Bradley Smith On Music And Metafunction

Bradley Smith replied to Ed McDonald on Sysfling on 25/8/23 at 10:08:

in thinking about the semiosis/semiotics of music, it has always seemed to me that the same problem occurs as in intonation study: our scope for what we consider to be 'meaning'. In intonation study, much that I consider 'meaning' has been dismissed as emotional reflexes or some such, as though those reflexes aren't grounded in some communication of meaning! So, the same with music: what meanings are there in music, beyond those found in other semiotic modes? From there, in terms of metafunction, the next question I would ask is, can we see prosodies or periodicities in music, and how are they realised? I happen to have a fundamental faith in the theory of metafunction, distinguished via prosodic and periodic expression, I have found it essential to understanding how tone group and clause interact, together and with body language, for example, as in the recent Paralanguage book.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, to date, no-one has been able to devise system networks for the content plane of music, together with realisation statements specifying how the systems are realised structurally; nor has anyone been able to identify how content plane systems are realised by expression plane systems and their structures.

For the view that music is not a socio-semiotic system, but a social system expanded by socio-semiotic systems such as theory, notation and lyrics, see Making Sense Of Music.

[2] To be clear, prosodies and periodicities are the types of structure favoured by the interpersonal and textual metafunctions, so Smith's question is 'how are structures realised?'. In SFL Theory, function structures (e.g. Senser ^ Process) are realised by syntagms of classes of units at the lower rank (e.g. nominal group ^ verbal group). That is, the question presumes that music has not only a grammar, but a grammar with a rank scale of grammatical forms. For Halliday, on the other hand, language is the only semiotic system that has a stratified content plane with a grammar; see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602ff).

[3] To be clear, here Smith gives priority to the view 'from below', structure, and suggests that structure types distinguish the metafunctions. SFL Theory, on the other hand, gives priority to view 'from above', so that it is the metafunctions that engender different types of structure.

[4] See 

• Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics (Ngo et al. 2022)
• Buyer Beware!
• Martin's Model Of Paralanguage