languages make a clear grammatical distinction between material and nonmaterial processes, the non-material being construed as processes of (typically human) consciousness – knowing, thinking, feeling – in which material entities are not accepted as the site where such a process takes place. There are often other differences as well: processes of consciousness have different relations to time, and different event structures, from processes of the material kind. Like almost all significant features of our everyday grammars, these distinctions lie well below the level of people’s conscious awareness. Matthiessen has argued convincingly that our familiar concepts like ‘mind’, and their learned counterparts like ‘cognition’, derive ultimately from this duality that is built into the grammar itself, and that is reinforced for us every time we talk or listen to language (Matthiessen, 1993, 1998). In other words, we are inclined to think in such dualities precisely because that is how our languages are organized. It made sense, in the grammar’s construction of experience, for material and semiotic events to be construed as two significantly different kinds of process.

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4 So it should come as no great surprise that we think in terms of such dualities: our grammar construes the duality for us. Such patterns are bound to remain subconscious; we could not talk if we were aware of them all the time. But if we listen to small children learning language – learning their first language, the mother tongue  – we can observe how they get constructed, and then buried from sight. Such a dichotomy began by being enabling: it helped us to interpret and so survive in our ecosocial environment. But it is also not surprising if it has now become a constraint. I have written elsewhere (1990 [2003]) about how this kind of dualistic picture, of a sharp division between conscious and nonconscious beings, is now conspiring to make us destroy that environment. And at the level of designed theory, many scientists and philosophers are finding this dualistic habit of thinking now quite seriously dysfunctional (Rose, 2003). But let me rather try to recontextualize it, in the terms of matter and meaning. I don’t think we can regard processes that take place in human consciousness as ‘information’; but I think we can conceptualize them all as processes of meaning. Not all processes of meaning end up as wording; that is how language organizes them, as lexicogrammar (words and structures); but some are organized in other ways, and others perhaps not organized at all.4 Some processes that we interpret as meaning are not, in fact, human: we recognize that other creatures also know how to mean, in their own terms; some direct their meanings at humans, like dogs and horses, and some, like birds and many orders of mammals, communicate with each other. But there are numerous types of human semiotic that are also not made of language: music, dance, the visual arts; ritual, and semi-ritualized forms of behaviour, like clothing; and images and graphic representations of all kinds – tables, charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, logos and so on. These human semiotics all depend on language to some degree or other, ranging from literature, which is made of language though having its own modes of meaning and values, to music, perhaps the least dependent of all but still ultimately reliant on the factor that those who practice it also traffic in language. But what links all these processes together, with each other and also with language, is that they all depend on physical processes in order to come into being. These may be sound waves travelling through some medium, usually air; or light waves together with the substances from which light is being reflected – building materials, paint, paper, computer screen and so on. Meaning relies on matter to make it accessible to a receiver; in linguistic terms, meaning depends

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on matter to realize it. A semiotic system is made of meaning; but to be realized, as process, it has to materialize – to become matter. In that respect, however, a semiotic system is no different from systems of other kinds: biological systems, and social systems. These are also constructed of matter; they are subject to the laws of physics, like everything else. But they raise an interesting question of ordering. A social system is also necessarily biological – but not the other way round. Let us start with a physical system. A physical system is just that: a physical system. What is systemized is matter itself, and the processes in which the system is realized are also material. But a biological system is more complex: it is both biological and physical – it is matter with the added component of life; and a social system is more complex still: it is physical, and biological, with the added component of social order, or value. So then a semiotic system is still one step further in complexity: it is physical, and biological, and social – and also semiotic: what is being systemized is meaning. In evolutionary terms, it is a system of the fourth order of complexity. Now it may be objected: is this really a further step? Surely there can be no social order without meaning? True. But in that sense, can there exist any biological order without meaning? or even physical order? I have said that meaning needs matter to realize it; perhaps we should cap this by saying that matter needs meaning to organize it. This would be saying that all organization, all departure from a purely random state, is a form of meaning. A physical system, then, is not just a physical system – or rather, it is not just made of matter; being a system, it is also made of meaning. This is a reasonable view, although it appears to extend the meaning of meaning beyond the notion of a semiotic system as I have been describing it. The trick lies in the word system, or in the slippage between system and phenomenal realm. If we characterize a system, say a social system, we are saying where the organization is taking place, or rather, perhaps, what it is that is being organized; and in that sense we can justifiably say that a language is a system of a fourth order of complexity. First, it is transmitted physically, by sound waves travelling through air; secondly, it is produced and received biologically, by the human brain and its associated organs of speech and hearing; thirdly, it is exchanged socially, in contexts set up and defined by the social structure; and fourthly, it is organized semiotically, as a system of meanings – a meaning potential, as I have called it. We cannot leave out any of these components, if we want an explanatory model of language; they are all involved in the semogenic enterprise. Not in an ideal harmony, of course; there are conflicts, disjunctions, compromises within and between them, as there are bound to be in any such

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complex organization; but every component is a necessary ingredient of the whole. Now it may be that all these different kinds of complexity, different forms of systemic order, will eventually be explained by the same methodology that gave birth to modern physics. Physical scientists can reasonably claim that the power of such reductionist strategy has already been demonstrated in the case of biological systems, via biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics (Wilson, 1998). But there is still a very long way to go. If we set up a continuum between the two phenomenal realms, matter and meaning, with the intermediate points defined according to the mix, then physical systems lie towards the ‘matter’ end: meaning comes in only when we define all systemic organization as meaning. Semiotic systems lie towards the other end, the ‘meaning’ end: matter comes in just in the processes whereby the meanings are realized. But there can be no ‘pure’ categories, at either end, because the two realms must always interpenetrate: as I put it just now, meaning needs matter to realize it, and matter needs meaning to organize it. In this perspective, language ultimately evolves out of the physical organization of matter: it is an indirect outcome of the big bang. Physical systems provide the prototype for exploring the complexity of our material environment, while semiotic systems provide the prototype for exploring the complexity of our other, non-material environment. The methodology for the first of these enterprises derives from physics. For the second, since language is the most complex semiotic system we know, probably the methodology will have to come from linguistics, with grammatics (the theory of grammar) in the role of mathematics. But in that case I think we need first to dispel some misconceptions about the nature of meaning in language.

5 There are three rather different assumptions that may be made about meaning in relation to language: different although also, I think, interrelated. The first is, that meaning is restricted to ideational meaning: it is ‘content’. The second is that meaning is a form of representation: it is ‘symbol’. The third is that all meaning can be measured: it is ‘information’. Let me try to say a word or two about each. The first assumption appears most extremely in the metaphor that is entrenched in the term content; this is related to – indeed is a component of – the ‘conduit metaphor’ whose pervasive effects were discussed in a famous article by Reddy (1979). If we discard that metaphor in favour of, say, meaning as reference,

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we need not deny that the realm of meaning may make reference to the realm of matter, provided we recognize that there is often no analogue in the real world: much science discourse, for example, is about virtual entities which exist only on the semiotic plane. The term ideational meaning is intended to overcome these constraints; and in doing so it helps to point up what is the real issue here, namely that meaning is not limited to construing. Meaning is also enacting. If I frown at you, or make a threatening gesture, we can of course describe these actions in representational terms – we can name them, as I have just done. But in themselves they are acts of meaning of a different kind, where meaning is not a mode of reflection but a mode of action. I can mean at you, so to speak. The problem with terms such as ‘emotional content’ and ‘self-expression’ is that the act of talking about our attitudes and our emotions transforms them from enactment into construal. But their mode of meaning is as semiotic process, not as content; this becomes clear when the emotions are verbalized, as in swearing at somebody, where the meaning is obviously not the experiential content of the wording. In the terms of our functional grammatics, meaning is not only ideational, it is also interpersonal. This is thus related to the second of the assumptions I referred to: that meaning can be understood as symbolic representation. We are accustomed to thinking of meaning in terms of symbols, of something that is ‘standing for’ something else, like the letter of an alphabet standing for a phoneme of the language; writing probably provided the unconscious model for this way of thinking. But in that case we have to locate that ‘something else’, the entity that must exist before anything can stand for it. As Lamb has pointed out, this becomes highly problematic when we try to account for meaning in neurocognitive terms. A semiotic system is best thought of not as a set of symbols but as a system of connections. Sydney Lamb has devoted a great deal of time and energy to developing and working out such a connectivist model, explaining language as relational networks in the human brain. The network representations of systemic functional linguistics, which are not of this kind (they are analytic tools, not refractions of the brain), are quite compatible with Lamb’s account, which embodies the paradigmatic dimension from Saussure and Hjelmslev instead of the flat, syntagmatic picture inherited from structuralism. Lamb’s model will serve as prototype for semiotic systems in general (1999, 2004). The third assumption was one I questioned earlier, namely that meaning can be measured in bytes – that it is just another name for ‘information’. I am not saying that no aspect of the meaning potential of language can be quantified. We can represent at least some of it in an assembly of system networks, which

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are networks of semiotic options. Imagine a network consisting of 14 binary options, all independent of each other and all equally probable; it is easy to calculate the information contained in such a network. Linguistic systems are not always binary; they do not operate independently – there is generally some partial association among them; and their terms are not always equally probable. Moreover there are many thousands of them at the stratum of grammar alone. But in principle it is possible to measure the meaning potential of a linguistic network, in terms of information and redundancy as defined in information theory (Shannon and Weaver, 1949  [1964]; Halliday and James, 1993). At present we are far from having the data that would enable us to do this. But even if we did, this would not exhaust the human potential for meaning. Systems of values, moral, aesthetic and so on, while they certainly constitute types of semiotic system, cannot be reduced to bytes of information. Like emotions, they can be glossed and discussed in language, in commonsense terms, and we can also construct abstract theories about them. But phenomena of any kind can be discussed, and theorized; and even if a scientific theory, which is a designed form of semiotic, can itself be quantified as information, that tells us nothing about the phenomenon which the theory is designed to explain. (It is by no means certain that the meaning contained in a theory is quantifiable anyway. Physicists like to maintain that their theories are, or should be, elegant; and I doubt whether elegance can readily be measured in bytes.) Of course there are semiotic systems that display some or all of these constraining features. One example would be the original system of lexigrams devised by Duane Rumbaugh for investigating the semiotic capabilities of bonobo apes, where each of a limited number of visual signs, all equally at risk, stood for a particular entity in the apes’ environment (Benson et al., 2002). But it would be a mistake, I think, to consider them as characteristic of the semiotic realm as a whole.

6 About 25 years ago we started being told that we were living in the ‘Information Age’. This was the new term in the series ‘Stone Age; Bronze Age; Iron Age; Machine Age’. It indicated yet another technical advance, but this time one of a rather more fundamental kind. If, as the name implied, the exchange of goods-&-services had been overtaken by the exchange of information as the primary mode of human interaction, this meant a massive shift away from

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the realm of matter towards the realm of meaning, at least for some (small, but powerful) minority of the human race. New problems were arising, and hence new strategies for dealing with them: storage and management of data, information protection and encryption, information overload and how to survive it – the semiotic analogue of surviving through a landslide or an avalanche. It was not long before information technology and information science found a place in research activities and in the curricula of educational institutions. The information machine was of course the computer, which extended human semiotic power in the way that tools and machinery had extended our material power. Like all machines, the computer is created by the human brain, as are the meanings which it processes and the meanings by which it is controlled. But we have as yet no clear concept of semiotic energy, covering brain power and computing power. This disjunction may be one reason why, as it turns out, we are not very good at exchanging information. Industrial accidents like those at nuclear power stations seem often to be caused by straightforward information failure: a critical message has not been delivered to where it was needed. Some five to ten generations ago my own forebears came out of the English countryside to work the new machinery, in mines and factories and shipyards; and they learned the new techniques extraordinarily quickly. Now their descendants have had to learn further skills, manipulating meaning instead of matter; they have no problem with the computer itself, which is just another machine, but find it harder to manage and evaluate its output. Information quality control is on the whole not notably successful.5 Robert Logan, following up the insights of Marshall McLuhan from some 40odd years ago (Logan, 2000; McLuhan, 1962, 1967), identifies six stages in the evolution of human semiosis: speech, writing, mathematics, science, computing and the internet. He refers to these as ‘modes of language’, with the internet figuring as ‘the sixth language’ in the title of the book. I would see them rather as semiotic modes, or modes of meaning, since their systemic relation to language is quite variable: writing is an extension of the functions of language, mathematics is an abstract tool deriving from language, and science is a form of knowledge construed in language; but that is not to reject Logan’s central thesis, which is that there has been a continuous process of the extension and elaboration of semiotic power throughout the known chapters of human history. Each new phase makes new demands on human capabilities and human institutions (see Logan, 2000: ch. 7); and also brings new maladies, as each technical advance (in McLuhan’s phrase) ‘numbs human awareness’: Logan cites ‘information-age

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maladies’ of ‘future shock, information overload, political gridlock, resurgent nationalism, and ethnic xenophobia’ (2000: 208). How much of these aspects of the late twentieth century’s ‘descent into barbarism’ (Hobsbawm, 1997: ch. 20) can be blamed specifically on information technology it is impossible to say; I imagine Logan would agree that, insofar as technology is implicated as a cause, it is the interaction between the material and the semiotic components of technology that is critical. For sure they both equally numb human awareness. What the information technology has done is that it has vastly increased the relative significance of semiotic power in the total organization and operation of the power structures in society. This was a central concern of Basil Bernstein in his profound theoretical studies in sociology and education. Bernstein distinguished control over physical resources (the field of production) from control over discursive resources (the field of symbolic control): Agents of symbolic control could be said to control discursive codes, whereas agents of production (circulation and exchange) dominate production codes. . . . I was distinguishing between a complex division of labour of symbolic control and a complex division of labour in the economic field. Both divisions and their complexities were the products of new technologies of the twentieth century relayed by the educational system. (2000: 110)

Elsewhere he comments that his conception of the pedagogization of knowledge is ‘part of a more general theory of symbolic control’ (2000: 189). Power, in the information age, must always include semiotic power: control not just of the organs that disseminate the discourse (the mass media) but also of the discourse itself, the meanings that are engendered and exchanged. Making reference to Bernstein’s work, Hasan (2004) has suggested that the only form of resistance to this semiotic aggression lies in developing a different kind of literacy: a ‘reflection literacy’ which provides the receivers with the metasemiotic resources to remove the wool that is all the time being pulled over their eyes. Otherwise, the democratic forces of the internet may not be enough to prevent ‘information’ turning into a semiotic weapon of mass destruction.

