Systemic Grammar*

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Review article

Systemic grammar*

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RICHARD HUDSON

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M. A. K. Halliday: An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold, 1985. 387 + xxxv pp. £14.95.

C. S. Butler: Systemic Linguistics: Theory and Applications. London: Batsford, 1985. 259+ix pp. £19.95.

Both the books under review are about systemic grammar (SG), a theory unfamiliar to many readers, so the review starts with a brief historical account of SG. This is followed by a review of the book by Halliday, in which I concentrate on matters of coverage and presentation. The next sections deal with a number of general issues which SG raises, and finally I turn to Butler's book.

1. Historical background

'Systemic grammar' is a name which was coined in the mid-1960s for a theory which Halliday was then developing. (The initiated pronounce it /sisti:mik/; the name comes from the key concept, the 'system', which is just a set of alternatives.) The precursor of systemic grammar was called 'scale and category' grammar (after the two main relations distinguished in Halliday 1961). This was a rather different theory which was less well developed in some important respects, so the difference of name is important. More recently, however, the name 'systemic functional grammar' is often used, but as far as I can see the theories called 'systemic grammar' and 'systemic functional grammar' are more or less the same.

Halliday's ideas were based on those of J. R. Firth, under whom he studied in London, and like Firth's they comprise a comprehensive theory of language structure which applies to all levels. Halliday himself has made significant contributions t6 work at all levels (except morphology):

Linguistics 24 (1986), 791-815

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phonology (especially intonation), lexis (which is roughly what others mean by '[the theory of] the lexicon'), syntax, semantics, pragmatics (especially in relation to cohesion and socially significant variation). He has also worked on language acquisition and on the relations between language and social structure and has been deeply involved for the last two decades in the application of linguistics to school education. He has published on all parts of this broad spectrum, and interested readers will find a complete list of references in the book by Butler reviewed below.

SG is for many synonymous with 'Hallidayan linguistics', which covers all these many fields of interest. This is entirely to be expected (in view of the way in which 'Chomskyan linguistics' is used as the name for one of the main alternatives) and reflects the dominant influence which Halliday has held since the start of the theory. This at least has the advantage, for the reviewer, of making it relatively easy to sort out what counts as 'true' SG: that which Halliday propounds. This is helpful because various other linguists have developed Halliday's ideas in their own directions and have ended up with very different theories which could be included under the label 'SG' only at the cost of enormous confusion. (I myself am an example, and 1 have been careful to minimize confusion by using names other than 'SG' for my ideas once they became clearly incompatible with Halliday's.) The identification of SG with Hallidayan linguistics has a disadvantage, however, which is that SG then comes to include any area of linguistic work in which Halliday has engaged, whether or not it has anything specifically to do with the theory of language structure called SG. I have in mind here the work on cohesion (Halliday and Hasan 1976) and much of the work on social structure and language and on language in education. The question how much of this work is 'really' part of SG is clearly not worth pursuing, but the fact remains that for many people there is no clear distinction between SG and the kind of humane linguistic endeavor which Halliday advocates and practices.

The school called SG is alive and well, socially speaking. Each year a 'systemic workshop' is organized and attended by a hundred or so linguists, and in recent years these events have been retitled 'international systemic workshops' in recognition of the fact that their participants come not only from Britain but also from North America and Australia (where Halliday is now working) - indeed, several recent workshops have been held in North America. Several linguistics departments are predominantly Hallidayan in orientation, and 1 have the impression that the same is true of very many language departments in teacher-training institutions. Not many schools of linguistics can boast such organizational success (one thinks of GLOW as the Chomskyan counterpart, but

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there is no comparable standing organization for any other school that I know of), so it demands explanation.

One reason is certainly that a lot oflinguists are attracted by Halliday's general philosophy, especially in contrast with the rather dry-as-dust and daunting wares offered by the alternative theories. Halliday is interested in the relations between language and people, and many people with similar interests find his work stimulating. Another reason is that Halliday offers a comprehensive analysis of English grammar which is relatively easy to apply to texts - something which no other school has to offer. This has obvious attractions for applied linguists of various typesnot least for computational linguists, who have taken SG very seriously since Winograd used it to make SHRDLU work (Winograd 1972, 1983). Yet another reason for the organizational success is the energy and efficiency of Fawcett, one of the leading advocates of SG (Fawcett 1980) and the founder of the systemic workshops.

