One subdiscipline that has potential for bringing Halliday's notion of transitivity is lexical semantics and its extension to syntactic governance.  Beth Levin's English Verb Classes is nice example of the syntactic implications of different types of transitivity.

Herb Stahlke

<<< [log in to unmask] 11/ 2  9:37a >>>
I want to apologize first of all for having the wrong publisher for An
Introduction to Functional Grammar.   It's Edward Arnold (1994).  Oxford
is the publisher of Spoken and Written Language (1989), which is indeed
the test on spoken language I referred to.  My computer is at work and
my books are at home, and I shouldn't rely on memory.

     I don't want to get too caught up in turf wars.  I would, if
anything, like to be a synthesizer and a healer.  What I find most
immediately usable out of Halliday is the notion of subject functions
(actor etc., grammatical subject, and theme), and the attempt at least
to map out representational meanings beyond the very clumsy division
into subject and direct object that traditional grammar has given us.
The boy kicking the ball is much, much different from the man admiring
Ghandi, and Ghandi and the ball are affected in remarkably different
ways.  I want to say also as a writer and a writing teacher, that I am
at work in the making of meanings and at work in helping other people
make meaning making decisions.  Whether or not Halliday is able to
account for all forms as functionally driven is absolutely irrelevant in
that day to day task. A doctor and a research biologist have different
problems to solve, and mine is much closer to the doctors.  The deep
problem in using his work in a practical grammar text in the U.S. is
that the terms are so foreign to those front line teachers who will be
using the text and the students exposed to them will go on to other
courses and have no one to talk to. (Though my students who have gone on
to do grammatical analysis in English classes have baffled their
teachers, but impressed them as well.  It conveys an interesting power.)
Since reading Halliday, I find it useful to think of all verbs as
processes and all verbs as carrying their own transitivity.  Mental
process is a rough category, but a highly useful one. (Itself broken
down into sensing, feeling, and thinking.)  If categories get fuzzy at
the boundaries, that does not diminish their usefulness so much as
affirm, once again, that language is larger than our attempts to
understand and explain it.
     Let me say it this way, and not at all as an attempt to knock what
anyone is doing in this marvelous enterprise.  A purely descriptive or
purely formal grammar, as important as that may be in the grand
intellectual scheme of things, will not and cannot solve the problem of
what to teach our kids.  For all the problems of traditional grammar, it
does attempt to be functional, and we will not be able to replace it
until we can  do so with a more functional alternative.



                        

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