7 At about the same time – 25 years ago – it became fashionable among linguists to replace the term semantic, which means ‘meaning as made in language,

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linguistic meaning’ (as distinct from semiotic, which means meaning of all kinds), by the term cognitive, which had an interdisciplinary flavour and was more likely to bring in research grants. Since mainstream formal linguistics had either excluded meaning altogether or reduced it to a secondary commentary on syntax, cognitive linguistics came to be used to signal that meaning was being brought back on to centre stage. This was a pity, as Lamb had been using the term since 1971 as that which ‘attempts to model the information system that is present in the mind of the typical . . . individual’ (2004: 418) – as what he later (e.g. 1999) named ‘neurocognitive’ in order to make his own earlier usage clear. But it was a pity in another sense also, in that it denied the presence of a semantic stratum in the organization of language itself. In other words, this construct reinforces the structuralist view that language stops at the wording; meaning is brought in (as ‘cognition’) in order to explain the wording, but it is located in some other quarter of the mind. This not only adds unnecessary complication to an overall model of language, as Matthiessen and I pointed out (1999), but it fails to distinguish between meaning as construed in language and meaning as a property of other semiotic systems, making it harder to conceptualize the semiotic as a whole. Semiotic systems are not like physical systems. Those of us who are not scientists or philosophers are accustomed to leaving it to the natural scientists to explore the essential unity of human knowledge: to scholars like Edward Wilson, whose book Consilience (1998) is a powerful exposition of this theme. Much of what Wilson says I accept; but he is inclined to suppose that the physical interpretation of phenomena, so successful in giving us a deep insight into the material world, provides the model for the whole of human understanding. To the extent that systems of all kinds are grounded in material substance, this is unproblematic: meaning is an activity of the brain, and the brain can be understood in terms of physical and biochemical processes. The ‘mind’ can be understood, with Susan Greenfield (2000), as ‘personalised brain’, the brain as it develops in the context of each individual’s unique pattern of experience. At the same time, we do inhabit a plane of reality other than the material; and this is a different story. The rest of us – even grammarians! – should also claim the right (or rather, accept the duty) to survey the general field of human knowledge, to bring a perspective which is complementary to that of a physicist, a chemist or a biologist. There is a value in thinking semiotically about phenomena of every kind, and so ‘thickening’, adding new dimensions to, our understanding. This

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complementary perspective is that of the study of meaning (of ‘semiotics’ in its original, pre-postmodern sense). Within this non-material, semiotic realm, the prototypical phenomenon is language. The powerhouse of a language is its grammar (more accurately, its lexicogrammar, the unified stratum of syntax and vocabulary); so thinking about meaning means thinking grammatically. As I put it earlier, grammatics – the theory of grammar – is the mathematics of a general theory of meaning. Although semiotic systems are not like physical systems, meaning does involve an expenditure of energy; but it is energy of a different kind, namely grammatical energy. For example, there is extra grammatical energy involved in creating metaphor, which is a cross-coupling between two strata, or levels of organization in language, the semantics and the lexicogrammar. Metaphor is an essential ingredient in much of our highly valued discourse: poets depend on it, as we know – but so do scientists, though theirs is metaphor of a different kind, metaphors that are made with structures and word classes rather than with individual words (Halliday, 1998b [2004]). Poets and scientists present (at least so we assume) different constructions of reality; but their semogenic strategies are related, and both take up considerable grammatical energy.

8 Meanwhile however a different motif is emerging, that of information as the ultimate foundation of matter. This is associated particularly with the work of the great physicist John Wheeler; von Baeyer quotes the last of five RBQs (Really Big Questions) that Wheeler identified, and which were brought up at his ninetieth birthday symposium: ‘The suggestion is that the material world – the IT  – is wholly or in part constructed from information  – the BIT’ (von Baeyer, 2003: 5 xi). Information has been gradually taking over in the discourse of physics for many decades, as a necessary element in quantum thinking; as an outsider, trying to understand what I read (e.g. David Layzer’s Cosmogenesis, 1990), I had come to assume that the elementary quantum particles must belong to a moment in time before matter and meaning were differentiated (rather like the moment in the life of a newborn baby, whose first actions are likewise undifferentiated). This ‘information’, first expounded by Claude Shannon half a century ago (Shannon and Weaver, 1949 [1964]), is clearly separated from ‘meaning’: information

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is measurable, whereas meaning is not. With reference to the fourth RBQ, ‘What makes meaning?’ von Baeyer comments (2003):6 The fourth question, ‘What makes meaning?’ refers to the thorny philosophical problem of defining the concept of meaning. At the same time it recalls the frustration of engineers who have at their disposal a variety of methods for measuring the amount of information in a message, but none to deal with its meaning.

They appear to come together in the concept of ‘total information’, which von Baeyer introduces in the final chapter, ascribed to Zeilinger and Brukner (von Baeyer, 2003: 232–3): ‘Total information’ turns out to be the quantum-mechanical implementation of ‘information content’.. . . Philosophers call it ‘semantic information content’, because it depends on the actual meaning of the message, which Shannon so pointedly ignored. The connection with meaning is made via the element of surprise.

And ‘surprise’ then turns out to be measurable, still in bits; the ‘bit’ being redefined as ‘the fundamental quantum of human knowledge’ (2003: 234). At that point I shall stop: since I have only just got hold of von Baeyer’s book, and read it only spottily, I have hardly begun to access its semantic information content. As a grammarian, I am accustomed to thinking in complementarities: the quantum theory’s ‘realisation that the blending of mutually contradictory attributes is the normal state of affairs among atomic systems’ (von Baeyer, 2003: 183) is a useful strategy for understanding grammatical systems also. Even ‘the square root of not’ (2003: 189) might be helpful, when we analyse how polarity is construed in everyday language. If matter is not just organized by information but actually made out of information, meaning becomes the unmarked member of the pair: matter is a special case of meaning, rather than (as in our usual way of thinking) the other way round. And that is a satisfying conclusion for a grammarian.

9 But let me return finally to happenings on a superatomic, human scale. My concern has been with the two phenomenal realms which we inhabit, and with the nature of the interpenetration between them. I took the concept of ‘history’

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as a point of entry. Given any recognized, or recognizable, historical scenario, what is the relationship between the events and conditions on the material plane, on the one hand, and those on the semiotic plane, on the other? Here is a passage from Christopher Hill’s writings about the English revolution (1975: 383–4): Again and again in this book we have noticed the seventeenth-century radicals shooting ahead of the technical possibilities of their age. Later Biblical scholarship and anthropology make better sense than they could of the mythological approach to the Bible; cheap and easily available contraceptive devices make better sense of free love. Modern physics and chemistry are catching up with the dialectical element in their thought; modern anthropology is a science of society which does not rely on the stars, modern theories of painless childbirth make no theological assumptions about the Fall of Man. The concept of evolution makes it possible to conceive of a universe with no external first cause. The technological possibilities may now exist even for a community in which the creation of unemployment need not be regarded as a principal task of government, and in which ‘the beauty of the commonwealth’ could take precedence over private profit, national power or even the G.N.P. My object is not to patronize the radicals by patting them on the head as ‘in advance of their time’ – that tired cliché of the lazy historian. In some ways they are in advance of ours. But their insights, their poetic insights, are what seem to me to make them worth studying today.

We cannot, unfortunately, listen in to the conversations of those seventeenthcentury radicals, nor even directly to their political speeches and their sermons. But at least some portion of their meaning is accessible to us, through the wordings that were written down and survived for future generations. Discourses of this kind make it possible to write the history of meaning, as it matches – and mismatches – what is known about the history of doing. A history of meaning has both a qualitative and a quantitative aspect. Qualitatively, there will be certain key discourses which carry especial value, either intrinsically, because they somehow distil the semiotic essence of their moment in space-time, or extrinsically because they played a critical part in the ongoing material events (Martin, 1999; Butt et al., 2004). Quantitatively, on the other hand, dominant semiotic motifs emerge more or less gradually over time; to access and evaluate these one needs a corpus of contextualized discourses that can be examined and interpreted as a whole (see e.g. Fairclough, 2000b). (On the conjunction between qualitative – ‘text-based’ – and quantitative – ‘corpusbased’ – investigation of discourse, see Thompson and Hunston, 2004.)

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The title of this new journal raises the issue of linguistics in relation to the human sciences, and it seems to me that linguistics faces three demands in such a context. It has to serve as means, as model and as metaphor. It is a means, to the extent that it provides a theory of language by reference to which instances of discourse can be explained and evaluated. We usually do not need linguistic theory in order to make sense of the text, provided it is in a language that we know. I have taken history as my ‘text’, so let me borrow one of Christopher Hill’s seventeenth-century examples (Hill, 1969: 135): when we read the popular verse: The law locks up the man or woman That steals the goose from off the common; But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose.

we have no difficulty either in conning it or in relating it along various dimensions to its historical background, both semiotic and material. But there are many levels of meaning in language, and these may call for specialized techniques and strategies; for example, Matthiessen’s ‘text profiling’ showing semantic biases in the selection of options across various text types, or Hasan’s semantic networks bringing out the different ‘coding orientations’ of families with different social profiles (Hasan, 1992a, 1992b; Matthiessen, 1999, 2004a). Martin and Wodak 2003)  presents detailed exemplars of linguistic approaches to meaning in historical discourse; see especially Martin’s chapter ‘Making History: Grammar for Interpretation’.7 Linguistics needs also to provide a model. Language can be seen as the prototype of a semiotic system; hence a theory which is designed to represent the multidimensional ‘architecture’ of language (Matthiessen, 2003) should be ‘thick’ enough, and rich enough, to offer insight into other semiotic systems. Not that all vectors of language are going to be found in the same interrelations in all other such systems  – they clearly are not; but a theoretical account of language would serve as a conceptual tool with which to explore other forms of human semiosis, for example, images (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996), the visual arts (O’Toole, 1994) and music (McDonald, 2005). Verbal art presents a special challenge, since, as noted earlier, it is language operating with distinct value systems and distinct levels of interpretation (Hasan, 1985b [1989]; Butt, 1984, 1988; Thibault, 1991b). Every theory is a metaphor for what it is theorizing; linguistics, as has often been pointed out, has the special property that, whereas in other domains the

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theory consists of language but the object does not, in the case of linguistics both theory and object consist of language. Hence linguistics shares many of the properties that characterize language itself (cf. Halliday, 1997 [2003]). In more general terms, language theorizes the human condition by providing a semiotic trajectory between the human organism and its ecosocial environment: between the environment of material and social processes at one end and the meaningmaking organs of speech and hearing at the other (Thibault, 2004). Linguistics, in its turn, theorizes that trajectory: it construes meanings to explain the processes of meaning. Thus as well as providing a metaphor for language, at another level linguistics stands as metaphor for the whole of meaning as theorizing – for the ability of the semiotic realm to construe itself into successive planes of virtual reality, in the (so far) unremitting human effort to understand. Whatever is not matter, is meaning. All the phenomena of human consciousness – those that are construed by the grammar as processes of sensing (in English, verbs like think, believe, know, like, hope, want, fear, see, hear and their nouns thought, idea, belief, knowledge, love and so on, as well as the general term mean(ing) itself) – belong to the non-material realm that we inhabit, for which the unifying concept is that of semiosis. Like processes of saying, to which they are closely agnate, they can project: they contain a semantic feature ‘mean’, and they are treated by the grammar as semogenic – they create meaning, and ascribe it to a source, as in we all believe the sun will rise tomorrow. Part of our experience is the experience of meaning; each language has its way of transforming the experience of meaning into meaning. It seems that meaning was how the world began, as quanta (bits, or ‘qubits’) of information; and that these remain the ultimate constituents of matter. As matter leads on to life, and then blood, and warm blood, and brains, meaning turns up again at a higher level, this time as qualia rather than (just) quanta. The science of meaning of this kind – meaning in the biological, and eventually the human, sphere – is semiotics; since language is the leading edge of meaning, the leading edge of semiotics is linguistics. If information is indeed the basic stuff of the universe, then physics will turn out to be one kind of linguistics, after all.

Notes 1 Cf. Hobsbawm, 1997: p. 168: ‘There can be no legitimate doubt that in the course of the past 200 years the material conditions of the population in the “advanced” countries of the world have, on average, substantially improved. The fact cannot

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be seriously disputed . . . and insofar as there are historical theories resting on the assumption that it has not taken place, such theories are wrong.’ The actual situation is more complicated – and more interesting – than this simple formulation allows for. It is true that the language has no critical effect (though it might influence the order in which phenomena come to be investigated). But the script may have an effect that is more long-lasting. When the Phoenicians took over the Egyptian charactery, they found it unsuitable for their (Semitic) language, and developed it into a syllabary; and when the Greeks took over that, they found it unsuitable for their (Indo-European) language and developed it into an alphabet. Now, a letter is patently a symbol; so the idea of using it to stand for something else, such as a number, or a formal relation, comes rather easily. But a character is not obviously a symbol; it shouts its meaning at you, and the Chinese (for whose language a charactery – a morphemic script – is very well suited) never did detach the character from its meaning (its morpheme) and use it as a purely abstract symbol. Thus both their mathematics and their linguistics evolved without the use of symbols (Tong, 1999; Halliday, 1981). Even when the characters were used to transcribe other languages, for example, in the Sino­Mongolian script of CC13–14, they were never treated as purely arbitrary phonetic symbols; the number of characters in Sino-Mongolian writing was about twice the number of distinct syllables represented. So it is possible that the way Chinese science evolved, with very little use of symbolization, was related to the nature of Chinese writing; likewise the fact that the Greeks, the Indians and later the Arabs did introduce symbols into their forms of organized knowledge was related to the fact that their writing systems already depended on the arbitrary nature of the written symbol. More accurately, the second is the ideational, which includes a logical component that is in complementary relation with the experiential, the two together constituting the resources of ‘construal’, the construction of reality (Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999). And meanings that are ‘worded’ may not be externalized; they may remain as silent verbalizations. These are not too difficult to access if required (as when one is composing a written text). Much more ineffable are the thoughts ‘that lie too deep for words’ – but these too are unambiguously processes of meaning. The problem with the exchange of information seems to be that both the process of exchange and the commodity being exchanged are semiotic; whereas in the exchange of goods and services, the process is semiotic but the commodity is material. I noted this first when studying children’s language development: goods and services are exchanged very early, in the protolanguage phase (in infancy), but exchanging information – telling someone of an experience that you know they have not shared with you – is something that develops only some way in to the learning of the mother tongue. (The exchange of goods and services need not be accompanied

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by wording – though with human beings it usually is; but it does involve a sequence of acts of meaning.) See Halliday (1975 [2004]). 6 And to me it recalls the frustration of early computer engineers when they discovered that, while they had a variety of methods for looking up words and morphemes in a dictionary, they had no success at all with machine translation. 7 Reading the well-informed and scholarly accounts of ‘memories’ of the Second World War in the European Review (11.4, October 2003), under the heading ‘Focus: history and memory’, I felt how valuable it would be to be able to undertake a linguistic analysis of some of the discourses concerned.

