Tom Bartlett On The Cardiff Grammar Offering A Complementary Perspective

Tom Bartlett replied to Johanna Salomonsson on SYSFLING on 3 Mar 2022, 23:50:

That's an interesting point, Johanna. Your analysis would work very well within the Cardiff Model as below, which allows a single participant to have roles in two processes simultaneously:

Your happy Glaxo baby [Ag] will make you [Af/Ca] a happy mother [Attribute].

[Note Af is close to Go in the CM] 

However, such labelling is against the method of IFG, and hence the Attributor - Carrier - Attribute pattern you analysed. This pattern is brought to bear in such divergent clauses as:

She considered me happy

She called me lucky

They made Mary happy (IFG3 p.237).

I've always found it unsatisfactory that these are lumped together - does anyone know of any alternative approaches (apart from the CM, above)? 

BUT, as Halliday says, process types and participant roles are not definitive - sometimes there are different ways of carving up the grammatical reactances (n.b. still not notional) - and here we see how the CM and IFG can complement each other in taking different perspectives.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, on the one hand, the clause that Bartlett presents features only one Process, not two, and on the other hand, a single clause can only feature one Process, so a participant in a single clause cannot have roles in two processes simultaneously.

[2] To be clear, Affected (Af) in the Cardiff Grammar corresponds to Medium in SFL Theory. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 336n):

Halliday (1968: 185/2005: 117) originally suggested the term ‘affected’ for what is now called ‘medium’, although Fawcett and other linguists working with and developing descriptions within the ‘Cardiff Grammar’ continue to use the term ‘affected’ in their accounts.

[3] To be clear, dissatisfaction is an attitudinal stance, not reasoned argument.

[4] To be clear, given that these three clauses all exemplify ASSIGNMENT in attributive clauses, it is not just satisfactory to lump them together, it is theoretically consistent and instructive. Where they differ is in ASSIGNMENT TYPE:

She considered me happy [projection: mental]

She called me lucky [expansion: elaborating]

They made Mary happy [neutral].

[5] This is misleading. The indeterminacies that Halliday acknowledges are indeterminacies that arise from applying the principles of a single unified theoretical approach. The Cardiff Model, however, is not consistent with SFL Theory, or indeed with itself — as demonstrated in great detail here — and the "complementary" perspectives it offers are those of a different, inconsistent theory.