And yet, for all this success, SG remains largely unknown except to the initiated. Very few papers in refereed linguistics journals use SG, or even refer to it as such (though the work on cohesion, for example, is quite often referred to). Indeed, the bibliography in Butler's book contains only three examples of such papers published since 1970 (Hudson 1973,1974; McCord 1975). There has been no shortage of either books about SG or articles about it in anthologies or in departmental working papers, but it is easy to understand why most linguists confess to more or less complete ignorance about SG. Not surprisingly, SG has had little effect on other theories (except for those which, like my own, are direct descendants), but the converse is unfortunately also true: SG shows little sign of being influenced by work in other theories. Halliday complains (p. xxviii) that 'it is often difficult to maintain a dialogue' with other theories, but a good deal more effort could have been made by systemic linguists to establish this dialogue - by listening and learning as well as by talking. If this had happened there might have" been more direct critical comment by outsiders, something which Butler (p. 77) regrets the lack of. Without such a change of attitude, SG looks set to sail on into the next century as an autonomous school of linguistics unaffected by the developments in other schools.

2. Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar

This (henceforward: IFG) is an introductory book about English grammar within the framework of SG. It is introductory in that it assumes no knowledge about linguistic analysis, so for example the first chapters

794 R. Hudson

introduce notions like 'constituency' and 'structure'; but as so often happens in 'introductory' books the pace accelerates rapidly and some of the later chapters become very hard work. (He warns us [po xxxiv] that the writing becomes dense in places; he is right.) It is mainly about English, with very few references to other languages, and indeed rather few references to theoretical issues which would justify the title of the book. It would perhaps have been more helpful to call it something like 'A functional introduction to English grammar'. Facts about English grammar are not brought in to exemplify theoretical matters; rather, the book sets out to give a more or less complete overview of English grammar and is organized accordingly (with a chapter on transitivity, one on the structure of the phrase, and so on).

In case the above gives the impression that IFG is a run-of-the-mill book about English grammar, I must stress that it is not. It is very unusual in most respects one can imagine. The order of presentation is unusual - he starts with poetry to illustrate the nature of linguistic structure, for example. The content is unusual, precisely because this is the grammar that he has been developing over the last two decades, largely without influence from outside (so far as one can tell). The book is stuffed with analyses which could not be matched from other theories or which conflict with analyses offered in terms of other theories. The coverage is unusual - he tends to continue his analyses at the points where other linguists give up in despair, such as intonation, topicalization, adverbials, and the fuzzy area where sentence structure fades into discourse structure. And the presentation is unusual - for instance, his examples are unusually well chosen not only for making the relevant point but also for their inherent interest; a good many are from Alice in Wonderland but there is a fair sprinkling of extracts from taped conversations. IFG is a challenging book - it challenges those of us who are outsiders to see if we can produce anything as impressive in its scope and internal consistency. It is important to bear this in mind in reading the following critical remarks, because I know of only two other attempts to present a unified, theoretically based account of a comparably large section of English grammar, namely the 'UCLA' grammar of Stockwell et al. (1973) and Huddleston (1984), a work which owes a lot to Halliday's influence. For one person to have produced IFG is an achievement to be respected, whatever its shortcomings.

The shortcomings are, unfortunately, numerous. Two are obvious at a first glance. There is no index at all, which makes the book virtually impossible to use as a 'resource for the interpretation of texts' (p. xx). The lack of an index is noted (p. xii) but we are told that the table of contents should do instead. This is certainly not the case for at least one reader

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(me). For example, say I wanted to find out what the book has to say about relative clauses, where do I look? Once you know the system, you know to turn up the sections labeled 'Experiential structure of the nominal group: interpretation of ordering; the Qualifier' and 'Elaboration' (in the chapter on 'The clause complex') - among others. But it would surely take several very careful readings of the book to reach the point where this skill is acquired - and I doubt if many readers would miss the opportunity to build up their own index on the way. It amazes me that the publishers agreed to publish the book without an index, as it must halve the value of the book for its most important population of potential users, those who want a detailed grammatical analysis which they can apply to texts. As it is, these customers will surely turn to one of the more conventional grammars such as Quirk et al. (1972), although in many ways Halliday's grammar is better - at least it is a serious attempt at a fully integrated analysis.

The other obvious point about the book is the total lack of references to the literature. (The one exception that I noticed was a short list of systemic works on p. 315.) All we are given is a bibliography of more or less relevant systemic publications at the end of the book, without any guidance as to the areas they cover. We .are not even told that large portions of the book are very similar to things published by Halliday himself elsewhere; for example, chapters 3 to 5 are very similar in content to his seminal articles, 'Notes on transitivity and theme', published in three parts as Halliday (1967a, 1967b); and chapter 9 summarizes the contents of Halliday and Hasan (1976).