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Mountains of the Word: Construing the Architecture of Nature into Meaning (2009)

1 It is a great pleasure to be here with you, at the University of Brawijaya, and I would like to thank Dr Tomasowa and her colleagues very warmly for inviting me to take part in this conference. I found your conference title exciting – but also challenging. When I read the first part, ‘The Language of Space, Light and Shadow’, I felt straightaway that I might have something to contribute. But the second part, ‘language and architecture systemically entwined’, set me a problem. I know very little about architecture; the person who had entwined it systemically with language was my good friend Michael O’Toole, whose book The Language of Displayed Art was and still is the major source of insight into this connection. On the other hand I do know a little about mountains, which have been called ‘the architecture of nature’; mountains too are fashioned out of space, light and shadow, and I would only be slightly cheating if I interpreted ‘the language of ’ space, light and shadow as the discourses with which space, light and shadow (as well as other features of mountains) are construed in natural language. But I should then explain the wording of my title, ‘mountains of the word’. There are two echoes here. One is the title of Nicholas Ostler’s 2005 book Empires of the Word, subtitled A Language History of the World. My paper is perhaps a small fragment of a language history of mountains. But the more substantial link is with Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, published in 2003, where (to quote from the publishers’ blurb) he seeks to answer the question ‘How have mountains  – which are, after all, nothing but First presented in Indonesian International Systemic Congress, The University of Brawijaya, Malang, East Java, 5–7 December 2009.

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lumps of rock and ice – come to exert such a strange and sometimes fatal hold on the human imagination?’ This is, of course, a modern European perspective, so we need to be aware of the broader context of mountains, and of human imagination, around the world. But I want to consider the language people use in talking, and especially in writing, about mountains; so I shall take my texts from English (though occasionally in translation from another language), and I shall refer only indirectly to other, non-European traditions.

2 I grew up in the north of England, in a family who loved mountains and went out walking among the hills whenever we could. My favourite reading in my mid-teens was books by mountaineers narrating their experiences. Here is a passage by one of the best writers, W. C. Slingsby, taken from his account of one of his climbs in Norway; he and his guide Johannes Vigdal are crossing the Tunsbergdalsbrae glacier: On either side there are fine precipices, and on the west is a narrow cul-de-sac of rock fringed with ice. At 6.15 we enjoyed an alpine sunrise, the beauty of which cannot be realised until seen. While it is yet twilight, the sun suddenly touches the snowy crown of the highest peak with a soft rose colour, which insensibly spreads down the mountain, and as it does so the colour of the snow passes through the softest gradations and most delicate tints to pure glistening white at last. Each peak in order of height receives the gladdening rays, and whilst the stars fade one by one away, bright daylight takes the place of brilliant starlight, and warmth often replaces bitter cold. (Slingsby, 1941: 141)

The climb took place on Sunday 14 August 1881. I will come back to this text later; here let me just note than narratives of climbs are frequently suspended to make room for descriptive passages of this kind. And here the description, in its turn, becomes a narrative, as shadow turns to light in the rising sun. But let me go back to my early childhood, with its rich store of traditional songs and rhymes (perhaps no longer passed on to children in the electronic world of today?) Before we were 2 years old, we learnt about Jack and Jill (text 1): Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after.

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Hills could be dangerous places: where you go up, you may fall down, and possibly break your bones. In the nineteenth century, an age of optimism, they added another verse, to give it a happy ending; but it was not convincing. Our Yorkshire hills, however, were largely friendly; in many rhymes and verses you ‘roamed o’er hill and dale’ (over hills and valleys – the valleys were called ‘dales’, and the hills in fact were known as ‘fells’); and they alternated as the countryside went up and down by turns: ‘up hill and down dale’ was another common narrative phrase. But there was a more threatening aspect, which we came across in fairy stories and in some of our early children’s literature, such as this verse by the poet Walter de la Mare (text 2): Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren’t go a-hunting For fear of little men.

This is Scotland, where the hills become mountains and the valleys are called glens. They are still inviting – ‘airy’ and ‘rushy’ are pleasing qualities; but whereas the fells, though craggy, are gentle, curving and wavelike, mountains are steep, protruding and irregular – and also higher. You ‘go up’ or ‘walk up’ a hill; you have to ‘climb’ a mountain. And mountains, up in the air, and glens, down among the reed-beds, may both harbour alien life forms. So, in our childhood texts, mountains were construed in terms of: minor processes material processes mental processes entities

up down over fall tumble break (bones) dare fear mountain, hill valley dales fells

– where up, down and over are both motion and rest: you go (walk, climb) up the mountain (motion), but you may also live up the mountain (rest); compare walk over the fells, lives over the hill. They are places to be, as well as to go to (and come back from). One final example here, from one of the first ‘grown-up’ poems you meet in school, by William Wordsworth (text 3): I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, . . .

Hills may be high, but clouds are higher still – they are ‘on high’, floating over the tops of the hills.

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Of course by this time you have a rich and varied experience of hills and mountains, both semiotically and materially: both as meanings construed in language, in fact and fiction, and as sensible objects, seen, heard, touched, even smelt and tasted. And here each one of us has a different history of personal experiences. For me the experience of hills and mountains was unfailingly positive. They were places of visual beauty: blue sky, green grass, rocks of white limestone or dark millstone grit; and clouds, fluffy billowing white or deep sombre grey, or else as a dense pale damp mist with myself shrouded in the middle of it; and always a source of delight and general well-being. But for others, mountains may be ‘nothing but lumps of rock and ice’; or they may even be felt as rather threatening and hostile.

3 Not so long ago, among the earliest cultivators and herdsmen, mountains were the mansions of the gods, the homes of spirits, sources of supernatural power. Particularly mountains that stood out by themselves, away from any of the main ranges, like Olympus, Zaphon (present-day Jebel el-Agra, home of the ancient Phoenician god Ba’al) or Fujiyama; but also those with other distinctive features, such as being the source of diverging rivers. Burkhan Khaldun, the sacred mountain of the Mongols, was the source of three rivers, the Onon, the Kerlen and the Tuul; the ‘Secret History of the Mongols’ tells how the young Temüjin, who later became Genghis Khan, the first ruler of all the Mongol peoples, used to retreat to this mountain to offer thanks, to meditate, and to seek guidance for his military exploits. And really high mountains – whether or not because of the effect of their thinner air on the human brain – have always been found to be conducive to mystical experiences. The mountain gods could of course dole out punishments for those who desecrated their abode: Michael Palin records an occasion on his attempt to reach Annapurna, in Nepal, when his Nepali Sherpa guide, Wongchu, explained why so many climbers had died on the slopes of the mountain: they had offended the mountain gods by their behaviour. It is perhaps not surprising that the frightening creatures who lived on, or in, the mountains, like the trolls of northern Norway, should have retained their place in human imagination longer than most other mythological beings. Mountains are unpredictable, and human beings need explanations for random-seeming events like landslides and avalanches and sudden extremes of weather. Such unforeseen events are

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dangerous, and can even be fatal. But mountains themselves were generally accepted as part of the natural order; the creator had decreed them, along with the ocean and the sky, and no further explanation was called for. There was however one strand in the Graeco-Christian tradition which saw mountains in a different light (Palin, 2005: 128). The (originally Greek) notion of perfection appeared in Christian theology, where it applied to God, and to all God’s works. A sphere, for example, was a perfect shape. The earth was known to be spherical; so, in a Christian view, as the centrepiece of God’s creation, the earth ought to have been a perfect sphere, rather than being disfigured by outcroppings of jagged mountains. In the late 1600s Thomas Burnet, an English cleric and Cambridge Fellow, travelled several times across the mountains of the Alps; he was overawed by their majesty and power, but also dismayed by their disorder and confusion. This was a time of intense scientific activity in Europe, when all the traditional certainties were being questioned, including the Biblical story of the creation; Burnet thought that the narrative in the Book of Genesis should be read as a metaphorical account, and he put forward his own ideas about how mountains were formed. They arose, he said, from cracking in the smooth surface of the earth, so that water from the interior gushed up through the cracks; parts of the crust collapsed, and what remained when the waters subsided was a landscape filled with huge precipices and monstrous crags (Lukin and Webster, 2005: 438–9). Burnet’s ideas were controversial, because he asserted that mountains had a history, in real time, thus opening the door to the first of the evolutionary sciences, geology. But he also altered the whole idea of mountains: they became a presence, even for those who would never see a mountain, and they possessed characteristics of their own: they were majestic and awe-inspiring, but at the same time they aroused feelings of fear and horror. Macfarlane writes of him: Burnet saw and communicated majesty in mountainous scenery, and in so doing laid the groundwork for a wholly new way of feeling about mountains. (Macfarlane, 2003: 29)

This mixed emotion of admiration and fear, described by John Dennis, in 1688, as ‘delightful horror and terrible joy’, also in a response to mountain scenery, became familiar in western Europe in the eighteenth century, and known as the ‘Sublime’. The term ‘Sublime’ came from the Latin translation of a work by an early Greek rhetorician Longinus, who had applied it to language, using the term to denote the impact produced on the reader by great literature. The philosopher Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the

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Sublime and Beautiful (1757), explained the sublime as pleasure that is aroused by a sense of grandeur and of force, often accompanied by feelings of horror and even pain. It became a keynote of the Romantic movement, where its association with mountains was further reinforced by the English ‘Lakes’ poets, especially Wordsworth  – who also recorded the excitement engendered by the start of the French revolution, before the ‘Terror’ had taken over. The lines that follow were written in 1791, in Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude, subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind (Book 6, lines 340–2 and 525–34) (text 4): But Europe at that time was filled with joy, France standing on the top of golden hours, and human nature seeming born again. . . . That very day, from a bare ridge we also first beheld Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved To have a soulless image on the eye which had usurped upon a living thought That never more could be. The wondrous Vale of Chamouny stretched far below, and soon with its dumb cataracts, and streams of ice, a motionless array of mighty waves, five rivers broad and vast, made rich amends, and reconciled us to realities.

Here thrilled with joy is a clear expression of the Sublime, as attained on the top of golden hours – in other words, at a summit in time. Crossing the Alps, they have attained at least a sight of a summit in space – the summit of Mont Blanc, the top of Europe. But here contradictions arise. For Wordsworth it is the inner voice, the imagination, that is the source of the emotions – the living thought, rather than the soulless image; the view itself is lifeless, and actually usurps  – takes over and destroys – the imagined spectacle. This is a familiar experience; now that I have seen this town, and your university, I can no longer recall what I imagined they were going to look like. But where did Wordsworth’s living thought originate? – either in eighteenth-century paintings of mountain scenes, but these are just other visual images, or in language, all that Wordsworth had heard and read about mountains since his early childhood. But now he has become reconciled . . . to realities through seeing the wondrous Vale of Chamouny (Chamonix, in your modern atlas) – and through his own skill at construing it in language. The language, the lexical items configured into nominal groups, construe the scene through three semantic contradictions:

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dumb cataracts, streams of ice and motionless waves. Cataracts are not dumb, they’re very noisy; ice does not stream, it is totally solid; waves are not motionless, they consist of nothing else but movement. The grammar presents these contradictions as features or properties of the vale (with its . . .), which have functioned as Agent in a mental process of emotion in which we are the Sensers (which . . . reconciled us to realities).

4 And that is what mountains had become, by Wordsworth’s time: realities, in a down-to-earth nineteenth-century view – especially in Britain, which was in the middle of the ‘industrial revolution’ where all human experience was construed in material form. At the beginning of the new century, however, they were still mainly to be ‘toured’ – observed from a safe and comfortable distance, and then perhaps written about. Later on Wordsworth was to read Thomas Wilkinson’s Tours to the British Mountains, published in 1824; we know this because it inspired his well-known poem The Solitary Reaper. But being part of the landscape of the industrial revolution had another, more devastating consequence: mountains could be mined. They had always been quarried, for building materials; but usually at a slow rate over long periods of time, and only on their lower slopes. Now mountains were found to contain large deposits of valuable minerals, and these could be rapidly extracted by machines, backed up with explosive devices. These processes were not without their dangers; and, since the mountains were often in very remote localities, the old, unseen inhabitants might still be lurking around. George Borrow, tramping on foot throughout Wales in the 1850s, records a conversation he had with a miner who was working in a high-country lead mine (n.d., p. 441) (text 5): ‘Do you like the life of a miner?’ said I. ‘Very much’, said he, ‘and should like it more, but for the noises of the hill’. ‘Do you mean the powder blasts?’ said I. ‘Oh, no!’ said he; ‘I care nothing for them; I mean the noises made by the spirits of the hill in the mine.’

