Halliday, M.A.K. “Ideas About Language.” On Language and Linguistics. Ed. Jonathan J. Webster. London: Continuum, 2003. Print.
“Much of our adult folk linguistics is no more than misremembered classroom grammar (or was, in the days when there still was classroom grammar); it may be wrong, but it is certainly not naive” (20).
Introduction
I chose this epigraph to begin this post to stir up questions surrounding what we mean by “grammar.” For most, grammar is the collective folk linguistics, the rules we remember, or misremember, from elementary school. Viewing language as a resource for meaning making, instead of a set of rules, opens up grammar’s rhetorical possibilities.
In “Ideas About Language,” Halliday surveys the history of linguistics, a period spanning several millennia, with particular emphasis on the origins and development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), which Halliday situates within the rhetorical tradition. SFL is a functional grammar concerned with analyzing language within social context. SFL has a variety of theoretical and practical applications and is used in social semiotics, genre pedagogy, critical discourse analysis (CDA), multimodal discourse analysis, and natural language processing (NLP).
Language as Rule vs. Language as Resource
Halliday explores the ontogenesis, or biological development of the individual, to trace “what is it that people naturally know about language” (20). Halliday asks, “What does a child know about language before his insights are contaminated by theories of the parts of speech,” which children learn once they go to school (20). The crux of Halliday’s argument is that children initially see language as a resource, a way to enact meaning, structure experience, a way to fulfill one’s needs and desires, until children go to school and are taught to see language as a set of rules: “language will be superseded by the folk linguistics of the classroom, with its categories and classes, its rules and regulations, its do’s and, above all, its don’ts” (22).
The Rhetorical Origins of SFL: Ethnographic vs Philosophical Traditions
Though it may be an overly broad generalization, Halliday assigns the two views of language – language as resource and language as rule – to two different schools of linguistic tradition, the ethnographic and philosophical schools. Halliday traces the origins of the ethnographic movement, which SFL is a part, back to the Sophists, who were concerned “with the nature of argumentation, and hence with the structure of discourse,” as opposed to “truth” with a capital T (23). The philosophical tradition, represented by Chomsky’s formal grammar, goes back to Aristotle and is concerned with logic and absolute truth. Halliday’s descriptive, ethnographic approach stresses linguistic variety understood in social context, while the Chomskyan approach looks for universals in language (27). The Chomskyan, universalist approach has been criticized for being “ethnocentric” by “judg[ing] all languages as peculiar versions of English,” as well as relying too heavily on formalized rules based on an idealized version of “perfect” English (27). Yet, Chomskyan linguistics is still the dominant form of linguistics within English Studies.
Discussion
What I find most exciting about Halliday’s work are the potential applications for SFL within rhetoric, composition, and new media. Halliday argues that SFL is “the functional grammar of rhetoric” and then goes on to situate a functional grammatical approach in the rhetorical tradition. SFL shows untapped potential as a rhetorical language within English Studies, which sometimes suffers from a lack of shared metalanguage and systemization of methods, and tends to look at texts in isolation instead of social context. In English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s), McComiskey notes the importance of social context as “crucial to a full and productive understanding of English studies that has the potential for relevance outside of academia” (44).
Additionally, while multimodal composition has focused on student production of multimodal texts, a less explored and perhaps more pertinent topic is how students will analyze, interpret, and write about multimodal texts, which SFL, as a metalanguage and framework, helps facilitate.
I have done a preliminary study on how students can use SFL as a metalanguage to analyze and write about multimodal texts in a first-year writing course, using Kress and van Leeuwen’s sociosemiotic framework from Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. This semester, while teaching multimodal visual analysis in a unit on research and argumentation examining advertising and consumerism, I hope to make more explicit connections between SFL as a metalanguage for visual analysis and SFL as a language to analyze traditional texts and understand genres.