Whether or not one takes the lack of scholarly references as a shortcoming is a matter of opinion, and even of taste. It is true that the book is an introductory one, based on Halliday's lecture notes, and in this context it could be argued that references are out of place. Nevertheless my opinion is that it was a mistake to omit them. One reason is that other linguists are likely to turn to IFG as a convenient source of information on the current state of Halliday's thinking on English grammar (I certainly approached it myself in this way). For such readers the lack of references is disastrous, as they lose all time perspective. Is this all new, or has some of it been published before? Those who are not familiar with Halliday's earlier publications have no way of knowing that many of the ideas were first published up to 20 years ago and might be forgiven for thinking that in some cases they are predated by work which in fact was itself influenced by them. (I think for example of the work by Dik on semantic relations in Dik 1978.) The lack of references is also unhelpful for beginners, who will get no sense of historical perspective and no encouragement to read further.

Since the material in this book has clearly been gestating for a long time, one would expect the successive reworkings and revisions (which are mentioned in the Foreword) to have ironed out all serious inconsistencies. Curiously, this does not seem to be the case. For example,

- The Greeks started with morphology according to p. xiv, but with rhetorical effect according to p. xxiii.

- Every independent clause selects for mood, and some such clauses are minor, for p. 44; but for p. 61 minor clauses do not select for mood. - In the sample text on p. 65 he marks off two relative clauses but misses two more (he could do about it and he could offer).

- On page 229 he introduces the term 'metaphenomenon' as though it had not previously been used ('We will refer to this as a "metaphenomenon".'); but it actually occurs frequently on previous pages (such as p. 227).

- There is a section headed 'Tonicity' (p. 273) which does not mention tonicity once, either by name or otherwise.

If a second edition of the book is produced I hope the publishers will consider serious revisions, to cover slips like these, and the production of

an index at the very least.

A deeper problem with the presentation is the level of argumentation

or rather, the lack of it. If one were asked to pick out the most important differences between modem linguistics and traditional grammar, I think most of us would agree that the list should include the fact that we now see that analyses are not God-given but need to be justified, whereas traditional grammar tends to take the form of dogma passed on from generation to generation. Any book, whether introductory or not, should show how the analyses have been arrived at; indeed, this is arguably even more important in an introductory book than in a scholarly monograph, since one is trying to bring the novice to some understanding of how linguists work. Otherwise we are simply perpetuating the era of dogma in which traditional grammar flourishes. But in IFG it is hard to find any passage which suggests that the analyses presented are at all problematic, less still any which attempt to justify these analyses in relation to the alternatives which are available.

The ex-cathedra tone would perhaps be justified if the analyses were self-evidently right, and it would be unreasonable to ask for step-by-step justification of every single analysis (I suspect this would lead to an infinite regress and paralysis in the writer, not to mention boredom in the reader). However, this is hardly the case in IFG - in fact Halliday warns us (p. xxxiv) that his descriptions break with the established tradition, so we might expect a good deal of discussion of tJ:leir pros and cons. Let me again give some examples of places where his analyses and claims seem to

be less than obviously right - in fact, where they seem to face fairly obvious problems - and where some attempt at justification would have been in order.

- He claims that speech functions are of four kinds, OFFER, COMMAND, STATEMENT, and QUESTION, and that these are related on two dimensions: giving versus demanding, and involving goods-andservices versus information (p. 69). This classification means that OFFER and QUESTION are maximally different (i.e. differ on both dimensions), so why is it that both are realized, in contrast with the other types, as interrogative clause structures?

- He tells us that common noun, adjective, numeral, and determiner are all kinds of NOUN (p. 164). This mayor may not be a good analysis, but at least it conflicts both with the traditional analyses and with other current ones, so some explanation is called for.

- He analyzes constructions containing direct speech as cases of parataxis (two equal parts, without subordination); so Brutus said: 'Caesar was ambitious'. has a structure similar to that of a pair of coordinated clauses (p. 228). If the two parts are equal, why is there an asymmetry between them, such that the reported may be enclosed in the reported (e.g. 'Caesar,' said Brutus, 'was ambitious'.), but not vice versa (* Brutus 'Caesar was ambitious', said.)? and why can't the reporting occur without the reported (as in * Brutus said.)?

Many of his analyses involve symmetrical tables whose very symmetry could perhaps be taken as a justification of the analyses; but this symmetry is sometimes questionable, as in the table on p. 113 whose symmetry depends on the assumption that the reversibility of Tom is the leader (cf. The leader is Tom) is found also in The piano is Peter's, compared with Peter's is the piano. But why, then, is it possible to say The