But by this time, mountains had already started to be climbed. From about the 1840s mountain climbing became a recognized form of recreation, now known as ‘mountaineering’. The original ‘mountaineers’ were, of course, people who lived among the mountains; among these it was the Swiss, or those among them

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who had grown up and made their livelihood in the high mountains, and were extremely skilful climbers, who began retraining themselves as mountain guides for the new arrivals who took up climbing as a sport. Most prominent among these were the British, a number of whom became very competent mountaineers; they studied the necessary techniques, devised appropriate forms of clothing, and designed items of equipment that they could carry and put to use when needed, which might be in a hurry, to cope with a sudden challenge. Some time in the 1850s they formed the British Alpine Club; some of the members, as well as being tough and agile climbers, were also, fortunately for us, talented writers. Geoffrey Winthrop Young, introducing the first volume of Blackwell’s Mountaineering Library in 1936, wrote that while To Rousseau principally we owe the articulate revelation of the beauty of mountains . . . the first book to popularise mountain climbing (was) Whymper’s Scrambles in the Alps, . . . (which) combined an expression of the new ‘seeing’ of mountains, as in themselves beautiful, with some of the first great stories of their novel adventure. (Winthrop Young, Introduction to Stephen, 1936: ix)

The sense of adventure is already made explicit in Leslie Stephen’s title, in his use of the term playground, with its connotations of leisure and fun. But the book itself, though it now appears as a rather self-consciously ‘literary’ work, did the most to establish the pattern of combining description with narrative which became the hallmark of mountaineering writing. I will give an example of Stephen’s writing below. Let me first come back to the ‘sunrise’ passage from Slingsby that I cited earlier (p. 2). Here the simple past tense of narrative is succeeded by the simple present of description, even though the description itself is taking the form of a narrative, of light that is moving and changing quality. This is construed lexicogrammatically as an interaction between the mountain and the source of the light: the sun touches the crown of the peak the colour spreads down the mountain each peak receives the gladdening rays

interspersed with changes in the quality of the light itself: a soft colour passes (by soft gradations via delicate tints) to glistening white bright daylight takes the place (as stars fade away) of brilliant starlight

– each with an Epithet (gladdening, soft, delicate, bright, brilliant) which steadily grows more intense. With the last, however, the order changes: bright daylight, its presence now established, becomes the Given, and the starlight, while ‘given’

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in the actual sequence of events, becomes the New, its Epithet brilliant reminding us that here in the high mountain air the night is itself ablaze with light. Here for comparison is a passage from Leslie Stephen (1936: 21–2) (text 6): As we reached our burrow, we were gratified with one of the most glorious sights of the mountains. A huge cloud, which looked at least as lofty as the Eiger, rested with one extremity of its base on the Eiger, and the other on the Mettenberg, shooting its white pinnacles high up into the sunshine above. Through the mighty arched gateway thus formed, we could see far over the successive ranges of inferior mountains, standing like flat shades one behind another. The lower slopes of the Hettenberg glowed with a deep blood-red, and the more distant hills passed through every shade of blue, purple and rose-coloured hues into the faint blue of the distant Jura, with one gleam of green sky beyond. In the midst of the hills the Lake of Thun lay, shining like gold. A few peals of thunder echoed along the glacier valley, telling us of the storm that was raging over Grindelwald.

Here the writer has retained the narrative past tense, locating the scene in the sequence of the day’s events (the paragraph both begins and ends with us). The thematic progression, once the cloud has been introduced, is spatial: through the mighty arched gateway thus formed, the lower slopes of the Mettenberg, in the midst of the hills; these form a coherent sequence, each being linked by cohesion to the location before. As in the Slingsby extract, light is construed as a progression of different colours, though here they are simultaneous, tracing their course through space rather than through time. Mountains typically appear to us as black and white – rocks alternating with snow and ice; so extremes of dark and light colour are not usually remarked on, other than in the description of clouds. Even ice, if its colour is mentioned, is likely to be construed as blue, as in this passage from Alfred Wills (1937: 113) (text 7): The appearances presented by some of the blocks of ice and dark, deep blue crevasses of the higher parts of the Strahlhorn, which were still in the shade, or just tipped with a narrow band of glistening sunlight, was of extraordinary wildness and beauty. Many of the crevasses on the glacier we were ascending were also of wonderful beauty; we strayed out of our way to gaze into some of them, which were only to be approached with caution, as the ice nearly met on either side, and disclosed beneath dark blue caverns, of fabulous depth, with long pendants of lustrous ice fringing the sides, and hanging in fantastic groups from the translucent roof. As the sun shone down into some of them, or forced his way, in delicate floods of pale green light, through the overhanging domes of ice, the scene seemed to belong rather to fairyland than to reality.

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What does tend to be expressed ‘in black and white’ – that is, in terms of extreme values  – is the experience of beauty. With the mountaineers this is almost bound to be positive, as in the three passages just cited. George Borrow, whose conversation with the miner I quoted above, was not a mountaineer but a tireless traveller, if possible on foot and in remote localities; in 1854 he walked around the Welsh countryside for more than four months, and commented frequently on the beauty of the hills and mountains. But unlike the mountaineers he also acknowledges its opposite, finding some prospects notably unattractive. In the following passage he builds up a contrast between the two (Borrow, n.d.: 517– 18) (text 8): I went on – desolate hills rose in the east, the way I was going, but on the south were beautiful hillocks adorned with trees and hedgerows. I was soon amongst the desolate hills, which then looked more desolate than they did at a distance. They were of a wretched russet colour, and exhibited no other signs of life and cultivation than here and there a miserable field and vile-looking hovel; and if there was here nothing to cheer the eye there was also nothing to cheer the ear. There were no songs of birds, no voices of rills; the only sound I heard was the lowing of a wretched bullock from a far-off slope. I went on slowly and heavily; at length I got to the top of this wretched range – then what a sudden change! Beautiful hills in the far east, a fair valley below me, and groves and woods on each side of the road which led down to it. The sight filled my veins with fresh life, and I descended this side of the hill as merrily as I had come up the other side despondingly.

It seems as if Borrow, who was a highly articulate and experienced travel writer, and spoke several languages fluently including Welsh, found himself ‘at a loss for words’ when he is being disparaging: the word desolate occurs three times, the word wretched three times, and most of the work is done in the grammar, by the selection of negatives: no other signs of life and cultivation, nothing to cheer the eye, nothing to cheer the ear, no songs of birds, no voices of rills. Even the colour word russet, which is at least neutral and to me rather positive in its associations, is here recast as a derogatory term in being submodified by the word wretched. But lexical items do not function by themselves; they are brought to life, and validated, by the grammar. This passage is framed by material process clauses of motion in space, with Actor I: I went on, I got to the top, I descended; the first and third mark the opening and the conclusion, while the second heralds the transition from ugliness to beauty. The first movement, ‘up hill in ugliness’, construes the experience in two sequences of four clauses each, the first sequence concerned with seeing, the second with hearing; each sequence consists of three

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existential clauses, together with a fourth as keynote, indicating which of the senses is affected; this keynote clause comes at the beginning of the first sequence (which then looked more desolate) but at the end of the second (the only sound I heard was). The second movement, ‘down hill in beauty’, is notably different; it consists of one exclamative and three minor clauses, each of the latter made up of one nominal group with a locative Qualifier delimiting the surrounding space. These are then distilled into a nominalization the sight, as Actor in a material process filled my veins – a lexicogrammatical metaphor for an agentive ascriptive ‘caused me to feel invigorated’. Given this structure, the very first clause complex, ending with trees and hedgerows, turns out to have been functioning as a kind of overture, anticipating the two motifs to come, again with an I clause (I was soon amongst . . .) serving as transition. This framing of a descriptive passage with moments of personal narrative is frequently found in accounts of moving through three-dimensioned space.

5 So how are mountains construed as phenomena in space? The short answer is: by climbing them – and note that, for a mountaineer, ‘climbing a mountain’ means climbing to the summit; compare the wording ‘this mountain has never been climbed’, which means that no-one has yet reached the summit, at least on foot. This means that when mountains are construed in language, the dominant mode of the text is not description, as it is with buildings, but narration. There are of course frequent descriptive interludes; and sometimes these include comparison with buildings, as in the following extract from Leslie Stephen: The fantastic Dolomite mountains . . . recall quaint Eastern architecture, whose daring pinnacles derive their charm from a studied defiance of the sober principles of stability. The Chamonix aiguilles . . . inevitably remind one of Gothic cathedrals; . . . (1936: l60)

But such comparisons are rare; in general the descriptive passages are contextualized by the narrative, in that they describe features that are encountered on the climb, including particular challenges and hazards. It is the narrative that gives the mountain its meaning and physical form. The narratives, as is to be expected, come in various different veins. There is the humorous vein, either sardonic (e.g. Stephen, 1936: 99–100, 120)  or bantering (e.g. Mummery, 1936: 218–24); there is the elaborate, grammatically complex vein (e.g. Freshfield, Italian Alps: 58–9); there is the ethnographic vein,

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now no longer about spirits but about human others, such as Welsh, Swiss, Norwegians and Caucasians – almost always positive: these people are after all mountaineers, in the original sense of the term (e.g. Borrow, n.d.: l32; Slingsby, 1941: 15–16; Mummery, 1936: 226–7). There is also what we might call the ‘straightforward’ narrative vein, favoured especially by Wills and by Slingsby. I will use this for my illustration, with more extended commentary, since it is this relatively unadorned narrative that gives the clearest insight into the mountain as a human construction. What follows is an extract of three paragraphs from Slingsby’s account of a challenging climb in Norway, the first ascent of a mountain known as Skagastölstind, on 21 July 1876. The chapter is titled ‘The conquest of Skagastölstind’; this is one example of the military expressions that are occasionally used by these writers, like an ‘attack’, or an ‘assault’, on the mountain. I expected to find many more of these; but in fact they turned out to be extremely rare. Mountains were not normally construed as enemies, or even enemy terrain, that had to be conquered. These three paragraphs give a feeling of the straightforward narrative vein. We could devote a monograph to the analysis of a passage of this length. What I will offer, instead, is a comment on this text from a particular point of view: namely, how it construes the mountain as an aspect of the human experience  – as a ‘monument’ within our own specific reality (Slingsby, 1941: 100–1) (text 9): We had some interesting step-cutting through some seracs where a jutting crag contracted the glacier. After this, we turned a little to the left quite under Skagastölstind, which towered proudly 3000 feet above us. Hardly any debris seemed to have fallen from this awful precipice on to the glacier; a good sign for us, which suggested firm rocks above, whilst on the other hand an avalanche thundered down to the far side of the glacier from the ridge above it, and echo answered echo again and again. Near the top of the glacier, there about 500 yards wide, a large crevasse stretched nearly across. Where we first reached it about the middle of the glacier, it looked like a ravenous, open-jawed monster, awfully deep and ready to swallow a whole Alpine Club. As there were no snow-bridges here, we followed it to the western side where the friction of the rocks had broken down the snowy wall and had partially choked up the crevasse. Here we made sure of crossing. In the best place, however, there was a wall of névé, 12 feet high, above the snow in the crevasse. My companions anchored themselves safely and paid out my rope while I climbed down into the hollow. Twice I cut my way up the wall, but though I cut a dozen large steps, I could not get over on the top, as the snow, at that late hour of the day, was too soft for my ice-axe to hold in, and twice I came down again to the soft snow in my fruitless endeavours. The second time, my

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feet passed through and revealed uncanny depths and a blue haze which was not reassuring. If the snow had been strong enough to hold a second man safely, we could have got up the wall, as I could have stood on his shoulders and have hacked away a sloping staircase to the platform above. I tried once more, and though I failed I all but succeeded. For some time, Knut had been calling out ‘Til höire.’ (To the right). Now, I replied, ‘Ja, nu maa vi gaa til höire.’ We retraced our steps and, to our great joy, found a substantial bridge close to the eastern side. The glacier became steeper, but we soon reached the black belt of rock, where from below we expected to find considerable difficulty or possibly defeat. Fortunately the bergschrund at the head of the glacier and at the foot of the rocks was choked up with a snow avalanche, which gave us a ready-made road on to the rocks.

First, and perhaps most obvious, are some unfamiliar words, like crevasse, sérac, névé and bergschrund. A crevasse is a deep crack, or crevice, in the ice of a glacier; a sérac is a large pillar of ice protruding out of the glacier, often on a steep slope; a névé is a mound or wall of compacted snow, found at the top end of a glacier; a bergschrund is the gap, or traverse, between the side of a glacier and the neighbouring rock, which is usually crumbling, loose rock (‘moraine’) that has been fractured by the long-term action of the ice. These are features that exist only for the mountaineer (now in the modern sense of ‘mountain climber’). Rocks and cliffs and ice and snow are objective features that are ‘given’ by the mountain as a physical phenomenon; the sérac and the bergschrund and other such entities ‘exist’ only for the humans that are tramping over them, clambering up them, impacting on them with their bodies and devising strategies, often in dialogue with each other, how best to get up, down, over or around the edge of them. Along with other terms more recognizable to the English reader, like snow-bridge, ice fall, rock face or chimney, they play a part in transforming the mountain into an edifice of meaning. Secondly, if we follow the thematic progression through the second paragraph, we see how described space is modulated into narrated time. The Themes in the first part of the paragraph are phrases or dependent clauses of place: near the top of the glacier; where we first reached about the middle of the glacier; as there were no snow-bridges here; here; in the best place. Then, with our viewpoint and ourselves as intermediary (my companions anchored themselves safely, anticipated by the evaluative best), the Themes become expressions of time: twice; the second time; for some time; now; along the way there is a dependent clause of condition if the snow had been strong enough, projecting an alternative sequence of events we could have got up the wall which did not in fact occur. The final Theme of the

