Dear All:
I’d like to address one point in the recent debate
about developmental phases of grammar – but I want to be careful to
emphasize that it’s a very focused (in other words, it doesn’t have
a large impact on the debate as a whole, but hey, it came up). And I
think I may be able to address it noninflammatorily (Word just red-lined that,
but I have a deriving license).
Halliday is quite clear about his grammatical model being a
statement about social practice, rather than about cognition. In a sense, he’s
recapitulating an old trend in linguistics: we’re much more confident with
statements about what we observe going on than we are with statements about
what we think might be going on in people’s heads, unless we have
some way to measure the latter directly. He’s also from the “hocus-pocus”
approach to linguistics rather than the “god’s truth”
approach, for the same kinds of reasons. In other words, if the grammar
describes what’s going on well, and acts as an explanation insofar
as it lets you predict the kinds of things you’ll encounter, why go
out on a limb and claim Full Truthiness?
Cognitive grammar, a la Langacker and others, is a “god’s
truth” model, and does make claims about what’s going on in
people’s heads. It would thus seem at first to stand in opposition to
Halliday’s – and it does, if the only dimension we’re
organizing along is the internal/external-phenomena one.
There are, however, other dimensions along which CG and SLF
tend to “cluster” together. Both acknowledge that social context
directly affects what is produced, and more importantly, both consider the
social environment to have a *direct* effect on the basic structure of
language. In most Generative approaches I’m familiar with, any kind of
selection effect due to social context is outside the scope of “grammar”
– the grammar defines the set of what is within the realm of possibility,
and that set has nothing to do with social interaction. In a particular social
situation, a speaker might choose a subset of that set, but that’s not an
issue for the grammar. There’s a sense in which sociolinguists, to
generativists, are looking at something fundamentally different from what “core
linguists” look at.
There’s an additional reason for CG/SFL clustering,
but it’s one that exists “outside” either theory. CG,
by its nature, must also acknowledge that cognitive processing constraints –
short term memory limitations, etc. – have a direct effect on the
structure (and structures) of language. SFL theorists have spent a fair amount
of time describing what Halliday terms the “textual metafunction,”
which among other things is concerned with maintaining new vs. old information
contrasts, and cohesion. The kinds of constructs one needs for the textual
metafunction happen to dovetail fairly well with notions of processing
constraints – in other words, part of CG may be quite useful as a kind of
backdrop to SFL and vice versa. In generative models, the *basic*
structure of language has nothing to do with more general nonlinguistic
processing constraints, so there isn’t that kind of “contact point”
between the theories.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell