[On Friday, Craig Hancock
said:]
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.
Well said, Craig. Earlier in this strand, someone asked for just
one insight gained from SFG that could stand up to close scrutiny
(apologies if my wording isn't exact, though I'm pretty sure the derisive tenor
hits the mark). Well, like Craig, I think just the idea that
linguistics ought to be useful is pretty compelling for starters. I'm
not much of a linguist, I'm afraid. I mainly teach writing, and teachers who
teach writing. So I want a "consumer-oriented" linguistics, a view of
language that has heuristic value for my students. Those students want a view of
language that opens up a range of nuanced choices about the kinds of symbolic
actions they negotiate, the subject matters they engage, the role relationships
they enact. They want a view of language that helps them locate the positions
they occupy in the discourses that surround them, and to resist the ways others
position them. They want a view of language that helps them act in the
world. I don't see our more purely formal linguistics being very
relevant to these concerns.
As I said, I'm not enough of a linguist know if SFG
analyses are delicate enough to account for all those "gaps" or "traces" or
whatever it is the more sophisticated scholar fixes on (Craig, I don't think the
language of SFG is so obscure, considering the alternatives). I do know that
I've never met a student who cared. So for me it's not really a question of how
fully accurate a particular linguistic description is, but how fully
useful the urge to describe desires to be.
Jeff