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paragraph is we, which brings the sequence of description and narration into the climbers’ perspective. Thirdly, ascriptive processes of circumstance very clearly present the mountain in a human perspective  – especially the perspective of homo scandens, man the mountaineer. (The first notable woman mountaineer was Dorothy Pilley, author of Climbing Days; she was the daughter of Leslie Stephen. But the introduction, and one chapter, in Mummery’s book were in fact contributed by his wife, Mrs A. F. Mummery.) Here we find that the mountain Skagastölstind towered above us (in fact towered proudly above us), a large crevasse stretched nearly across (the glacier); and, unusually, an agentive ascriptive a jutting crag contracted the glacier ‘made the glacier thinner’, with a natural feature, the crag, as Agent (compare the examples in the paragraph below). Later in the same account we find a snow cornice which overhung the northern precipice (see the continuation of this text in Appendix 11.1). Other Attributes characterize features as the climbers encounter them along the way: the snow was too soft for my ice-axe to hold in; the glacier became steeper; and compare the Epithets in firm rocks; the snowy wall; the soft snow; a sloping staircase, and then the black belt of rock, reached by a substantial bridge close to the eastern side. The ‘bridge’ is, of course, a natural bridge, formed out of compacted snow. Fourthly, when we consider the material processes in the text, many of these have some natural feature or natural force as the Actor. Some of these are ‘middle’ (intransitive) processes, where the Actor is simply the Medium: hardly any debris seemed to have fallen; an avalanche thundered down. Here no agency is involved – our grammar will take the force of gravity for granted, and so will the mountaineer. But we also find natural features and forces as Agent in an ‘effective’ (two-participant) process: the friction of the rocks had broken down the snowy wall and partly choked up the crevasse; and, in the passive, the bergschrund was choked up with a snowy avalanche, where the passive gives the bergschrund the status of Theme. In this environment, humans are not the principal agents, and certainly not the most powerful ones. Fifthly, there are many wordings which bring out the climbers’ reading of the situation in which they find themselves, as hopeful, dangerous and so on. An example occurs in the first paragraph of this extract: Hardly any débris seemed to have fallen . . .; a good sign for us, which suggested firm rocks above. More or less any feature can be interpreted as a sign, so the lexicogrammar of these expressions is extremely varied; the ‘sign’ may be an intensive Attribute, as here; it may be the carrier of an Attribute, as in (the crevasse) looked . . . ready to swallow a whole Alpine Club; it may be Agent in a mental process, as in (uncanny depths and a blue haze) which was not reassuring; it may be a feature defining a location as point of vantage, as in (a black belt of rock,) where from below we

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expected to find difficulty or . . . defeat. Signs are valued as predictors, whether of good or ill, so there is often an interpersonal, evaluative element attached: a good sign; awfully deep; not reassuring. The cognitive mental process we expected makes explicit the way the climber looks at a mountain: as something where each instance is unknown, but there are general systemic properties which make it possible (and, for the climber, necessary) to anticipate what lies ahead. These three paragraphs offer a fair sample of the features I wanted to bring out: those aspects of the lexicogrammar which show language and mountains ‘systemically entwined’. These texts construe mountains  – the architecture of nature – into meaning, the meaning they have for us in our modern construction of the world. In the process, they also construe them along the dimensions of physical space, through locative prepositions and adverbs and more or less grammaticalized ‘facet’ nouns, as well as a sprinkling of lexical adjectives and verbs. Just in this one passage we find a dense cluster of spatial expressions spread across these various word classes: prepositions: above, at, from, into, on, on to, through, to, up adverbs: above, across, down, over, through facet nouns: the head, the foot, the left, the right, the top, the middle, the far side, the eastern/western side adjectives: close, deep, high, sloping, steep, wide verbs (relational): stretch, tower verbs (material): climb, cross, get up

I have included some more pages of the text in Appendix 11.1. This will provide some more examples, give a flavour of the text as a whole, and allow you to discover whether Slingsby ‘succeeded’ or not: that is, whether or not he reached the summit of the mountain.

6 Mountains, like everything else in our experience once we are past our infancy, are refracted for us through language – they become transformed into meaning. In the course of this process, they emerge as a semantic complex, a junction between their physical presence and their value in human existence. Mountains are constructions in space, with objective physical characteristics – still of course processed by our human capabilities of perception, but measurable as they would be by an observer from another planet. At the same time they are the

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bearers of human value, to be judged by criteria of beauty, of danger and so on. The language with which they are construed combines these two perspectives. I have chosen to focus on just one particular corpus of texts, the writings about mountains by British climbers of the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when mountains came into the consciousness of people who had new and advanced technology and a correspondingly strong commitment to material explanations and material values. In this cultural environment, mountains appeared as a welcome and revitalizing counter-reality. As Macfarlane puts it, writing in a twenty-first-century context where information, even more than machinery, dispels almost all remaining mystery: Ultimately, and most importantly, mountains quicken our sense of wonder. (Macfarlane, 2003: 275)

To me, at least, these texts do promote a sense of wonder. But because they were written by people who were not just observing the mountains but were physically involved with them, through their bodies, they ‘come alive’  – they become participants in an interactive engagement with ourselves. As described, they are seen as beautiful (occasionally the opposite), and resplendent with light and colour as they interact with the sun at its different locations in the sky. But in the narrative they interact with ‘us’, both relationally (stretching across our path, towering above us) and materially as locations of movement (we climb up, or down, them, scramble over them); but also materially, they embody nature in its most active presence, causing avalanches, blocking crevasses and the like. All this means that they have to be ‘read’, as signs – signals of present conditions, and portents of future events. A playground, perhaps; but not the sort of playground we would recommend for our children. This genre of mountain literature has long been out of fashion. John Hunt’s twentieth-century classic The Ascent of Everest, documenting the first attainment of the summit, by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing in 1953, was in the same narrative tradition; but a large portion of it concerned the planning of the expedition and the details of its progress (Hunt was the leader of the expedition, but not one of the summiteers). Now we read about mountains in our magazines and guidebooks. There are still many people climbing them, though seldom for the first time – Everest has become a playground of a more contemporary kind; and there are still some outstanding narratives such as Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void, an impressive account of an impressive feat of survival. But the narratives by those early members of the Alpine Club, even if they are no longer widely read today, have remained as part of our semiotic heritage, the language we still resort to when we construe the architecture of nature.

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Appendix 11.1  (from Slingsby, 1941: 100–5) We had some interesting step-cutting through some séracs where a jutting crag contracted the glacier. After this, we turned a little to the left quite under Skagastölstind, which towered proudly 3000 feet above us. Hardly any débris seemed to have fallen from this awful precipice on to the glacier; a good sign for us, which suggested firm rocks above, whilst on the other hand an avalanche thundered down to the far side of the glacier from the ridge above it, and echo answered echo again and again. Near the top of the glacier, there about 500 yards wide, a large crevasse stretched nearly across. Where we first reached it about the middle of the glacier, it looked like a ravenous, open-jawed monster, awfully deep and ready to swallow a whole Alpine Club. As there were no snow-bridges here, we followed it to the western side where the friction of the rocks had broken down the snowy wall and had partially choked up the crevasse. Here we made sure of crossing. In the best place, however, there was a wall of névé, 12 feet high, above the snow in the crevasse. My companions anchored themselves safely and paid out my rope while I climbed down into the hollow. Twice I cut my way up the wall, but though I cut a dozen large steps, I could not get over on the top, as the snow, at that late hour of the day, was too soft for my ice-axe to hold in, and twice I came down again to the soft snow in my fruitless endeavours. The second time, my feet passed through and revealed uncanny depths and a blue haze which was not reassuring. If the snow had been strong enough to hold a second man safely, we could have got up the wall, as I could have stood on his shoulders and have hacked away a sloping staircase to the platform above. I tried once more, and though I failed, I all but succeeded. For some time, Knut had been calling out ‘Til höire’ (To the right). Now, I replied, ‘Ja, nu maa vi gaa til höire.’ We retraced our steps and, to our great joy, found a substantial bridge close to the eastern side. The glacier became steeper, but we soon reached the black belt of rock, where from below we expected to find considerable difficulty or possibly defeat. Fortunately the bergschrund at the head of the glacier and at the foot of the rocks was choked up with a snow avalanche, which gave us a ready­made road on to the rocks. Though we were still 1114 feet below the summit, Mohn said he felt tired and needed rest. Both of my companions on principle wore boots which were quite innocent of nails or spikes, and in consequence they had found the steep portion of the glacier to be very trying, and they both acknowledged that their

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theories were wrong, and that Alpine nails were excellent and prevented many a fall. As it was nearly 5 p.m., and the great tug of war was yet to come on, I said that we could not afford time for a rest, so I untied myself and soon reached the steep snow-slope at the top of the belt of rock. This snow-slope was nearly 600 feet high. As it was partially frozen it required very great care, and an ice-axe was a sine quâ non. I rather feared the descent of this part, as being in the shade the snow crust was then hardening, the angle was severe, and a fall was not to be thought of. Where the rocks were feasible I preferred them, and left the snow until the rocks were too steep to climb. An hour after leaving my friends I reached the top of the skar, and then took a look around. On the north or opposite side to that which I had ascended, instead of a friendly glacier or couloir close at hand, there was a grim precipice, and at its

Figure 11.1

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base was a glacier, the Skagastölsbræ, the sister to the Midt Maradalsbræ, which projected its icy foot into a mountain tarn, on the placid surface of which many quaint little icebergs were floating. Above the tarn and glacier rose the black precipices of the northern Dyrhougstinder, a grand wall. Looking towards the true Skagastölstind, 518 feet above the skar, I felt that I was beaten after all, and my dream at an end, as it is difficult to imagine any mountain presenting a more impracticable appearance than is shown at first sight by this peak from the skar. The skar consists of a narrow and flat ridge, perhaps 100 yards in length, of which one end abuts against a huge oblong tower of gabbro, the great peak itself. On the right is the precipice above the tarn, and on the left the base of the tower springs from the glacier which we had ascended nearly perpendicularly and almost entirely without ledges. There seemed to be no proper arête to connect the peak with the skar, and merely a narrow face, mostly consisting of smoothly polished and almost vertical slabs of rock. The first 150 or 200 feet appeared to be the worst, and I thought that if those could be surmounted, the top might be won, but really I did not then think there was the slightest possibility of doing it. Of course there was no snow couloir, as the rocks were much too steep to allow snow to accumulate there in any quantity. Behind me, and rising some 300 feet at a comparatively gentle angle from the other end of the ridge, was another peak now called Vesle, or the little, Skagastölstind. As this seemed to be relatively easy to ascend, and thinking that it was better than none, I set off to climb it before my companions arrived. When I had gone a short way I looked down and saw the others rounding a rock just below the skar, so I hurried down and joined them. ‘What do you think of it, Mohn?’ ‘Well, I suppose that we can now say it is perfectly impossible.’ ‘We have not yet proved it to be so; we must not give it up without a try. Will you come?’ ‘No.’ ‘Knut, will you ?’ ‘No, I shall not risk my life there.’ ‘I will at least try, though I do not think I can manage it.’

Fortunately I was perfectly fresh, and of course had an excellent stimulant in the uncertainty of my enterprise and the delights of entering still further into the unknown; and besides this, it is rarely safe to say that a mountain

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wall which you have never studied in profile, but have face to face with you, is unclimbable. I recommended the others to climb the lesser peak  – then unascended. Mohn said philosophically ‘Aut Cresar, aut nihil.’ Then I left them and passed under a snow cornice which overhung the northern precipice like a wave arrested when about to break on a shingly beach, and I soon reached the rock wall. Now! farewell to snow, that great aider of mountain ascents, and! – 500 feet of cold rock! I found a small buttress projecting from the face of the rock a little to the south of the skar. It formed a corner. Up there I must go, or nowhere else: of choice there was none; but still, when viewed closely it looked more hopeful than at the first glance. I soon found that the rocks were firm; the ledges, though so tiny, were secure. The strata of the rock inclined the right way, downward from the outface towards the centre of the mountain.1 Better than all, I was quite cool and in perfect training. Still, no trifling must be indulged in here. After being hidden from my friends by the snow cornice, I came into view again, and every movement was eagerly watched by my well-wishers. Soon I got into difficulties in the corner, and, but for a ledge not so broad as my hand, from which I had to knock away the ice, I should thus early have been defeated, because without the aid of this foothold the mountain, on this side at least, would be inaccessible. My friends saw me at this place, and vainly tried to call me back, but with the help of my well-tried ice-axe I surmounted the difficulty; I avoid going into details about this and other places, though I made minute notes the following day because if I were to attempt to describe them I should undoubtedly be accused either of exaggeration or perhaps of foolhardiness by readers unaccustomed to alpine work, when at the same time I might be guilty of neither. Suffice it to say that what under the most favourable conditions must be a tough piece of work, was made more so by the films of ice with which every little ledge was veneered. Three times I was all but beaten, but this was my especial and much-longed-for mountain, and I scraped away the ice and bit by bit got higher and higher. In sight of the others I reached what from the skar we had judged to be the top. I raised a cheer, which was renewed below, when I found that there was a ridge – a knife-edged affair – perhaps sixty yards long, and that the highest point was evidently at the farther end. There are three peaklets, and a notch in the ridge which again almost stopped me. For the first time I had to trust to an overhanging and rather a loose rocky ledge. I tried it well, then hauled myself up to terra firma, and in a few strides, a little above half

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an hour after leaving my friends, I gained the unsullied crown of the peerless Skagastölstind, a rock table four feet by three, elevated five or six feet above the southern end of the ridge.

Note 1 In that best of all books on mountaineering, Scrambles amongst the Alps, p. 287, Mr Whymper shows how much depends on the dip of the strata when difficult rocks have to be climbed – W. C. S.

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Language Evolving: Some Systemic Functional Reflections on the History of Meaning (2010)

1 It is always a pleasure – and, at my age, a special and valued privilege – to take part in one of our systemic functional congresses. Originally, when inaugurated by Robin Fawcett, they were ‘workshops’; it was in Canada, I think in 1983, that they mutated and evolved into being ‘congresses’ – but whatever the name, what matters is that our view of language has gone on steadily evolving as new problems have been faced and new fields of linguistic activity investigated. This is the thirty-seventh year of these exchanges of ideas; and this time our theme is, not linguistics evolving but ‘Language Evolving’: the evolution not of ideas about language but of language itself. There is no question, of course, that language changes; we all know that it goes on changing all the time. Language, and every particular language, has a history. I have found it helpful to parse this out into three distinct histories: there is the history of language as system – its phylogenesis; there is the history of the individual speaker – their ontogenesis; and there is the history of each instance of language – of the text, for which I suggested the term ‘logogenesis’ (using logos in its original sense of ‘discourse’). And these follow three different trajectories. The text unfolds in time; it may head for a target, or it may meander (most texts are a mixture of both), but meaning accumulates as each moment in the text reshapes the context for what is to come. First presented in the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress, University of British Columbia, July 2010.

