David Kellogg On Identifying Clauses

David Kellogg wrote to sys-func on 23 Dec 2023,  at 12:24:

I am not sure if "typical" structures are the object of interest here: after all we are talking about verbal art. But even in ordinary life, I'm quite wary of making statements about "canonical" order without any corpus evidence.

For example, what about questions? Consider:

a) "What is your name?"

b) "What, after all, are names?"

You can see that in a) the order is Token Value, but the Token doesn't map onto the Subject but rather onto the Complement.

In b), which is surely much less common in life if more typical of verbal art, the order is Value-Token and the Subject does map onto the Token…

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is not true. Token does map onto Subject, and Value onto Complement. Cf. What serves as your name? The information that the clause demands is the decoding of a Token by reference to a Value.

[2] To be clear, the sequence is Value^Token because the sequence is Complement^Subject. The information that the clause demands is the encoding of a Value by reference to a Token.

. 

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 180):

In other words, ‘identifying’ clauses select for voice; they have an ‘operative’ and a ‘receptive’ variant. The difference is entirely systematic, once we recognise the structure of Token and Value: the ‘operative’ voice is the one in which the Subject is also the Token (just as, in a ‘material’ clause, the ‘operative’ is the variant in which the Subject is also the Actor. The most important difference is that the typical verb of the ‘identifying’ clauses, namely be, has no ‘passive’ form; so clauses like the villain is me and I am the ugly one do not look like ‘receptive’ clauses. But they are. This appears clearly when we substitute a different verb, one which has a ‘passive’ form, as in the villain is played by me.

David Kellogg On "Bottom-Up" Realisation

After ChRIS CLÉiRIGh wrote to sys-func on 21 December 2023 at 10:56:

The reason why Halliday would not even have meant

'wording-realized-as-meanings' or

'sounding-realized-as-wording'

is that both are self-contradictions. These are agnate with:

meaning realises wording

wording realises sounding

which are identifying clauses: Token^Process^Value.

In the first clause, the higher level of symbolic abstraction (meaning) is misconstrued as the lower level of symbolic abstraction (Token), and the lower level of symbolic abstraction (wording) is misconstrued as the higher level of symbolic abstraction (Value).

Likewise, in the second clause, the higher level of symbolic abstraction (wording) is misconstrued as the lower level of symbolic abstraction (Token), and the lower level of symbolic abstraction (sounding) is misconstrued as the higher level of symbolic abstraction (Value).

This is 'theory turned back on itself'.

 

David Kellogg replied on sys-func on 22 December 2023 at 8:55:

Chris--yes, theory turned back on itself indeed! But theory turned back on itself often produces category errors, like when you drive by a field and instead of seeing two cows you say that there are a bull, a cow, and a bovine couple.

When you say that "wording-realises-meaning" is agnate with the clause "meaning realizes wording", you can ignore the hyphen and make the clause irreversible, so that wording realizes meaning but meaning does not realize wording.

That makes it impossible for me to pursue my argument on verbal art, because my argument does depend on the relationship being reversible, and the 'bottom up" realization being dominant in and typical of literature.

But ignoring the hyphen and introducing "Token-Relational Process-Value" also means that your model is no longer neutral between speaking and hearing, as Halliday's is (Halliday remarks on the difficulty and necessity of making it so in the intro to the IFG).

Worse, you seem to be confusing two dimensions of SFL (stratification and metafunction) which are typically (and rightly) distinct--at least as distinct as the dimensions of instantiation and stratification confused in the Martin model.

As I said, I was writing about the theory--not about the way it was worded. That's why I used my own words and said "Halliday pointed out that" instead of "Halliday said". And Halliday does indeed say, in many places, that realization works both ways. I think, actually, that he chose the word "realization" for precisely this reason--it can mean both "to make real" and "to become aware" in English, although of course neither of these folk meanings captures the distinction that Halliday is really making.

This is one of many places where Halliday's terminology differs from that of Hasan--Hasan prefers "actualization" [activation] to talk about bottom up realization. For me, "realization" will do nicely.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Kellogg presents no evidence that 'theory turned back on itself often produces category errors' or that there is a category error in this case. The example of a category error he presents is not a case of theory turned back on itself and does not relate to this post.

To explain, just as linguistic theory is 'language turned back on itself' is using language to model language, 'theory turned back on itself' is using linguistic theory to model linguistic theory. In this case, it was using identifying clauses to model interstratal realisation.

[2] This misunderstands Cléirigh's post. What Cléirigh said was that Kellogg's 'wordings-realised-as-meanings' is agnate with 'meaning realises wording'. Kellogg's 'wordings-realised-as-meanings' is also agnate with 'Gielgud-played-by-Prospero'. The difference here is only in the subtype of identifying: 'realise' is 'symbol', whereas 'play' is 'role' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 269).

