功能语法

Ⅰ. Introduction

From Firth’s theories in the London School, Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday developed his own theories of language, which is systemic functional grammar. His systemic functional grammar is a sociologically oriented functional linguistic approach and it is also one of the most influential linguistic theories in the 20th century. His grammar has exerted a great influence on various disciplines related to language, such as sociolinguistics, stylistics, machine translation, especially on language teaching and discourse analysis. This paper explores the application of systemic functional grammar in analysis of the discourse. This paper adopts the textual metafuction in analysis of context, structure of theme, and transivity in the discourse.

The paper falls into four parts. The first part is the general introduction of the content in the paper. In the second part, the brief introduction of systemic functional grammar is presented. In the third part, the application of systemic functional grammar in analysis of the discourse from context, theme, and transivity aspects are discussed. The last part is the conclusion.

Ⅱ. Introduction of systemic functional grammar

In fact, systemic functional grammar is based on two facts: the first is, language users are actually making choices in a system and trying to realize different semantic functions in social interaction; the second is language is inseparable from social activities of man. Thus, it takes actual uses of language as the object of study.

According to Halliday’s theories, there are three metafunctions which are ideational metafunction , interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction. The ideational metafunction means people use language to describe their experience about the outside word and they also use language to describe what happened around them. The interpersonal metafunction means people use language to interact with each other, to establish and to maintain their relations. They also use language to influence other people’s actions or to express their point of view about the world. The last one is the textual matafunction which means the ways that people organize information. It presents the relation between information and the context when people read or write

(Thompson, 2008).

In fact, these three metafunctions are interrelated. They are closely connected during people’s interaction, discourse coherence, and mutual communication. Systemic functional grammar holds the view that language is the product of the society. As a method of people’s communication, it has various functions. It is a kind of textual grammar, and it can be used to analyze the discourse. Thus, the author holds the view that it is important to apply the discourse analysis which is guided by the systemic functional grammar into extensive reading.

Ⅲ. The application of systemic functional grammar to discourse analysis Discourse is a language unit which consists of a series of clauses. Discourse analysis is a method that is to understand the text from the whole point of view.

The paper adopts the systematic functional grammar to analyze the “The Expensive Fantasy of Lord Williams”from the context, theme, and transitivity aspects.

3.1 context

The formation of any discourse can not be separated from the context, which includes the circumstances, society, culture, and surrounding people or things. Thus, if we want to have a deep understanding of the discourse, the context should come into consideration first. “context is the environment and basis for generating discourse, and there is no discourse which can get rid of the context”(Halliday, 2004). Halliday concluded three factors that determine the situational elements of language features which are: field, tenor and mode. He thought that these three elements are in accordance with the three metafunctions which are ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, and textual metafunction.

In the text “The Expensive Fantasy of Lord Williams”, the field is: an office worker named Anthony Williams who in order to maintain his imagination of Scotch nobility constantly stole money from London police office, at last, he was sent into the prison. The tenor of the text is Willianms who imagined himself as nobility and the common villagers, their social status are quietly different. The mood of the text is the formal written English. According to the analysis of the three elements of the

situational context, we can have a deep insight of the text. It is helpful to understand the semantic and the style of the text

3.2 theme

From the systemic functional point of view, the clauses are divided into theme and rheme. From the information structure, the theme of a clause is simply the first constituent of the clause (Thompson, 2008). It is the start point of the information. Generally speaking, what the theme expresses is the known information. The new information is presented in the rheme. According to the location of the known information and new information, we can infer the location of useful information when we read a text. We can omit the information occurred in the previous, thus we can improve the reading speed. In this text, most of the themes are unmarked. Meanwhile, there are still marked themes. The occurrence of the marked theme means that the clause is expressing an implicit meaning. In the text, time adverbials and place adverbials are used as marked theme, and according to them, we can know the time sequence and the place changing of the text. Thus, it is helpful to understand the structure and content of the text. The purpose to study the theme is to know the distribution of the core information in the discourse. If we can correctly find the theme and rheme in a clause, we can easily find the starting point of the speaker.

According to the theme, we can easily hold the structure of the text. 1-5 paragraphs is the first part, which introduced the background, such as time, place and character; the 6-8 paragraphs mainly contains verbal process, which talked about the villagers’reaction to Williams’imprison. 9-14 paragraphs mainly contain material process, which talked about the crime of Williams and how he spent this money. 15-17 is the last part of the text, which also contains material process and verbal process. Thus, in reading we should pay attention to the implicit information in the theme so that we can improve the reading speed.

3.3 transitivity

Transitivity is an important semantic system of the experiential metafuction. In particular, it refers to a system for describing the whole clause, rather than just the verb and its object (Thompson, 2008). In the transitivity clause, we have doer, process,

and circumstances. There are six processes in the transitivity system: material process, mental process, relational process, verbal process, behavioral process and existential process. It is quietly different from the traditional grammar. These six processes involve some factors such as entity, time, space, and circumstance. That is transitivity.

In the text we read, there are all together 79 processes, which include 55 material processes, 9 relational processes, 6 verbal processes,3 mental process and 3 existential processes. The material process accounts for 69.9% of the whole, relational processes 11.4%, verbal process 7.6%, mental processes 3.8% and existential process 3.8%. From the number, it is obvious to see that material process occupies the largest percent. The material process is the description of the author’s experience of the out side word. The text talked about how Willians made up such an expensive dream. This adjusts to the style of the text. The relational process shows the relationship between the objects, and it is a description and judgment of the objects. In the text, Willians lived in his noble dream. He regarded himself as a lord, and he had to pay high price for this. Verbal process is the process which people use language to communicate with each other. In the text, Williams who drove by the greedy stole much money, but according to villagers’ speech, we can recognize that, the villagers till had a thankful passion to him.

Ⅳ.Conclusion

It is hard to apply Halliday’s systemic functional grammar into text analysis completely. But it is helpful to use his theories when we analyze a text. From the above analysis, we hope to reach two aims: first, through the systemic functional grammar of the discourse, we can understand the context of the text; also we can know the structures and features of a text. Thus we will have a deep insight of the text. Second, knowing the theme and rheme, we can find the relation between different information which can develop our reading skills.

In the last of the paper, the author wants to say that it is the first time that the author is exposed to systemic functional grammar. In the author’s point of view, the systemic functional grammar is a new way to deal with grammar. It is quite different from the traditional grammar. In studying systemic functional grammar, the author has

made a great progress in language study and this led her deep into the filed of language.

References

Halliday,M.A.K.An Introduction to Functional Gramma r [M]. London: Edward Arnold, 2004.

Geoff Thompson. Introducing Functional Grammar. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2008.

胡壮麟.语境研究的多元化[J].外语教学与研究, 2002, (3).

胡壮麟,朱永生,张德禄,李战子.系统功能语言学概论[M].北京:北京大学出版社, 2005.

刘润清, 封宗信. 语言学理论与流派. 南京: 南京师范大学出版社, 2006.

The Application of Systemic Functional Grammar to

Discourse Analysis

英语语言文学

201110651

2011级

远洋