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The language of the individual speaker follows the course of their life: it develops from base zero, grows to maturity, and eventually dies, perhaps with an intervening period of decline. Only the language system evolves, persisting through constant change in interaction with its environment. The early comparative philologists took Darwin’s evolutionary theory as their model, which was fine, although they had a rather restricted view of what constituted the relevant environment, their focus being on the phonetics of the syllable or the semantics of the lexical item. Any given instance of language use is the product of these three histories – language as evolving, language as developing, language as unfolding. I want to keep these three histories in mind, while at the same time keeping ‘evolving’ in the foreground; so let me come back to this formulation, which I gained many years ago from discussion with Jay Lemke: that the system of a language is metastable – is maintained in being through constant change in interaction with its environment. I shall assume, with Terrence Deacon (and now I think many others), that in the past, at least, human language has coevolved along with the human brain. The immediate environment of language is the brain itself, as modelled for linguists by Sydney Lamb in his relational network theory. The brain, in this case, is being seen as the interface between the two planes of language, that of expression and that of content, and the two ‘poles’ of the material environment. At the expression pole are the physiological systems (articulation and auditory perception) that are involved in the production and reception of speech; at the content pole are the phenomena that we model as ‘context’ (context of culture, instantiated as contexts of situation) and to which we extend the privilege of being treated as a stratum of language (this being an important proviso of an ‘appliable’ linguistics). So when we talk about language interacting with its environment, we are referring to both these aspects: one, at the expression pole, the ‘signifying body’, as described by Paul Thibault  – the biological evolution of the articulatory organs under the general pressure to mean (and presumably the organs of hearing as well, otherwise the quickness of the tongue would deceive the ear); two, at the content pole, the ‘ecosocial context’, the increasing complexity of the physical and social processes that shape and define the conditions of human life. The evolution of the meaning potential of the human species involved both these factors simultaneously: the human body as signifier (the ‘expression’) and human ecosocial experience as signified (the ‘content’). The early philologists were not wrong in adopting an evolutionary perspective on language. Their limitation was in treating single features, especially

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speech sounds and lexical items, in isolation, or at most in a rather localized monostratal environment. Let me briefly revisit the old issue of the uniqueness or otherwise of the human capacity for language. Probably all warm-blooded species exchange meanings; and some, such as the bonobo, can play the human game of using conventional symbols, and even hearing human sounds apart. But it is doubtful whether any other species fully severs the bond between content and expression, achieving a ‘duality of patterning’ which requires an open-ended articulatory or other symbol-generating system. Unless you evolve a truly ‘arbitrary’ sign system, decoupling the expression from the content, you cannot refer, and without reference you cannot construe your experience as meaning. The semioticizing of the whole of experience does appear to be a uniquely human attribute, part of the history of meaning that is specific to the human species. This rather discursive paper is organized around that topic: the history of meaning as a distinctively human semiotic. When we think of language evolving, we usually think either of sound systems or of rather specific features of the lexicogrammar – lexicosemantic fields, or grammatical systems that can be formally identified and defined. I am asking whether we can consider the evolution of the meaning potential of languages, and if so, what are the relevant contextual factors that might make this something sensible, and useful, to explore.

2 If we switch to the ontogenetic perspective for a moment: we can track the outline history of meaning in children as their language develops. Children progress from a non-referring protolanguage to a referential language – that is, to language in its adult (i.e. post-infancy) sense. Almost at once they progress from proper to common reference (individual to class referents), then from concrete to abstract reference (sensible to imaginable referents), then from congruent to metaphorical reference (actual to virtual referents). This series of developmental steps  – referring, then generalizing, then abstracting, then metaphorizing  – is roughly matched in the progression of the contexts in which meanings are exchanged: first the home and the neighbourhood, then the primary school, then the secondary school. This of course is no coincidence, since these contexts are the social institutions that have evolved to exploit the developmental sequence in the child’s potential to mean.

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We can also think of these stages in terms of the ongoing development of knowledge. There are no generally agreed terms for this, but I have usually talked about the commonsense knowledge of home and neighbourhood, the educational knowledge of the primary school, and the technical knowledge of the secondary school. If you will accept that ‘knowledge’ begins at (or before) birth, then we can perhaps distinguish a pre-commonsense phase of ‘personalized’, or selfaware, knowledge in the home, associated with pre- and protolanguage, from the commonsense knowledge of the neighbourhood, beginning with the transition from protolanguage to mother tongue; but that would need separate discussion. The point to be emphasized here is that, whatever phases we identify, each one encompasses all those that have gone before. (Yes: some earlier particulars may be lost, as with the development of the body as a whole; but that does not invalidate the total picture.) Knowledge accumulates, and this process subsumes those cases where something already learnt gets reorganized at the next stage, as happens when the child studies something like the conservation of matter in primary school, bringing to conscious awareness a principle that they have already mastered in their experience of daily life. But there is a problem with this conceptualization: what I am calling ‘knowledge’ is being assumed to be only ideational knowledge – and I have just described the developmental history of meaning as a history of ways of referring, which likewise focuses uniquely on the ideational. But meaning, along whatever dimension of its history, covers all the metafunctions of language; and the history of meaning includes enacting as well as construing – the interpersonal as well as the ideational. We could bring the interpersonal in under ‘knowledge’ in the sense of ‘knowing how to . . .’, where the ideational is ‘knowing that . . .’; but this suggests something like ‘knowhow’, in the sense of technical or managerial skills, whereas interpersonal meaning is still linguistic meaning but it is language enacting social and personal relationships. Knowing how language does this, and being able to refer to interpersonal meaning, is of course ideational knowledge; but that is different from engaging in acts of meaning, where every act of meaning embodies an interpersonal as well as an ideational component. This is why I have always tried to talk about meaning as something you do – like saying rather than like knowing – for example, in calling my earlier book Learning How to Mean. People were often unhappy about this, especially my translators; I had to point out to them that I had had to tweak the English language to make it mean this, so why shouldn’t they tweak their own languages in an analogous way? But wait  – is this telling us something about the nature and the history of knowledge itself? Let me come back to the perspective of evolution, but within

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a historical time depth. The history of meaning has been driven by – or rather, it has been a part of – changes in the nature of the speech fellowship (I use Firth’s term, in preference to the more usual ‘speech community’, to suggest something more in the nature of a community of shared meanings): the speech fellowship evolved from nomadic to agricultural/pastoral, and then to industrial (for the moment I am leaving out the late industrial, digital/electronic; I’ll come back to this below). For those of us whose forebears followed this route, our meaning potential has a history of the exchange of meanings in forest, in farm and in factory; and in the course of this progression the outward face of language has also evolved. It has gone from speech to writing, and from writing to printing: from text as process addressed by speaker to listener, to text as entity manoeuvred from writer to reader, then text as self-replicating entity, with multiple copies out there for access by a ‘readership’, a set of receivers unknown by, and unknown to, the originator of the text. And again, of course, all of this history is with us in the present: most adolescents and adults in our culture engage with all of these modes of discourse every day of their lives. If the outer face of language has evolved in such a fashion, what about the inner face? – well, perhaps you can’t have an inner face; the inner essence, we might say. Does that evolve at the same time, as part of the same progression? Clearly it does. If we want to maintain a matching sequence of terms, we can enumerate the series spoken language, written language, standard language; these were the terms I used at the Kachru Symposium in the context of ‘World Englishes’, and there I added as a fourth term global language, as this has been used in reference to the status of English today. Up till now, in this chapter, I have been ignoring the most recent stage of history, the digital/electronic stage of mass communication and multimedia; so let me say a few words on this topic now. We need a more general term which would cover the kinds of text that are associated with these multiple modalities and are indifferent to political boundaries, from the appropriately named Fox News, to the internet and the worldwide web, to the daily messaging that socializes each new generation of our children. These can take place, in principle, in any language or language mix, although the more affluent languages are inevitably playing the most significant part. There have been and continue to be many studies of twenty-first-century patterns of language use – of blogging, twittering, facebook conversations and the like. We can read about innovations in writing practices: about rebus writing, emoticons and so on; about code-switching and code-mixing; about multimodal and multimedia discourses – all of which goes to build up our picture of this fourth stage, multiple aspect language. But I don’t know how much has been

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described of its semantic properties: as Christian Matthiessen has said, it is not so much multimodal as multisemiotic, with new ways of meaning and of combining the meaning potential of different semiotic systems. Even within one language we can see new patterns in the integration of the metafunctions, with meanings now often packaged as a succession of bite-sized chunks to accommodate the reduced space on a small screen and the reduced time scale of much of today’s interaction, and perhaps the reduced attention span of the interactants. Here, both interpersonal and textual meanings take on a new prominence, though for different reasons: the textual in integrating the various semiotic strands, with the interesting consequence that it becomes less explicit in the text, rather like the subtitles in a foreign language movie; the interpersonal on the other hand becoming more explicit as the exchange of meaning becomes increasingly individualized and personalized (we are never shown parliamentary debates on our television screens, only the ranting and swapping of abuses that are thought to make ‘good television’). Here you can hear the interpersonal element intruding into my own text, since it is clear that I don’t like to find so much of meaning reduced to a series of bitesized chunks, and I don’t like the way any thoughtful discourse by those we have elected to govern us is overtaken by verbal brawling  – and I blame the media for it: that explains the scare quotes just now when I referred to ‘good television’. This is just one small symptom, not in itself important (but then symptoms never are); but symptomatic of a process that I have talked about as the destruction of knowledge, which as an old-fashioned socialist and lifelong marxist I see as part of the death throes of what is now corporate capitalism. Capitalism is a sociopolitical structure that was spectacularly successful when it first evolved (because its controls evolved along with it), but has now passed its use-by date – it has moved on, as most structures do, from being enabling to being constraining, and will destroy anything in its ruthless determination to survive. But what is happening to knowledge is perhaps not so much its destruction, in absolute terms, but its polarization: the increasing gap in our societies between the knows and the don’t-knows (replacing the haves and the have-nots, which has become a worldwide phenomenon, inter- rather than intrasocietal). Either way, of course, it is destructive. But let me return to history, and to my various schemata of periodization, and ask how knowledge has been construed in language at different periods of our history – when, as I put it just now, our living space was defined first by forest, then by farm and then by factory. (I haven’t got a fourth term for that series, which ought also to begin with f; perhaps fantasy might be as appropriate as any?)

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3 I have been criticized, reasonably enough, for being too fond of grand generalizations. My defence is that I find such general patterns very useful to think with; they can be exemplified, tested and modified or else abandoned. So I am tempted to try to map the construal of knowledge into the schemata outlined so far. But I won’t – not because there are no patterns there (I am sure there are), but because I don’t know enough about the subject, and I haven’t read enough of recent work. So I will just say a little about some different ways of knowing – of codifying and transmitting knowledge – that have evolved in different contexts over the course of human history. One genre that has played an important part in the evolution of knowledge is narrative, in which preserved accounts of past (or imaginary) events are rehearsed, in a more or less stylized and ritualized form, events which encapsulate the accumulated experience of the community. This mode of knowing was illustrated in a nice episode in the original Star Trek series, where Captain Kirk’s universal translator seemed to him to be totally malfunctioning,1 because when he asked the inhabitants of this particular planet, who were technologically rather sophisticated, to explain how they had arrived at some problem-solving strategy – I forget now what exactly it was – the response always came in the form of a story, a narrative of some particular past event. In the end, Mr Spock got the message: the narrated events embodied significant moments of collective experience, from which the receiver would distil the relevant principle that had to be applied – the same as we do when reading a scientific paper. Such narratives are instantial: they have particular protagonists (who have proper names) along with their own particular doings. Alongside such narratives, we find generalized propositions and proposals, telling what happens, or may happen, if . . ., or what should or should not be done. These are not stories; they are adages, and may be familiar to us in the form of proverbs. Proverbs are often in archaic and/or phonologically memorable language, perhaps with a touch of what Malinowski called the ‘coefficient of weirdness’; but their essential feature is that they construe knowledge as generalization: the grammar detaches them from particular persons and events, making it clear that they contain a principle that is generally appliable. Proverbs were the traditional repository of commomsense knowledge in the situations of daily life; where I come from in the north of England they survived into my childhood – my grandmother was one of the last generation who used proverbs quite unselfconsciously; with my mother they had already become quaint and were played with as semiotic toys.

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But proverbs construe knowledge in small isolated doses; they do not combine to build up any larger patterns. Narrative can do this, and the story can have a place in a broader compendium of knowledge-oriented texts. Unlike the forest, the farm produces surplus wealth; this gives rise to townships (‘cities’, or even ‘city states’), where a division of labour evolves: the esoteric knowledge of the priests is matched by the technical knowledge of the craftsmen, and perhaps by more abstract forms of knowledge among ‘philosophers’ – those who have the leisure, or are directed, to pursue it. Story evolves into history, and acquires a written form. Let me glance at two ancient centres of knowledge, which we call ‘classical’ for that very reason: Greece and China. New ways of meaning were evolving in the discourses of knowledge construction – in cosmology, in mathematics, in medicine; and history was among them. Kappagoda looked at the language of two grand narratives of ancient Greece, the Iliad of Homer, and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, composed roughly six hundred years apart; and in a detailed grammatical analysis of portions of these two texts he examined how they construed history as knowledge. Homer, around 1,000 years BC, made extensive use of simile: this event, or this protagonist, was like some other phenomenon, and therefore served to exemplify some general pattern or principle; the likeness might be with some higher realm, such as the gods, or the forces of nature. By the time of Thucydides there had been two or three centuries of enquiry; there were texts in cosmology, geometry and medicine; with some foundation in mathematics. Thucydides sought explanations in terms of cause-&-effect, construed as clause complexes and with abstract nouns for processes and qualities  – terms evolving by grammatical metaphor with the transcategorization of adjectives and verbs. In this process, systematic knowledge had evolved alongside the knowledge of common sense. Its channel was not speech but writing; its lexicogrammar was still further removed from the particular. A parallel evolution was taking place, under similar conditions, in the ‘Warring States’ of ancient China; these were united into the Han empire, during the same epoch as when the Romans were taking over Greece and the eastern Mediterranean; and the languages, ‘classical’ Chinese and Latin, became the vehicles of systematic knowledge for most of the next two millennia. Their semantic systems continued to evolve; we can’t measure this, of course, but my impression is that there was about the same difference between Han and Song Chinese as there was between classical and medieval Latin over roughly the same period. I don’t know how to describe this difference – it needs investigating

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properly; but the language of abstract learning is not insulated from other discourses: it would interact both with the language of technology (especially in China, where technology was on the whole more advanced) and with the language of commonsense (especially in Europe, where the scholars spoke a wide variety of vernaculars before taking up Latin as their second language, and these other tongues increasingly took over as the media of learned discourse). Remember also that contact between Europe and China, while frequently disrupted, was never completely lost; it was mediated by a succession of peoples who had, or soon acquired, similar semantic resources: the Byzantines and Persians, then the Arabs, and finally the Mongols who opened up the whole Eurasian continent and so helped pave the way for one further phase in the linguistic construal of knowledge – the one we’re in now, in fact.