[3] This misunderstands identifying clauses. All identifying clauses are reversible. The reverse of wording realises meaning is meaning is realised by wording. In the first, the Token is Subject; in the second, Value is Subject. Moreover it is true that meaning does not realise wording, because this misconstrues Value (meaning) as Token and Token as Value (wording).

[4] To be clear, if an argument depends on 'bottom up' realisation, then the argument is invalidated by the self-contradiction that it construes. The notion of a higher stratum realising a lower stratum misconstrues the higher level of symbolic abstraction, meaning, as the lower level (Token), and the lower level of symbolic abstraction, wording, as the higher level (Value).

What is reversible is not the direction of realisation (swapping Token and Value) but the direction of coding (swapping Identified and Identifier). That is, the direction is encoding in the case of Token/Identifier and Value/Identified, and decoding in the case of Token/Identified and Value/Identifier. That is, 'wording realises meaning' can either encode meaning (Identified) by reference to wording (Identifier), or decode wording (Identified) by reference to meaning (Identifier).

[5] To be clear, this bare assertion — the logical fallacy ipse dixit — is misleading because it is untrue. Token-Process-Value simply analyses the interstatal relation 'wording realises meaning'. What could be said to differ for speaker and hearer is not the direction of realisation, but the direction of coding. For a speaker, meaning (Value) is encoded by reference to wording (Token), whereas for a hearer, wording (Token) is decoded by reference to meaning (Value). In both cases, wording is Token and meaning is Value.

[6] This is misleading because it is untrue. Cléirigh's post turned theory (identifying relations) back on itself (stratification). The former is a reconstrual of the latter. There is no confusion, because each construal is at a different level of abstraction.

[7] This is misleading. Cléirigh's post was not about Halliday's wording, but about his meaning:

The reason why Halliday would not even have meant…

Moreover, the advantage of quoting a source, instead of reporting it, is that the reader can judge whether or not the writer has understood the source.

[8] This is misleading because it misrepresents Halliday. For Halliday, realisation "works both ways" in the sense that the identifying process "works both ways". Wording realises meaning, and meaning is realised by wording; and in terms of coding, wording can serve to identify meaning, and meaning can serve to identify wording.

[9] To be clear, Halliday chose the word 'realisation' because 'realise' is an intensive identifying process of the type 'symbol' (Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 269), which is the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction, which is the relation between strata.

[10] This misleading because it is untrue. Hasan uses 'activation' for "top-down" realisation. Hasan (1995: 164):

But at the same time, the notion of realisation must include the relation of activation especially where the higher strata are concerned. Choices at the stratum of context activate choices at the stratum of semantics, which in their turn activate choices from the systems at the stratum of lexicogrammar.

Postscript: 

Unsurprisingly, Martin is one source of the self-contradiction of upside-down realisation. Martin (1992: 505):

The common ground between the two models lies in the correlation proposed between schematic structure and field, mode and tenor options; for both Martin and Hasan staging redounds with social context. Keeping in mind that realisation is not theoretically directional in systemic models, there is nothing substantive in the fact that whereas for Hasan, choices in field, mode and tenor are realised by schematic structure, for Martin schematic structure is realised through these same components of register.

David Kellogg On Viewers Of Cave Paintings Not Requiring Language

David Kellogg wrote to sys-func on 5 Dec 2023, at 00:17:

Implicit in Halliday's last two sentences is either:

a) Prelinguistic infants are not engaged in human semiosis, or.

b) Language exists from birth.

It seems to me that both of these are clearly false.

Instead of Mondrian, consider the attached cave painting. Imagine that the floor of the cave preserves the footprints of the artists who made this mural.

1. The involuntary meaning of the footprints of the artists who made the mural. This seems no different from the meaning that deer tracks convey to a non-human predator. 

2. The intentional meaning of the picture of the herdsmen (hunters?) recording their labor. This seems very different, as it invites (because its intention is to allow) the viewer to "reverse engineer" the story, for amusement or profit. 

3. The strategically placed hand print done in red ochre. This too seems different again: although it resembles 1) in form and 2) in intension, it probably signals authorship and in that sense has a textual as well as an interpersonal function.

None of these seem to me to require the Hallidayan assumption that the viewer possesses language. All of them merely require the Vygotskyan assumption that the object (or "objective") can be inferred from the remains of the object-oriented action.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the last two sentences in the quote (Halliday 2003: 4) were:

All that needs to be said in the present context is that other human semiotics are dependent on the premise that their users also have language. Language is a prerequisite; but there is no need to insist that language can mean it all.

[2] To be clear, neither of these propositions are implicit in the quote, since Halliday's 'present context' is a discussion of human 'post-infancy' semiotic systems.

[3] This is true, as demonstrated by Halliday's extensive work on human protolanguage.

[4] To be clear, the observation of deer tracks by a non-human predator is, according to Edelman's Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, simply perceptual categorisation on value. No linguistic meaning is involved. The observation of footprints by humans is the construal of experience as the first-order meaning of language.

