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1、SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR: A FIRST STEP INTO THE THEORY Christian Matthiessen more specifically, it is the system of wordings of a language. It is a phenomenon that can be studied, just like light, physical motion, the human body, and decision-making processes in bureaucracies; and just as in the
2、case of these and other phenomena under study, we need theory in order to interpret it. So for instance, the physical phenomenon of the atom has been interpreted theoretically in terms of Democritus theory, Rutherfords theory, Bohrs theory, and so on. We distinguish between the phenomenon itself (th
3、e atom) and various theoretical models of it. What kind of thing the atom is thought to be will of course vary considerably as we move from one theory to another. Democritus atom was very different from Bohrs atom, in that it was indivisible, not a configuration of subatomic particles; that is, Demo
4、critus theory allowed us to see much less of the atom than Bohrs theory does. A well-known example of the way theory determines how we interpret phenomena is light. Light can be interpreted either as particle or as wave; there are two alternative theories. In this case, the alternatives turn out to
5、be complementary, in the sense that each reveals something about light that we need to account for. This situation is quite typical in science: we need complementary theoretical perspectives to account for the rich diversity of properties we uncover in the phenomena being studied. Grammar as a pheno
6、menon of study is thus interpreted according to different theories. So as to maintain the distinction between grammar and theories of grammar, we shall call theory of grammar grammatics. The distinction is analogous to that between language and linguistics, or between society and sociology. The diff
7、iculty is that people often use the same term for both the phenomenon and its study: e.g. we speak of the “grammar of English“ (the phenomenon) but also of “traditional grammar“ (one theory of the phenomenon). We could clarify this situation if we called the second “traditional grammatics“. Our conc
8、ern here is thus with systemic- functional grammatics; and we shall illustrate how it can be used in the study of grammar with examples from the grammars of Chinese, English, and Japanese. Grammar (as a phenomenon) is part of language; it is the “system of wordings“, as we put it above. But how it i
9、s conceptualized will depend on our grammatics. In the history of thinking about language in the West, there have been two somewhat different theoretical perspectives. Both have their origins in Ancient Greece; there have been many variations, but we can still trace these two strands of thinking tod
10、ay. In one, language is a set of rules rules for specifying structures; so grammar is a set of rules for specifying grammatical structures, such as the construction of a transitive sentence with verb + object. This perspective is that of logic and philosophy, e.g. in the foregrounding of the sentenc
11、e as the basic unit of language, organized on a logical model into Subject + Predicate. Since the sentence is the basic unit, it is studied in isolation. In the other view, language is a resource a resource for making meanings; so grammar is a resource for creating meaning by means of wording. This
12、perspective is that of rhetoric and ethnography, e.g. in the foregrounding of text (discourse) as the basic unit of language, organized according to the rhetorical context. Since text is the basic unit, the sentence is studied in its discourse environment. The kind of grammatics that is usually pres
13、ented in school is a diluted version of the grammar as rule type of theory. It presents rules of grammar in terms of words in sentences, with words serving functions such as Subject, Predicate, Object, and Adverbial. As a theory, it falls far short of the demands that are now being made on grammatic
14、al theories. On the one hand, it takes over too much from the European languages it was first applied to, starting with Greek and Latin; hence it is of limited value in interpreting the grammars of non-European languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese or the languag
15、es of other regions and continents. On the other hand, it builds in too little of the overall grammatical system of language. It allows us to see only a small fragment of grammar and does not provide us with a way of interpreting the overall organization of the grammar of a language as a system of i
16、nformation. At this stage in history we need a richer theory of grammar to meet the challenges of the age of information e.g. in education (how to organize 3 and give access to knowledge) and in computation (how to achieve the automatic processing of text). We are also in a position to learn more about grammar thanks to technical innovations: the tape recorder allows us to store and examine spoken language, and the computer allows us to manipulate vast amounts of text (spoke
