What grammarians do, as we have been suggesting in these first two chapters, is to construct an abstract model of the system of language, based on observation of language instantiated in use. The computerized corpus has made this evidence available in sufficient quantity for the first time. But the relation between what we observe on the screen (or take in in any other form, as written or spoken discourse) and the abstract categories that we construct in order to explain how the language works — how people exchange meanings discursively in real-life situations — is extremely complex and indirect. We have tried to set out the grammarian’s resources for doing this, the list of abstract tools we use to think with (Table 2(8)), in the course of these two chapters.
At the end of this chapter we will enlarge one of the cells of our linguistic map in to display a metafunction-rank matrixfor English grammar. Let us now move on to that bit of the territory and zero in to the clause. The clause, as we said, is the mainspring of grammatical energy; it is the unit where meanings of different kinds, experiential, interpersonal and textual, are integrated into a single syntagm. Chapters 3–5 will be exploring these three facets of the clause in turn.
Two concepts that we need to invoke from the start are those of grammatical class and grammatical function.
A class is a set of items that are in some respect alike (cf. Halliday, 1963c). The most familiar, in our traditional grammar, are classes of words: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction (and sometimes also interjection) in the usual list. But every unit can be classified: there are classes of group and phrase, classes of clause and, at the other end of the rank scale, classes of morpheme.
Table 2(5)Corpuses and text archive used for description and exemplification in An Introduction to Functional Grammar size: no. of words corpus (explicit criteria) text archive (opportunistic sample)
>50 million COBUILD corpus of spoken and written British, American, Australian English (c. 60 million out of 330 million words)
c. 1 million LOB corpus of written British English (1 million Archive of written and spoken British, American,
words) Australian English texts (c. 850K words)
Kohlapur corpus of written Indian English (referred to as Text 1, Text 2, etc.) — manual
(1 million words) analysis of various samples
c. 500K London—Lund corpus of spoken British English Archive of screenplays (c. 450K words) (c. 500K words)
≤250K UTS/Macquarie corpus of spoken Australian Archive of Larry King interviews (c. 70K words) English (sub-part used: c. 250K words)
Word classes were traditionally called ‘parts of speech’, through mistranslation of the Greek term meroi logou, which actually meant ‘parts of a sentence’. These began, with the Sophists, as functional concepts, rather close to the Theme and Rheme of Chapter 3; but they were progressively elaborated into, and replaced by, a scheme of word classes, defined by the kinds of inflexion that different words underwent in Greek (and which were largely paralleled in Latin; see Robins, 1966, for an account of the development of the account of word classes in the European tradition): see Table 2(6).
Table 2(6)Classical definitions of word classes Inflection for: (defines) Word classes:
number, case noun
number, case, gender adjective
tense, person verb
(none) (other words)
This could have been carried further, to take account of inflexion for voice and aspect in verbs, and for comparison in adjectives and adverbs. But the criterion of inflexion will not serve all relevant word classes, even in a highly inflected language such as Greek or Latin;
and in languages with little or no inflexion, such as English or Chinese, other principles have to be invoked. These may be either grammatical or semantic, or some combination of the two.
There are many ways one word may be like another, and the resultant groupings do not always coincide; a word will typically be like one word in one respect and like a different word in another. For example,upperandlower (which may have the same function, as in upper case andlower case) both belong to the class of adjective; butloweris a comparative adjective, contrasting with low, whereas upperis not — we cannot say this roof is upper than that one. In this respect,loweris likehigher; but loweris also a verb, whereas higheris not — we cannot say that roof needs highering. Sometimes rather clear and definite criteria do present themselves, like grammatical inflexions with fairly consistent meanings; but often they do not, and in such instances the criteria on which classes are defined tend to be rather mixed, and membership of the classes rather indeterminate, with some items clearly belonging and others whose status is doubtful.
Consider for example the class of ‘noun’ in English. A general definition would involve both grammatical and semantic considerations, with some of the grammatical features having an overt manifestation and others not:
(semantic:) expresses a person, other being, inanimate object or abstraction, bounded or unbounded, etc.
(grammatical:) is either count or mass; if count, may be either singular or plural, plural usually inflected with-s; can be made possessive, adding -’s/-s’; can take thein front; can be Subject in a clause, etc.
C l a s s e s a n d f u n c t i o n s
When we say that something is a noun, in English, we mean that it displays these characteristics, or most of them, in common with some (but not all) other words in the language.
The word classes that we shall need to recognize in English are shown in Figure 2-8. We shall also refer to three classes of group: verbal group, nominal group, adverbial group (also preposition group and conjunction group); and to one class of phrase: prepositional phrase.
These will be clarified in the course of discussion (see Chapter 6); but we shall assume that the traditional word classes are reasonably familiar. We shall not need to discuss clause classes explicitly, although they are in fact present as part of the overall description, as in the distinction between major and minor clauses.
Theclassof an item indicates in a general way its potential range of grammatical functions.
Hence, words can be assigned to classes in a dictionary, as part of their decontextualized definition. But the class label does not show what part the item is playing in any actual structure. For that we have to indicate its function. The functional categories provide an interpretation of grammatical structure in terms of the overall meaning potential of the language as exemplified in Figure 2-9.
word
nominal
verbal
adverbial
noun
adjective numeral determiner verb
preposition adverb
conjunction
common proper pronoun
lexical auxiliary finite
linker binder continuative Fig. 2-8 Word classes recognized in a functional grammar of English
our daily deeds as ordinary must produce an actual South African reality that …
South Africans for a glorious life for all
[function] Actor Process Goal
[class] nominal group verbal group nominal group
Fig. 2-9 Function structure of clause with syntagm of classes realizing functions
The functional labels could be further elaborated to show what kind of Process, what kind of Goal, etc.; but this is not necessary to the description because these more delicate functions can be derived from the systemic analysis, which shows the features selected by any particular clause (in this case,seeChapter 5). An extended example of correspondences between classes and functions is given in Figure 2-10 on p. 54.
Note, however, that most elements of a clausal structure have more than one function in the clause.* This is where the concept of metafunction comes into play. We presented this in outline in Chapter 1; we will now explore its significance for the grammar by reference to one of the most familiar, and also most problematic, functional concepts in the Western grammatical tradition — that of Subject. This will then open the way into the metafunctional analysis of the English clause.