The simple sentence in traditional grammar and the clause simplex in systemic functional grammar: a comparative study

TABLE OF CONTENTS General Introduction 1. Rationale The history of linguistics has seen the endless development of different approaches, each of which defines its own tasks, scopes and objectives. Of the grammatical approaches, traditional grammar (TG) considers sentence as the largest unit in the grammatical system of a language, and the study of grammar is primarily concentrated around the study of sentence. Because of its earlier foundation, traditional grammar has largely influenced on linguistics in general and on language teaching in particular in several parts of the world, including Vietnam. For a long time, sentence has been the main content of grammar teaching at schools. As a result, the concept of sentence has become very familiar to many people. Until recently, there has witnessed the flourish of systemic functional grammar (SFG) during the late 20th century and its great influence on language research and teaching. Among the units recognized for study in functional grammar, clause represents as a crucial one. Clause description has been found not only in English but also in Vietnamese although the studies on Vietnamese clause are found in a small number. Since functional grammar is still new in Vietnam, the term clause has often been confused and misunderstood, even some linguists argue that the term sentence should be used instead of the clause. Therefore, the questions to ask would be “What does the clause really mean?”, “Is it completely the same as the sentence in traditional grammar?” The thesis aims at exploring the notion of sentence in traditional grammar and clause in functional grammar, at the same time making comparison between them to see in what ways they are similar and different. 2. Aims of the study Within the framework of an MA thesis the study aims to: - investigate how the sentence in English and Vietnamese is conceptualized and described in traditional grammar. - investigate how the clause in English and Vietnamese is conceptualized and described in functional grammar. - compare and comment on similarities and differences between the two approaches in conceptual and descriptive terms. 3. Scopes of the study This study deals with comparison between the sentence in TG and the clause in SFG, with concentration on the investigation of the simple sentence in TG and its counterpart in SFG - the clause simplex. 4. Methods of the study To fulfill the aims of the study, the main methods used for study are generalized, descriptive and comparative. Firstly, a generalization will be made to provide an overlook on TG and SFG. The descriptive and comparative are primarily concerned with the description and the comparison of the sentence and the clause. The description will be illustrated with the two languages: English and Vietnamese. Examples are selected from different sources, but primarily from short stories in English and Vietnamese. Examples from grammar books written by famous grammarians are also taken as the source for illustration. Although both English and Vietnamese are taken as source languages, English is adopted to be the main reference source. The reason for this adoption is that English is the language which has been most extensively and comprehensively described in many parts of the world under the framework of both traditional and systemic functional approaches. The description of the sentence in the second chapter is based on the categories and definitions in various traditional studies, but mainly in Quirk et al. (1985), Leech & Svartvik (1975), Cobuild (1991), Delahunty & Garvey (1994). The description of clause is mostly based on the model given in Halliday (1994). Works by some other systemic functional linguists are also consulted, including Downing and Locke (1992), Morley (2000), Bloor (1994), Eggins (1994), etc. The invaluable reference sources in Vietnamese include the following publications: TrÇn Träng Kim (1941), Tr­¬ng V¨n Ch×nh & NguyÔn HiÕn Lª (1963), NguyÔn Kim Th¶n (1964), Hoµng Träng PhiÕn (1980), Lª CËn et al. (1983), DiÖp Quang Ban (1986), Cao Xu©n H¹o (1991), Hoµng V¨n V©n (2002), DiÖp Quang Ban (2004). Apart from those publications named above, other studies are also consulted when necessary. 5. Design of the study The study is organized around three parts: introduction, main content and conclusion. Introduction – presents the rationale of the study, the aims of the study, scopes of the study and methods of the study. Chapter One – General Conceptualization – is concerned with the theoretical preliminaries: the framework of TG and SFG for describing the sentence and the clause. Chapter Two - The Simple Sentence in Traditional Grammar – investigates how the sentence is conceptualized and described in TG. Chapter Three – The Clause Simplex in Systemic Functional Grammar – investigates how the clause is conceptualized and described in SFG. Chapter Four - Comparison – draws out the similarities and differences between the sentence and the clause. Conclusion - summarizes the main points discussed in the thesis and offers implications of the study and some suggestions for further research. chapter I general conceptualization Introduction This chapter is concerned with the theoretical preliminaries for the study. The first attempt is made to sketch out a brief history of grammatical study. After that, we shall generalize the most fundamental issues concerned with traditional grammar and systemic functional grammar. The last part of the chapter is devoted to the comparison to explore the distinguishing features of these two grammar schools. A brief history of grammatical study The study of grammar was initiated by the ancient Greeks, who engaged in philosophical speculation about languages and described language structure. This grammatical tradition was passed on to the Romans, who adopted the terminology and categories in Greek grammar to describe Latin. This type of grammar was then received and continued in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by the European society, and lasted until the rise of modern linguistics in the twentieth century. This study of grammar is known as traditional grammar. In addition, by the Middle Ages, European scholars generally knew, in addition to their own languages and Latin, the languages of their nearest neighbours. This access to several languages sets scholars to discovering that languages can be compared with one another. This discovery was the origin of later comparative philosophy. In the 18th century, the scholars developed systemic analyses to