Options and Functions in the English Clause (1969)

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5800976
AutoresMark Halliday (autor correspondente)
Ano2005
Páginas154-163
Data de publicação2005-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoOTHER
PeriódicoStudies in English Language (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2355-2794 • E-ISSN: 2461-0275
EditoraBloomsbury Publishing (UK) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5040/9781474211970.ch-004
OpenAlexW186663356
ISBN9781474211970
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas16

In his excellent summary of the work of the Prague school, Josef Vachek draws attention to the development by Czechoslovak linguists of the 'functionalist' view of linguistic structure. One of the characteristics of this approach has been the recognition of several components in the organization of the grammar of a language, a conception which Vachek shows to be derivable from the work of Mathesius and of Biihler. The importance of this conception appears very clearly from a study of the systems and structures of the English clause. The systems having the clause as their point of origin group themselves into three sets which I have referred to elsewhere under the headings of transitivity, mood and theme. These labels refer specifically to sets of clause systems, which are however relatable to these general components of the grammar. Those of transitivity belong to that area which Vachek derives from Biihler's 'Darstellungsfunktion' and glosses as 'informing of the factual, objective content of extralinguistic reality'; Danes calls it the 'semantic structure' of the sentence. Those of mood express speech function, the relations among the participants in a speech situation and the speech roles assigned by the speaker to himself and his interlocutors; this includes most of Poldauf's 'third syntactical plan', and embraces both of Biihler's additional functions-the speaker's attitude and his attempt to influence the hearer-though excluding (as outside grammar) the paralinguistic indexical signals. Theme is the clausal part of Mathesius' 'functional sentence analysis', Danes' 'organization of utterance', which continues to be studied extensively by Firbas and others; this concerns the structuring of the act of communication within the total framework of a discourse, the delimitation of message units and the distribution of information within them. Thus the English clause embodies options of three kinds, experiential, interpersonal and intratextual, specifying relations among (respectively) elements of the speaker's experience, participants defined by roles in the speech situation, and parts of the discourse. Although the clause options do not exhaust the expression of these semantic relations-other syntactic resources are available, quite apart from the selection of lexical items-the clause provides the domain for many of the principal options associated with these three components. At the same time it is useful to recognize a fourth component, the logical, concerned with the and's and or's and if's of language; this is often subsumed under the first of those above (e.g. by Danes; cf. n. 4 above) with some general label such as 'cognitive', but it is represented by a specific set of structural resources (hence not figuring among the clause options) and should perhaps rather be considered separately. Let us then suggest four such generalized components in the organization of the grammar of a language, and refer

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