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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