compare Sanskrit with German, Greek, Latin, etc. This writing of grammar is known as Indo-European grammar – a method of comparing and relating the forms of speech in numerous languages. Not until the early 20th did grammarians begin to describe languages on their own terms. Noteworthy in this regard were Boas’ and Jesperson’s works. Jesperson’s A Modern English Grammar (1909) was the precursor of such current approaches to linguistic theory as transformational generative grammar. Boas’s Handbook of American languages formed the basis of various types of American descriptive grammar. Given impetus by the fresh perspective of Boas, which saw grammar as description of how human speech in a language is organized, the approach to grammar known as descriptive linguistics became dominant in the U.S during the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, there was another approach to grammar in which descriptive linguistics developed precise and rigorous methods to describe the formal structural units in the spoken aspect of any language. The grammar that developed with this view is known as structural grammar. A structuralist grammar describes what relationships underlie all instances of speech in a particular language (what Saussure referred to as langue and parole). By the mid-20th century, Noam Chomsky developed the generative grammar. A generative grammar is a formal grammar that can in some sense “generate” the well- formed expressions of a natural language. His universal theories are related to the ideas of those 18th and early 19th century grammarians who urged that grammar be considered a part of logic – a key to analyzing thought. In the history of grammatical study, there have always existed two opposite variables in the way grammars are written: functional and formal. Although there are many cross-currents with insights borrowed from one to the other, they are ideologically fairly different. Functional grammar is the name given to any of a range of functionally–based approaches to the scientific study of language such as the grammar model of the Prague school, The Copenhagen school, or the grammar model developed by Simon Dik. A modern approach to combining accurate descriptions of the grammatical patterns of language with their function in context is that of systemic functional grammar, an approach originally developed by Michael A.K. Halliday in the 1960s and now pursued in all continents. Systemic functional grammar is related to the older functional traditions of European schools of linguistics as British Contextualism and the Prague schools. 1.3. Traditional grammar By traditional, grammar is usually used to refer to the grammar written by classical Greek scholars, the Roman grammars largely derived from the Greek tradition, the speculative work of the medieval and the prescriptive approach in the 18th century. The label is also applied to the grammars largely presented in school textbooks for both native and foreign language teaching that take the terminology from this tradition. Because of its pedagogical implication, traditional grammar is also labeled as “school grammar” or “pedagogical grammar”. Traditional grammar is criticized by a great many of modern linguists, especially the linguists of structural approach for certain reasons. The term is often used with clear unsupportive connotations reflecting the overtly prescriptive orientation of the school textbooks. The grammar is also criticized for its lack of a scientific approach for language study; i.e. it based largely on intuition about grammatical meaning rather than an overall theory or model of grammar. Also, the grammar is criticized for being atomistic and limited in scope. Although there has been much of criticism on traditional grammar, it should not be forgotten that traditional grammar represents the fruits of more than two thousand years of serious grammatical investigation, resulting in a great deal of grammatical terminology, many concepts and categories which are still widely used in the current theories of grammar, in textbooks and other resources on language. Dinneen (1967) pointed out that one of the possible virtues of traditional grammar is the fact that it is the most wide-spread, influential, and the best understood method of discussing Indo- European languages in the Western world. Indeed, a great many of traditional grammarians have provided invaluable source material and descriptive insights into the grammar of English. Noteworthy in the regard are Curme (1931-1935), Sweet (1891-98), Zandvolt (1972), and so on. Even certain contemporary approaches, such as that presented in Quirk et al. (1985), can also be characterized as traditional in their outlook, even though they are considerably more linguistically sophisticated than earlier descriptions (Trask, 1999). With regard to the background of Vietnamese grammatical study, it is not exaggerated to say that, in the early period (1850- 1935), most of Vietnamese grammarians profoundly adopted the model of grammar given by their conquered French scholars. (H. V. V©n, 2002). Since 1930 on, the study of grammar has extensively influenced by English grammar, French grammar and Russian grammar. Until recently, a great many of grammarians have still taken traditional grammar as the basic model for their study. Through out of the country, a mass of grammatical textbooks written under traditional perspective is used in schools for all levels, from primary to university education . The sentence is taken as a crucial grammatical unit. Study of syntax, which means study of sentence, is primarily concerned with definition of sentence, classification of sentence types and identification of sentence elements. In the twentieth century, language teaching continues to be formed on the word as the minimal unit and the sentence as the maximal. A typical work on grammar is traditionally divided into two parts, the first of which deals with parts of speech and the rest is often devoted to describing the sentence. Apart from the concepts related to parts of speech, traditional grammar developed a great deal of grammatical terminologies, including the terminology that refers to grammatical units (words, phrases, clauses, sentences), the terminology that refers to clause elements (subject, predicate, object, direct object, indirect object, complement, adverbial, transitivity, intransitivity, intensive, etc.), and the one that refers to categories such as gender, number, person, tense, mood, case, inflection, aspect, voice, relative, subordinate, dependent, independent and so on. These sets of terminology are familiar in current linguistic theories. In