4 The semantic signature of our present phase of knowledge construal is metaphor; more specifically grammatical metaphor, which creates a parallel semiotic universe of virtual things, especially virtual entities and virtual processes, all of which are good for thinking with. Knowledge now takes the form of theories, which are explanatory, predictive, and generate hypotheses; these can be tested, allowing the theory to be validated and improved. In terms of the development of the individual, this level of specialized, technical knowledge is reached in the secondary school – single abstractions like speed, product, bisect can be coped with in the primary school, but the fully metaphoric mode of meaning is largely inaccessible to children before they reach the age of puberty. I would like to emphasize that all these different ways of knowing are part of our semiotic make-up; the later mode of meaning does not drive the earlier ones out of the picture. Our meaning potential evolved along with our bodies and brains, and with the emergence of homo sapiens the human brain had evolved to where it is today. I am not talking about our ancestors previous to homo sapiens. The meanings of what I called the forest are the semantic resources that supported the lives of many of the first nations here in Canada, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Guinea, the first inhabitants of South Africa, South America and the Arctic, whether they lived in forest, savannah, prairie, desert or icefield. Probably none of their representatives today, or perhaps a very few isolated groups, have entirely retained their inherited patterns of knowledge. Much of the details of that knowledge must have been lost; you cannot transmit

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what you know of the medicinal properties of hundreds of plants if they have all disappeared from the scene with the coming of the farms and the factories. But the ways of meaning that supported this knowledge have become part – the foundational part  – of the human experience; we see them in the patterns of our lexicogrammar, and in the way we build semiotic models of our ecosocial environment  – of the social groups in which we interact, and our own place within them; and also the semiotic models of the significant features of the situations in which we live, and of our abilities (successes and failures) when we try to manage them. But if we are suggesting that the meaning potential has been expanding throughout these phases of knowing, we need to specify in what senses – on which of the dimensions of history – this is to be understood. To start with the brain: the brain’s capacity to mean – what we ought to call its meaning potential potential – is common to all the human species, and while it is obviously finite, there is no reason to think it is anywhere near to being exhausted. The meaning potential of the individual expands as they learn their first language, throughout childhood and adolescence; it also expands if they learn one or more other languages, something our educators do not seem to be aware of. But what about the meaning potential of the system? is this a meaningful concept, or just a fancy? I think the meaning potential of the system is a meaningful concept. We should not be fooled by those who say there is no such thing as a language, or indeed as language; they are simply refusing to move to the level of theory, of thinking in terms of systems and populations. Take some arbitrary location in space-time as a startingpoint  – say the kingdom of Mercia, or middle England after the Anglo-Saxon invasions, around AD 600 (because this happens to be where I come from). The inhabitants spoke a variety of Saxon: call it Mercian – which was probably not written when they first arrived, but soon afterwards started to be written down. Did writing increase its meaning potential? Let us think about this. If we isolate the act of writing from its contexts of use, the answer is no; in and of itself, writing does not affect the meaning potential of a language. But of course it does not happen like that: writing is not a decontextualized process, and writing together with the contexts in which it evolves and is transmitted certainly does increase the meaning potential, whether in trading relations and commodity exchange, in codifying laws, in developing technology or in simply keeping records of any kind  – all those contexts where meaning arises from reflecting and building on shared knowledge and shared text. In terms of our third, logogenetic dimension of history, writing made possible new forms of discourse with new relations to the context.

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Several hundred years later, one form of Mercian evolved to become the standard language of England as an emerging nation-state, backed up by the technology of printing, which arrived from Germany though having originated some time earlier in China. Did this increase the meaning potential of the language? – again, what was effective was the combination of the new medium, the printed text, with the contexts of language use, in this case the expansion of English to become the language of commerce, administration and the law. And where writing had disseminated religious knowledge, printing promoted technical and scientific knowledge. The printed text is directed at ‘others’, large numbers of people that the writer doesn’t know, doesn’t even know the existence of; it creates its own new meaning group, a speech fellowship linked by shared knowledge in some increasingly specialized domain. From now on no single individual will achieve the meaning potential of the whole system (if indeed they ever did); but the history of education suggests that even at the level of the individual the meaning potential generally tended to increase. Just as every individual has their own story, so every language has its own story, though with many features of language shared across a common culture band – as example, in most of the language communities of Europe, in the late Middle Ages, much of the meaning potential was encoded in Latin. In China too the pattern was diglossic, though with less of a gap between the two codes (written and spoken Chinese); and there were differences between China and Europe in their socio-political evolution: Chinese feudalism was more centralized and bureaucratized, less rigidly stratified, than that of Europe. But Chinese historians have worked out that the rate of turnover of landowning families was about 5 per cent per century, and I would guess that that wasn’t very different at the European end of the continent; I wonder whether such a low rate of social mobility would constrain the growth of meaning potential? – since it implies that there was relatively little exchange of meanings between the landlord and the peasant households. But that’s just a fleeting thought.

5 There is a lot of guesswork here, though I think the basic proposition makes sense: that the meaning potential of a language does, at least under certain conditions, tend to increase. In any case we can’t measure it, neither in the species (the potential potential) nor in the speech fellowship nor in the individual; we can only try to compare one stage, or one state, with another. I should point out,

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though, that the account carries no prosody of evaluation; we have to clear the air by detaching notions of value from evolutionary processes. You may have your personal preferences – no doubt every one has. (I grew up in FactoryLand, but spent a lot of my childhood in FarmLand; I like the physical environment of FarmLand and I like the interpersonal environment of FactoryLand. But I like the professional environment of whatever land we live in now, especially the doctors and the dentists.) It is hard not to be bemused by the fact that evolutionary processes are ordered in time; what came later must be better (or, for some people, must be worse) than what went before it. But that is no part of the evolutionary story. But one question of value does arise, in the sense not of evaluation but of effect on the overall system: namely, whether some acts of meaning, or some individuals, do carry special weight in expanding the meaning potential of a language. In the past I have called this the Hamlet factor, since an obvious candidate for such special effects in English would be Shakespeare, and above all perhaps the text of Hamlet. Other possible candidates would be the King James Bible, Milton, Jonathan Swift, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton; and, more particularly for British English, Jane Austen, Dickens, Darwin, Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter. However, what spring to mind are particular pieces of wording, such as you might find in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations; whereas what really counts is whether these writers, through the impact of their works as a whole, enlarged or in some way reshaped the meaning potential of the language. The example often cited in modern China is the writer Lu Xun, from the first part of the twentieth century, although his impact may have come more from the social message he was putting over than from his own rather idiosyntactic way of writing. His work is perhaps a manifesto rather than a model; in this way he figures both as writer and as reformer, alongside those who have established new ‘national languages’ in countries such as Norway, or what is now the Czech Republic; or even reforming statemen such as Kemel Ataturk, who succeed in releasing large amounts of semiotic energy among their citizens. But there is no act of meaning that leaves a language exactly as it was before. Every act of meaning perturbs, however minutely, the probabilities of the language system, and so contributes to its ongoing evolution. The meaning potential is statistically modulated; that is how it is transmitted from one generation to the next. A grammatical system that is on its way out will be destabilized, one of its terms becoming less and less frequent until it disappears altogether – as has happened with one of the systems of English modality within my adult lifetime. New systems may arise, perhaps by grammaticalization like the distinction

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between what are now the two derivational suffixes -less and -free, as subtypes of ‘privatory’ with different interpersonal loading: these can now appear with the same lexical item (e.g. valueless/valuefree, on the model of careless/carefree). Such minor quantitative effects accumulate as the speakers ongoingly interact with their ecosocial environment.

6 It is a habit of human beings to intervene in processes of evolution – to try to improve on them by introducing design. We now call this language planning. There is no clear line between planning and evolution – even the invention of writing could be regarded as an instance of intervention by design; but some activities are clearly designed so as to speed up, or deflect, or even to inhibit the evolution of a language. In the ancient world some texts were singled out as canonical, even sacred, and were required to be preserved and transmitted intact; while others, or the same ones at another time; were felt to threaten some new or existing order, and so had to be destroyed (the ‘burning of the books’). Many societies have exercised forms of language control: some rulers have told their minorities ‘your language is forbidden; you must use this one’; others, like the Nazis in Germany, have engineered a language to support their own ideology. Nowadays those who control information technology set limits on what we can mean: not only do they dictate our spelling and put restraints on our range of vocabulary, they go as far as checking our grammar to ensure that it matches their picture of ‘correctness’ (that it conforms to a set of arbitrary rules invented some time in the past). Presumably those who impose these constraints do not realize that the lexicogrammar is where meaning is made – or it may be, on the other hand, that they do. Does this mean that language planning never serves to increase the meaning potential of a language? No, I don’t think so; I think there are certain occasions where it clearly does. The seventeenth-century language planners in England and France, like Wilkins, Dalgarno and Mersenne, set out with the intention of shaping a new form of language for construing scientific knowledge. What was needed, they reckoned, was to systematize the vocabulary so that all words were clearly and logically interrelated. They saw no need to reform the grammar; what little they said about grammar was largely within the mainstream European tradition. Their specific proposals for constructing words were never taken up; but the principle of taxonomic organization was. This principle is of course

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already embodied in the vocabulary of the everyday language; but the language planners brought it into prominence, and their ideas about how to make the taxonomic organization fully explicit were followed in later chemical and biological terminology. We can see now that the most significant innovation was actually taking place in the grammar, without any attention from the language planners at all; this was the extension of grammatical metaphor throughout the discourse, creating a parallel universe of virtual entities and virtual processes which made it possible to construct elaborate scientific theories and develop chains of rational argument. There can be no doubt that the total effect of these extensions to the lexicogrammar of the major European standard languages  – in which the language planners played their part  – did expand their overall powers of meaning. Nowadays, ‘language planning’ suggests committees of specialists creating lists of new terminology for a newly emerging national language. This has sometimes been derided, because such terms tend to be selected on grounds of linguistic purism – as if borrowing sounds was somehow less respectable than borrowing wordings (calquing). I remember reading about an early example from modern Greece: when the streetcar was first introduced, the Greeks were urged to refer to it as o aftosiderodromos (‘self iron runner’) rather than by the general European term to tram. To the extent that such coinages, whatever their origin, were construing new meanings, they were of course adding to the meaning potential of the language. Adding new words is a significant factor; it is simply not the whole story. One group of people whose role in the history of meaning is easily overlooked is that of translators. Translators provide a simulation of multilingualism, by introducing into their target language discourses, and discourse patterns, of the other languages that they use as sources for their texts. Let me come back once more to the Chinese experience. When the Ming rulers defeated the Mongolian forces late in the fourteenth century, they reacted strongly against Mongolian internationalism; they closed the country to outsiders and outside institutions, and forbade their own citizens to travel overseas. At the time of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, Chinese scientists were working on a level which was at least on a par with their European colleagues; according to the historian Mark Elvin, they had evolved all but one of the distinctive meaning styles that proved critical to the evolution of modern science in the West. Their literary language included a large number of abstract terms powered by grammatical metaphor. But it had

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not developed the elaborated metaphoric mode of discourse that was evolving in Europe at the time of Galileo and Newton. This had to wait until the end of the nineteenth century, when Chinese translators, using English and German sources, often via the intermediary of translation into Japanese, made extensive texts of European scholarship available. Within a few decades, which included the move from classical to modern Chinese beginning in the 1920s (the ‘May 4th movement’), Chinese had evolved patterns of discourse that are no less driven by grammatical metaphor than those of English and German. Was this a case of linguistic ‘borrowing’? I would think of it rather as a process of evolution in the Chinese language that was triggered off by the work of the translators. It was brought about by the changing context of China in the modern world – and it helped to bring that changing context about.

7 The problem is that, while for the particular subset of the total meaning potential that is constituted by systematic institutionalized knowledge we can track the course of its evolution, because it was written down and a significant amount of it has survived, we have practically no evidence for the evolution of the meaning potential of the daily lives of the population as a whole. We can assume that people have always talked about the technical resources they were using and keeping under repair, in farmyards, workshops and kitchens, naming their parts and the processes and qualities associated with their use. At the least, vocabulary would tend to grow as things became more varied and more complex – but it would be wrong to measure meaning potential simply by size of vocabulary. In a few cases we can look at meaning potential as a function of what people were able to understand, because we have drama: the plays from the Mongol dynasty in China, and the miracle and mystery plays from the same period in England. The audiences were town-dwellers, or at least frequenters of the market; mainly but not entirely adult males, of whom quite a number would have been literate; in any case the themes and the stories would have been very largely familiar. But what about Shakespeare and Marlowe, whose plots would surely not have been known in advance? Two thousand years earlier, the Athenians had listened to performances of intricate tragic dramas in equally intricate language; again the stories were drawn from familiar epics and legends – but not those of

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the comedies of Aristophanes, or of the plays of the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence? It seems likely that city-dwellers at any rate were operating at a level of linguistic understanding that would not have been noticeably different from today. Country dwellers of farm and forest, with no written forms of their languages, were often thought to be just linguistic simpletons; there used to be stories about them having ‘no more than a few hundred words’, and these are still around in some popular accounts of language. As I keep saying, counting words tells us little about total meaning potential (remember that Ogden and Richards’ ‘Basic English’ was reckoned to have only eighteen verbs); but in any case the reality is rather different. Many components go to make up the meaning potential of a speech community. In the first place, there are prodigious resources for construing complex areas of experience like the calendar, and sources of food and medication – and for both construing and enacting highly complex social structures and kinship systems. Secondly, people without writing often memorize and transmit large quantities of coherent text, including long and complicated narratives and rituals. And thirdly, though this is more true of forest dwellers than farm dwellers, they often speak three, four or five different tongues  – different languages, or quite divergent varieties of their own. It is surprising how little is known, or has been recorded, of their true discursive abilities. We ought not to get too distracted by questions of size. It may be that languages tend to get bigger in the course of long-term history, in the number of options available to their speakers; but we can’t measure this – even if we could count all the options, they wouldn’t all carry the same value. What we can try to observe – and what is relevant to an appliable kind of linguistics  – is how the meaning potential changes over time; or rather, how it varies, both diachronically and diatopically. In other words, we try to observe and explain semantic variation, exactly as Ruqaiya Hasan has defined it. Hasan showed how semantic variation can be studied, by observing and analysing large-scale quantitative patterns of natural linguistic interaction in clearly delimited populations of speakers; her work provides a model of scientific research in language wherever sufficient data can become accessible. Then, if we ever can combine this with some measure of the size of a language, we might get a sense of meaning potential as semiotic power. I am not sure whether semiotic power, as the full meaning potential of the individual, the speech fellowship or the language, is or is not a concept that can usefully be explored. I think it ought to be.

