David Rose On Imperative Mood And Obligation

David Rose wrote to sys-func on 12 Aug 2019 at 08:50:

Subjunctive mood is not recognised in SFL… 

Semantically, imperative mood realises obligation, obligating the Subject to act. In modern English this is normally the addressee, so that imperative mood congruently realises a command to the addressee. 

These clauses are relics of archaic systems with a non-addressee Subject, that obligate the Lord/God to act. Stepping up to the stratum of register, it was/is the role of priests to speak to God on behalf of the people, and to the people on behalf of God. Here the priest exhorts God to bless, forgive or be with the addressee, who is realised grammatically as Complement or Adjunct, whereas God is Subject. Paradoxically, the priest is exhorting God while addressing the people. Maybe that’s why such blessings sound archaic… they don’t make sense ;-)

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, 'subjunctive mood' is recognised in SFL theory, but in its description of English, it is a system of the verbal group, not the clause, and termed 'subjunctive mode' to distinguish it from the clause rank systems of MOOD.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 143n):

Note that the system of MOOD is a system of the clause, not of the verbal group or of the verb. Many languages also have an interpersonal system of the verb(al group) that has been referred to as ‘mood’: it involves interpersonal contrasts such as indicative/subjunctive, indicative/subjunctive/optative. To distinguish these verbal contrasts from the clausal system of MOOD, we can refer to them as contrasts in mode. The subjunctive mode tends to be restricted to the environment of bound clauses – in particular, reported clauses and conditional clauses having the sense of irrealis. In Modern English, the subjunctive mode of the verb is marginal, although there is some dialectal variation.

[2] To be clear, here Rose confuses SPEECH FUNCTION (proposal: command) with MODALITY (modulation: obligation).  In SFL, a command is specified as a demand for goods-&-services, whereas obligation is concerned with the semantic space between positive and negative POLARITY in proposals. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 177-8):

In a proposal, the meaning of the positive and negative poles is prescribing and proscribing: positive ‘do it’, negative ‘don’t do it’. Here also there are two kinds of intermediate possibility, in this case depending on the speech function, whether command or offer. (i) In a command, the intermediate points represent degrees of obligation: ‘allowed to/supposed to/required to’;

[3] For clarification, the clauses in question are:

The Lord be with you
God bless you
God forgive you your sins

[4] In SFL theory, tenor is a dimension of context, not register.  Register, on the other hand, is a sub-potential of language: a point of variation on the cline of instantiation.

In terms of the architecture of SFL theory, Martin's notion of register as a stratum of context is inconsistent with the notion of register, the notion of stratum, and the notion of context.  As functional varieties of language, registers are language, not context; as functional varieties, registers are sub-potentials, not a stratal system.  For evidence of Martin's misunderstandings of register, see here; for evidence of Martin's misunderstandings of context, see here.

[5] Trivially, the addressee you serves only as Complement in these clauses, specifically of the Predicators bless and forgive and of the minor Predicator with.

[6] For a deployment of SFL theory that demonstrates how and why such well-wishings do make sense, see the analysis here.

John Bateman On Language Not "Explaining" Other Socio-Semiotic Systems

John Bateman wrote to SYSFLING on 8 Aug 2019 at 23:10:

 Language can be used to explain anything, that is what it is used for, just like telling a story about anything. In terms of the much more (multimodally) interesting question of capturing the same distinctions, then no, language does not 'explain' all the others... or even many of the others, because different things are going on.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, on the SFL model, the 'different goings-on' in other human-only socio-semiotic systems are made possible by language, and it is through language that we analyse ('explain') them. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3, 444): 

All knowledge is constituted in semiotic systems, with language as the most central; and all such representations of knowledge are constructed from language in the first place.

… all of our experience is construed as meaning. Language is the primary semiotic system for transforming experience into meaning; and it is the only semiotic system whose meaning base can serve to transform meanings construed in other systems (including perceptual ones) and thus integrate our experience from all its various sources.

John Bateman On The Natural Relationship Between Semantics And Lexicogrammar

John Bateman wrote to SYSFLING on 8 Aug 2019 at 23:10:

… 'natural' is not a way of avoiding work, it is a way of defining (often quite hard) tasks. The 'natural' relationship referred to is that there are structural and functional similarities of a revealing and useful kind between the apparently distinct domains. Semiotically we are mostly situated here in Peircean metaphor, i.e., the third and most complex kind of iconic relationship, which is always something constructed … rather than simply present. And these can go in many different directions, yes.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the word 'natural' is not a way of "defining tasks" — "quite hard" or otherwise.  In its use with regard to the relation between semantics and lexicogrammar, the closest of its non-technical meanings is 'entirely to be expected'; see further below.

[2] To be clear, in SFL theory, the relation between semantics and lexicogrammar is 'natural' in the sense of being non-arbitrary.   Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3-4):

A systemic grammar is one of the class of functional grammars, which means (among other things) that it is semantically motivated, or "natural". In contradistinction to formal grammars, which are autonomous, and therefore semantically arbitrary, in a systemic grammar every category (and "category" is used here in the general sense of an organising theoretical concept, not in the narrower sense of 'class' as in formal grammars) is based on meaning: it has a semantic as well as a formal, lexicogrammatical reactance. … Grammar and semantics are the two strata or levels of content in the three-level systemic theory of language, and they are related in a natural, non-arbitrary way.