summary, traditional grammar is a label applied loosely to the range of attitudes and methods found in the period of grammatical study before the advent of linguistic science. The term “traditional grammar” is generally pejoratively used by modern linguists, identifying an unscientific approach to grammatical study in which languages were analyzed in terms of Latin, with insufficient regard for empirical facts. In current background, despite the fact that modern linguists reject it, traditional grammar is still the backbone of the grammar instruction given to the general population. Systemic Functional grammar Systemic functional grammar was originally articulated by M.A.K Halliday in the 1960s and has now come to be recognized as a major force in linguistics. Halliday, in Introduction to Functional Grammar, explains that his grammar is functional because the conceptual framework on which it is based is a functional one rather than a formal one. For Halliday, a language is “a system of meaning” because when people use language, their language acts are the expressions of meaning. From this point of view, the grammar becomes a study of how meanings are built up through the wording. The basic principle in Halliday’s functional grammar is that it approaches the language from a semantic point of view; more precisely, it examines the semantic functions of the language forms. The basic functions (metafunctions, such as ideational, interpersonal and textual function) around which Halliday’s theory is built, exist in all languages since these reflect the fundamental role of the human language in general. When we communicate and use a language as a means of communication, we rely on both our experience of reality and the world as well as on the experience of previous generations throughout history. The other important objective of using the language is that we want to say something to someone, to another person, and we can do this if we continuously refer our message to the context in which the participants of the particular discourse are involved. Although different languages can realize these functions in different ways, there are universal features of all languages. From this view, language is a resource for making meaning; so, ‘grammar is a resource for creating meaning in the form of wording’ (Halliday & Matthiessen, forth coming). In the history of thinking about language, there are two somewhat different theoretical perspectives. Some linguists have approached the study of language with account for formal aspects of the grammar largely divorced from meanings. They started by looking at words and sentences (language forms) and then asking how the forms of the language represent meaning. For Halliday, the only approach to the construction of grammars that is likely to be successful will be one that recognizes meaning and use as central features of language. It follows from this use that Halliday’s grammar is semantic (concerned with meaning), and functional (concerned with how the language is used). The systemic functional approach is increasingly being recognized as providing a very useful descriptive and interpretive framework for viewing language as strategic, meaning-making resources. (Eggins, 1991:1) Systemic functional grammar is concerned primarily with the choices that are made available to speakers of a language by their grammatical systems. These choices are assumed to be meaningful and related speaker’s intentions to the concrete forms of a language. The name “system grammar” is derived from the fact that a language is seen as being a huge, integrated series of system networks of meaning potential. This potential gives us a framework within which it makes sense to compare different choices. According to Halliday, every choice in a system is realized by a syntagmatic structure. A structure is a linear configuration of slots filled by some functional elements; i.e. syntagmatic relations give structures. While the systemic approach gives theoretical priority to paradigmatic relations, “its formalism through the system network, captures both paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations”. (Eggins, 1994: 213) 1.5. Some differences between SFG and TG 1.5.1, Theory of language and linguistics The first typical difference between the two grammars can be found from the privilege to the choices of dichotomy between langue and parole (Saussure), competence and communication (Labov), potential and actual (Halliday) or system and instance (Halliday). While formal linguists treat the concepts in each pair as the oppositions of each other, and they take the former ones (language, competence, system. etc) as the objective which linguistics should aim at. Functional systemic linguists consider the two concepts as equally important roles in defining what language is and what linguistics is. Language, in SFG is not something that is independent of the instance of use; language is really and only unfolds its meanings through the context in which it is used. Halliday claims that his grammar is at once both a grammar of the system and a grammar of the text (instance) of language use. We follow Saussure in his understanding of the relationship between the system of language and its instantiation in acts of speaking; although not in his implied conclusion, that once the text has been used as evidence for the system, it can be dispensed with - it has served its purpose. (Halliday, 1994: xxii) To support to the view regarding the text as the objective of linguistics along with the system, Halliday claims that both the system and text have to be in focus of attention: It is of little use having an elegant theory of the system if it cannot account for how the system engenders text; equally, it adds little to expatiate on a text if one cannot relate it to the system that lies behind it. (Halliday, 1994: xxii) Because systemic linguists put attention to both the systems of language and language in use (instance of use), their grammar simultaneously accounts for not only wordings (as the formal grammar schools) but also meanings (as the other functional grammar schools). 1.5.2. Syntagmatic grammar and paradigmatic grammar In TG, language is a set of rules , rules for specifying structures; so grammar is a set of rules for specifying structures, which are made up smaller elements, such as the construction of a transitive sentence with “verb + object”. The grammar is itself syntagmatic oriented. In contrast to formal grammar, SFG is paradigmatic in orientation. It interprets a language as a network of relations (systems of choices from the paradigms) with structures coming i