SUMMARY

Ika Kurniawati Khasanah / 2201409032

Rombel  03

ASSIGNMENT 5

SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS

Introduction

Systemic, or Systemic-Functional, theory has its origins in the main intellectual tradition of European linguistics that developed following the work of Saussure. Regarding to a development of scale-and-category grammar, the term ‘systemic’ derives from the term ‘system’, in its technical sense as defined by Firth (1957); system is the theoritical representation of paradigmatic relations, contrasted with ‘structure’ for syntagmatic relations. In Firth's system-structure theory, neither of these is given priority and this perspective was maintained. However, systematic theory regards that the system takes the priority. The most abstract representation at any level is in paradigmatic terms and the interpretation of syntagmatic organization as the ‘realization’ of paradigmatic features.

Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language centred around the notion of language function. SFL places the function of language as central (what language does, and how it does it) in the syntactic structure of language. SFL starts at social context, and looks at how language both acts upon, and is constrained by, this social context. A central notion is 'stratification', analysed in terms of Context, Semantics, Lexico-Grammar, and Phonology-Graphology. 

History of Systemics

            SFL grew out of the work of JR Firth, a British linguist of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, but was mainly developed by his student MAK Halliday. He developed the theory in the early sixties (seminal paper, Halliday 1961), based in England, and moved to Australia in the Seventies, establishing the department of linguistics at the University of Sydney.

            In child language development, Ruquaya Hasan has performed studies of interactions between children and mothers. SFL has also been prominent in computational linguistics, especially in Natural Language Generation, interpreted in some systemic generators, such as a multilingual text generator (KPML) by John Bateman, Genesys ny Robert Fawcett, WAG by Mick O’Donnell, and many others. 

Communication Planes : Language and Social Context

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics the oral and written texts we engage with and produce have their particular linguistic form because of the social purposes they fulfill. The focus is on the mutually predictive relationships between texts and the social practices they realise. Then, the interpretation of social context includes two communication planes, genre (context of culture) and register (context of situation) (Martin,1992:495). The context of culture can be thought of as deriving from a vast complex network of all of the genres which make up a particular culture. The context of situation of a text has been theorised by Halliday (Halliday and Hasan, 1985:12) in terms of the contextual variables of Field, Tenor and Mode. Language bridges from the cultural meanings of social context to sound or writing. It does this by moving from higher orders of abstraction, which is organised into three levels; semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology (or graphology) to lower ones.

Semantics is therefore concerned with the meanings that are involved with the three situational variables Field, Tenor and Mode. Ideational meanings, that are realised lexicogrammatically by the system of Transitivity, realise Field. Interpersonal meanings, that are realised lexicogrammatically by systems of Mood and Modality and by the selection of attitudinal lexis, realise Tenor. Textual meanings, that are realised by systems of Theme and Information, realise Mode. Thus, lexicogrammar itself is a resource for wording meanings, ie. realising them as configurations of lexical and grammatical items.