[3] To be clear, Peirce's notion of 'icon' is irrelevant to the relation of semantics to lexicogrammar in SFL theory.  Not only is Peirce's theory of semiotics based on assumptions incompatible with SFL theory, the iconic relation obtains between content and expression, not between two levels of content.  Moreover, Peirce's metaphor is, strictly speaking, a type of hypoicon:

An icon (also called likeness and semblance) is a sign that denotes its object by virtue of a quality which is shared by them but which the icon has irrespectively of the object. The icon (for instance, a portrait or a diagram) resembles or imitates its object. … Peirce called an icon apart from a label, legend, or other index attached to it, a "hypoicon", and divided the hypoicon into three classes: (a) the image, which depends on a simple quality; (b) the diagram, whose internal relations, mainly dyadic or so taken, represent by analogy the relations in something; and (c) the metaphor, which represents the representative character of a sign by representing a parallelism in something else.

John Bateman On Blends

John Bateman wrote to SYSFLING on 8 Aug 2019 at 23:10:

for many, the appeal to 'chaos theory' simply gives some kind of (misplaced) scientific respectability to vagueness. The idea that it is by no means simple to achieve operationalisable specifications of theoretical terms is absolutely central in almost all scientific work, linguistics too, and does not depend on an appeal to chaos theory. It is difficult to recognise theoretical categories in practice, but making the attempt teaches us more both about the phenomena and the theoretical categories. Even for very conservative non-chaos based systems. 

blends are used with pretty much the same kind of rhetorical force as chaos theory, and to similarly dubious ends often. Being precise about what blends are helps here too (cf. Goguen).

Blogger Comments:

It also helps to know how blends are understood in the theory under discussion. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 522):

In its ideational metafunction, language construes the human experience — the human capacity for experiencing — into a massive powerhouse of meaning. It does so by creating a multidimensional semantic space, highly elastic, in which each vector forms a line of tension (the vectors are what are represented in our system networks as "systems"). Movement within this space sets up complementarities of various kinds: alternative, sometimes contradictory, constructions of experience, indeterminacies, ambiguities and blends, so that a grammar, as a general theory of experience, is a bundle of uneasy compromises. No one dimension of experience is represented in an ideal form, because this would conflict destructively with all the others; instead, each dimension is fudged so that it can coexist with those that intersect with it.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 549-50) distinguish blends as one type of indeterminacy, and provide an illustrative interpersonal example:

There are perhaps five basic types of indeterminacy in the ideation base: ambiguities, blends, overlaps, neutralisations, and complementarities — although it should be recognised from the start that these categories are also somewhat indeterminate in themselves. …

(1) ambiguities ('either a or x'): one form of wording construes two distinct meanings, each of which is exclusive of the other.
(2) blends ('both b and y'): one form of wording construes two different meanings, both of which are blended into a single whole.
(3) overlaps ('partly c, partly z'): two categories overlap so that certain members display some features of each.
(4) neutralisations: in certain contexts the difference between two categories disappears.
(5) complementarities: certain semantic features or domains are construed in two contradictory ways. …

(2) Blend

they might win tomorrow

— ability 'they may be able to'
— probability 'it is possible they will'

Here, on the other hand, the meaning of the oblique modal might combines the two senses of 'able' and 'possible', rather than requiring the listener to choose between them. If the verbal group is 'past', however, this again becomes an ambiguity:

they might have won

— ability 'they were capable of winning (but they didn't)'
— probability 'it is possible that they won (we don't know)'

John Bateman On All Models Being Wrong By Definition

John Bateman wrote to SYSFLING on 6 Aug 2019 at 18:53:

…fuzziness in the model[l]ing means that fuzziness in the modelled may become inaccessible because multiplying fuzziness by fuzziness is pretty much the same as multiplying not-fuzziness by fuzziness. better to have a non-fuzzy model that is wrong (easily done, by definition, because all models are wrong by definition) that can show real fuzziness rather than imagined fuzziness. difficulty may always be interesting; fuzziness often not. …

Blogger Comments:

[1] Any reader would be very hard-pushed to find a definition of a scientific model that includes the interpersonal assessment that all models are "wrong".  In science, models are evaluated as valid or not, according to whether, for example, they are self-consistent or not, consistent with data or not, explanatory or not, predictive or not, and so on.

[2] On the other hand, fuzziness (indeterminacy) in language is of great interest to Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 547-62), who, as well as identifying 5 types of indeterminacy, explain its significance. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 547-8, 549):

What does it mean to say that a natural language is an indeterminate system? In the most general terms, it suggests that the generalised categories that constitute language as a system — as "order", rather than as randomness or "chaos" (let us say randomness rather than chaos, since chaos in its technical reading is also a form of order) — are typically not categorical: that is, they do not display determinate boundaries, fixed criteria of membership, or stable relationships from one stratum to another. We could refer to them as "fuzzy", in the sense in which this term is used in fuzzy logic, fuzzy computing, etc.; but we prefer to retain the term "indeterminate" for the phenomena themselves, since "fuzzy" is usually applied to the theoretical modelling of the phenomena (it refers to meta-fuzz rather than fuzz). …  

We have tried to make the point that the human condition is such that no singulary, determinate construction of experience would enable us to survive. We have to be able to see things in indeterminate ways: now this, now that, partly one thing, partly the other — the transitivity system is a paradigm example, and that lies at the core of the experiential component of grammar.