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Some temporal sequences relevant to the histories of meaning Modes of language

Modes of Modes of Workplace Speech community knowing construing knowledge

Modes of reference

spoken +written +printed (+electronic)

narrative +proverb +principle +theory

(proper) (family) +common +neighbourhood/ +abstract pre-school +metaphorical +primary +secondary

forest farm factory (office)

clan region nation (globe)

common   sense +educational +technicalscientific

Education

Note 1 The episode is ‘Darmok’, season 5 episode 2 of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

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Index aesthetic  37, 203 Africa(n)  51, 87, 103, 129, 245 ambiguity  28, 136 ambiguous  19, 76, 146 articulatory  75, 168, 238–9 auditory  75, 238 Bateman, J. A.  43, 45, 59, 73 Benson, J. D.  73, 203 Bernstein, B.  58, 138, 205 biology  101, 201 biological  47, 72, 169, 200–1, 211, 238, 250 Bloomfield, L.  129 brain  25, 37, 47–8, 50–1, 61, 66, 73, 75, 105, 140, 168–9, 180–1, 183–4, 194–5, 200, 202, 204, 206, 211, 218, 238, 245–6 Cantonese  116–17 capitalism  55, 62–3, 102, 242 child  30, 34, 40, 53, 58, 69, 73, 79–80, 88, 139, 154, 160–4, 167–71, 176–83, 194, 239–40 childhood  46, 51, 154, 161, 183, 216–17, 220, 243, 246, 248 China  28, 39–42, 51–3, 66, 71, 95–6, 191–3, 197, 244–51 Chinese  11, 28, 39–45, 51–3, 66, 81, 93, 95–6, 105, 107, 110–19, 123–4, 129–31, 144–53, 191–7, 212, 244, 247, 250–1 Cloran, C.  23–4, 58, 114, 184 cognitive  193, 206, 229 complementarity  97, 141, 181–3, 208 computer  5–6, 43, 66–7, 75, 128–9, 139, 199, 204, 213 computational  9, 43, 45, 67, 150 computing  50, 66, 196, 204 congruent  60, 99, 101, 239 consciousness  47, 73, 80, 154, 159, 167, 170, 177, 183–4, 198–9, 211, 230

conversation(al)  5, 9–14, 22–5, 46, 88, 128, 130, 145, 159–60, 163, 168, 185, 209, 221, 224, 241 corpus  5–24, 42–4, 67, 209, 230 corpus-driven  14, 20–1 creative/creativity  12–13, 43, 76, 100 culture(s)  15, 21, 40, 50–1, 65, 90, 93, 101–3, 117, 119, 135–6, 139, 146, 152, 159, 183, 198, 238, 241, 247 Davies, P.  69, 73 Deacon, T.  66, 73, 184, 238 delicacy  14, 81, 106, 108–9, 113, 119, 132, 145, 147 descriptive  24, 42, 105, 115, 120, 132, 149, 216, 225 developmental  73, 160, 163, 176–7, 179, 239–40 dialect(al)  57–8, 69, 87–9, 91, 96, 130, 132, 144 dialogic  22, 170 dialogue  6, 8, 12–13, 16, 21–4, 69, 74, 80, 159, 179, 227 discourses  49, 51, 55, 59, 62, 78, 92, 101, 139–40, 145, 193, 209, 213, 215, 241, 244–5, 250 duality  177, 180, 198–9 Edelman, G.  66, 73, 184 emotions  65, 202–3, 220 Englishes  39, 87, 102–3, 241 Fairclough, N.  63, 209 Fawcett, R.  9, 43, 45–6, 67, 139, 237 Firth, J. R.  21, 24, 50, 56, 58, 71, 87, 129, 131, 133, 143, 241 functional,  analysis  67, 141 context(s)  97, 120–1 domain(s)  13, 94 explanation(s)  136, 138, 150 grammar(s)  43, 63, 138, 140–1

270

Index

grammatics  202 linguistics  42–4, 63, 66–7, 195, 202 theory  46, 50, 59, 63, 108, 135 typology  139 variation  109, 131, 139–40 varieties  22, 42–3, 91, 130, 139 fuzzy  20, 48, 50, 182–3

imperative  57–8, 120, 132, 179 interpersonal  12, 14, 45, 47, 51, 53, 65–6, 72, 80–1, 108, 113, 119, 134, 139–40, 148, 152, 161, 168, 171, 176, 180, 183, 195, 202, 229, 240, 242, 248–9 intonation  10, 14, 17, 23–4, 65, 132, 134, 137, 171, 178

genre(s)  12, 40, 42, 58, 60, 67, 95, 110, 118, 139, 230, 243 gesture(s)  73, 163, 168, 202 grammar  7, 9–10, 14–15, 18–20, 24–5, 36–46, 62–3, 66–9, 71, 74, 76, 97, 99–100, 107–8, 112, 115, 118, 129, 131–41, 145, 154, 159–89, 193–203, 207, 210–11, 221, 224, 228, 243, 249–50 grammarian(s)  15, 18–19, 35, 42–3, 55, 67, 71–2, 79, 154, 159, 193, 196–7, 206, 208 grammatical,  category/-ies  14, 26, 67, 78 energy  183, 193–4, 207 logic  23, 177 metaphor  47, 60–1, 78, 98–100, 139–40, 244–5, 250–1 system(s)  10, 18, 22, 135–6, 182, 208–9, 248 grammaticalization  134, 248 grammaticalized  14, 18–19, 178–9, 229 grammatics  6, 15, 21, 37–8, 141, 148, 201–2, 207 Greek  77, 91–5, 135, 193, 219 Gregersen, N. H.  69, 73

Kachru, B.  39, 81, 87, 90, 96, 241 Kappagoda, A.  77, 244

Hasan, R.  9, 23–4, 46, 58, 60, 69, 72, 75, 103, 107, 135, 138–9, 144, 184, 205, 210, 252 history/-ical  7, 48, 55, 61, 77, 79, 81, 87–101, 115, 128, 138, 153–4, 191–3, 197, 204, 209–19, 237–47, 250, 252 Hjelmslev, L.  131, 202 Hunston, S.  14, 19–20, 209 hypotactic  16, 19 ideational  53, 65–6, 72, 80–1, 108, 115, 140, 148, 152–3, 176, 183, 201–2, 212, 240

Lamb, S. M.  184, 202, 206, 238 learner(s)  40–2, 49–50, 67, 119, 123, 132, 136–7, 139, 144–5 learning  37, 41–2, 45–6, 49–52, 76, 81, 87, 89, 92–3, 97, 102, 111, 117, 123, 128, 141, 167, 178–82, 198–9, 212, 240, 245 Leeuwen, T.  59, 81, 210 lexical  13–18, 24, 60, 78, 91–2, 98, 100, 102, 109, 113, 134, 137, 148, 152–3, 220, 224, 229, 238–9, 249 lexicalized  19, 116, 177 lexicogrammar/lexicogrammatical  6, 12–24, 39, 45–8, 53, 57, 60, 62–4, 69, 71, 73–4, 77–8, 92, 98, 107–12, 115, 120, 131, 134–5, 138–41, 145, 148–53, 159, 171, 176–8, 182, 195, 199, 207, 225, 228–9, 239, 244, 246, 249–50 lexis  14, 18, 134, 143, 148, 152–3 listener(s)  23, 74, 135, 241 literacy  140, 205 literary  46, 55, 59–60, 78, 102, 105, 110, 140, 250 literature  46, 59–60, 65, 67, 69, 81, 95, 118, 128–9, 144, 199, 217, 219, 230 Lukin, A.  63, 159, 219 marked(ness)  10, 95, 119, 137, 152, 171, 178 Martin, J.  7, 14, 32, 45–6, 56, 58, 61, 63, 65, 103, 110, 134, 139–40, 209–10 marxist  129, 144, 242 Mattiessen, C. M. I. M.  16, 20, 24, 43–9, 58–9, 67, 106–10, 119, 132, 139–40, 144, 146–7, 150, 198, 206, 210, 212, 242

Index meaning-making  8, 24, 37–40, 44, 46, 92, 105, 107, 150, 211 -creating  21, 154, 159, 194 medical  36, 48, 119, 128 metafunction(al)  12, 14, 59, 65, 74, 81, 113, 119, 135–6, 139–40, 147–52, 166–9, 180, 183, 195, 240, 242 metaphor  9, 46–7, 51, 60–1, 69, 77–80, 98–102, 139–40, 201, 207, 210–11, 225, 244–5, 250–1 metaphoric  61, 78–9, 99–101, 245, 251 modality(-ies)  8, 12, 58–9, 81, 101, 134, 184, 241–8 mood  12, 58, 131–5, 167, 176, 179–80 morphology  10, 14, 148 morphological  17, 91, 145 multimodal  141, 241–2 narrative(s)  12, 23, 77, 108, 133, 170, 177, 216–17, 219, 222–6, 230, 243–4, 252–3 Nigel  160–79, 184–8 noun(s)  19, 47, 77, 81, 98–9, 211, 229, 244 O’Halloran, K. L.  80–1 ontogenesis  154, 180, 183–4, 237 orthographic  10–11, 17, 29, 116, 133 O’Toole, M.  81, 210, 215 paratactic  16, 19 phonetics  64, 81, 88, 141, 143, 148, 182, 238 phonetic  17, 48, 73, 107, 123, 182, 212 phonology  21, 64, 69, 81, 88, 107, 116–17, 131–3, 138, 141, 143, 148 phonological  11, 17, 48, 90, 107, 116, 133–6 poetry  118–19, 128 poetic  60, 76, 209 polarity  20, 131–2, 168, 208 political  39, 62, 69, 89, 96, 101, 103, 139, 192, 205, 209, 241 pragmatics  56–7 pragmatic  178–80, 188 probabilities  22, 24, 57, 182, 197, 248 probabilistic  48, 67, 197 prosody  10, 14, 71, 152, 171, 176, 248 prosodic  10–11, 17, 176

271

protolanguage  73–4, 79–80, 133, 154, 160–71, 177–83, 212, 239–40 protolinguistic  76, 160, 178, 185 rank  59, 81, 106–19, 133, 140, 147–8, 152 register(s)  16, 22, 24, 40, 45, 57–8, 63, 69, 90–2, 95, 99, 106–7, 109, 115, 120–1, 130–1, 139–40, 152 representational  10, 108, 180, 202 Sanskrit  95, 193 semantic  12, 18–19, 23, 46, 48, 50, 58, 60–1, 67, 69, 73, 77–8, 80, 90, 93–4, 98–103, 107–12, 116, 118, 137–40, 149, 152, 182–3, 205–11, 220, 229, 242–5, 252 semantics  8, 13–14, 17, 21, 39, 45–6, 49, 57, 60, 69, 78, 90, 98, 100, 114, 120, 132, 138, 141, 148–9, 152–3, 207, 238 semiotic  8, 17, 23–4, 35, 38–9, 44, 47–51, 59, 62, 66–70, 72–81, 89–103, 109, 117, 132, 138, 141, 143, 154, 160–71, 179–83, 193–212, 230, 239, 242–8, 252 semiotics  59, 199, 211 semogenic  11, 21, 24, 71, 92, 96, 102, 132, 154, 159, 194–6, 200, 207, 211 Sinclair, J.  18, 24 speech  6–25, 47–8, 75, 88, 102, 135, 137, 154, 161, 184, 195, 200, 204, 211, 238–9, 241, 244, 247, 252–3 spoken,  corpus  8–9, 12, 14, 16, 20 discourse  6, 9–11, 14, 19, 23 English  9, 12, 137 language  5–24, 32, 43, 59, 117, 136, 137, 241 standard,  English  88–94 language(s)  89–92, 96–7, 101–2, 241, 247, 250 strata  12, 45–8, 69, 80, 107, 116, 118, 138, 143, 181, 207, 234–5 stratum  6, 24, 57–8, 69, 71, 107–14, 134–5, 139–40, 147–52, 159, 171, 176–7, 181, 203, 206–7, 238 stylistics  21, 55, 59–60 Svartvik, J.  6, 9–10, 22, 27

272

Index

syntagmatic  11, 45, 109, 131, 133, 202 syntax  18, 39, 43, 56, 71, 148, 152, 159, 179, 206–7 syntactic  40, 46, 145

verb(s)  18–19, 35, 45, 47, 77, 98–9, 115, 136–7, 211, 229, 244, 252 visual  17, 48–9, 59, 81, 101, 162, 169, 194–5, 199, 203, 210, 218, 220

Teruya, K.  43, 140 Thibault, P. J.  59, 73, 162, 211, 238 translation(s)  38–45, 52–3, 66–7, 81, 94, 96–7, 100, 105–24, 128–9, 131, 140, 144–51, 169, 213, 216, 219, 251 translator(s)  45, 52, 81, 97, 105–9, 115–23, 140, 145–50, 240, 243, 250–1

Welsh  224, 226 Wordworth, W.  149, 217, 220–1 written,  discourse  16, 58, 95 English  18, 33, 182 language  7–11, 14–18, 22, 24, 96–7, 101, 117, 137, 144, 241