[5] To be clear, according to comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, cave paintings are expressions of mythic symbolism, and mythic symbolism is the use of (lexical) metaphor to adapt consciousness to its physical and social environments, which requires that the participants had language — as does the fact that the painting is, at most, only about 13,000 years old.

[6] To be clear, the cave painting is to be found in The Cave Of Hands, in Argentina, and since, according to comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, such sites were used for male initiation rites in hunter-gatherer societies, the great number of hand images in this cave might be taken to suggest that they identify the initiates in those rituals. Again, this demonstrates that the participants had language.

[7] As the above demonstrates, this is the exact opposite of what is true. All three require that the human participants had language, and the dating of the cave art provides corroborating evidence.

Ed McDonald On What SFL Should Be Working Towards

Edward McDonald wrote to sys-func on 27 Nov 2023, at 10:05:

So if I think we always need to look outside language in order to understand language … equally I think we need to look outside SFL in order to understand what we are doing within SFL. 

The days of the grand all-encompassing theory, the Theory of Everything which I note the physicists are still struggling towards, for me are well over, even if you put aside the historical accident that it was a man deeply UNinterested in language as she languages, i.e. Old Noam, who was responsible for the best known of such theories in our current academic ecology. 

How can one theory be social, cognitive, pure, applied, etc etc all at the same time? It seems to me that it would be far more helpful — not to mention more feasible — for (at least) two complementary theories that start out from completely different premises to somehow manage to meet in the middle, and that this is what those of us working within SFL should be working towards creating a space for, a space that needs to be both practical and intellectual, both ideational and interpersonal. …

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, on the assumption of 'immanence', which informs SFL, there can be no final theory, because there is no meaning beyond semiotic systems that theories can finally equal. Instead, theories are evolving semiotic systems, and the open-ended process of evolution entails that there is no final state of such a system.

[2] To be clear, a theory of everything in physics would unify the General Theory of Relativity (modelling gravity) with Quantum Theory (modelling the other three forces). See Quantum Gravity Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics.

[3] To be clear, these are not components of an 'all-encompassing' theory. 'Social' and 'cognitive' are different priorities in theorising, though not mutually exclusive, whereas 'pure' and 'applied' is the distinction between theorising and applying a theory to practical purposes.

[4] To be clear, after dismissing the pursuit of a theory of everything, as exemplified by physicists, here McDonald advocates that SFL should do precisely the sort of thing that physicists are trying to do: make two complementary theories, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, meet in the middle in a theory of quantum gravity.

Ed McDonald On The Interpersonal Motivation Of Model Selection

Edward McDonald wrote to sys-func on 27 Nov 2023, at 10:05:

In this regard, members of this and other lists may have noticed that I seem to talk about my own experience a lot. But I hope they will also have noticed that I do so not to stress the particularity of my experience but rather its representativeness. I don't think my own experiences are special: I just think we're all far more affected by our own experience in the process of developing our academic thinking than we often like to admit. For example, in observing and reflecting on how people take up and adapt ideas of all kinds, including theories of language, I have become convinced that, whatever may be the purposes for which such ideas end up being used, the reasons for which they're taken up are far more likely to be interpersonal than ideational: because people you admire hold them, or because they're held by a group you want to join, or because they're being used for a practical/political/ideological project with which you're aligned.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this is indeed a very serious problem within the SFL community, given that SFL theory, as created by Halliday, is a scientific theory; see What Lies Beneath.

See also, from The Evolution Of Models on The Life Of Meaning:

Controlling Variation: Institutions As Model Reproduction Nurseries

Acting On Each Other: Modulation And Modalisation

Metafunctional Consistency And Selection

Ideational Consistency As Overtly Influencing The Probability Of Selection

Interpersonal And Textual Consistency As Covertly Influencing The Probability Of Selection

Social Immunological Systems

Communities As Bodies Organised By Shared Construals, Values And Attentions

Semiosis As Social Immunological Process

Ed McDonald On Metafunction, Stratification And Expression Affordances

Edward McDonald wrote to sys-func on 27 Nov 2023, at 10:05:

Just to take up the issue of metafunctions again after some further thinking on this fundamental but slippery concept, I think that if this notion is to be empirically defensible, or rather if the theoretical category of metafunction when translated into descriptive categories as part of a framework for a specific modality is to be empirically defensible, we need first of all to look outside language, <<without assuming that the 3x3 stratification/metafunction model necessarily applies in the case of other semiotic systems>>.

My starting point here would be that every semiotic system depends on its affordances, which shape the kinds of meanings it most easily or typically expresses. … My recent paper for LC&T, The Signifying Voice: Materiality and sociality in language and music, maps out one way of doing this, by taking two systems — language and music — whose default expression plane is the human voice and seeing how they exploit this differently. 

I have been hugely influenced in my thinking on these two systems by a little book now out of print which has almost the same name as Theo's 1999 book on music, i.e. David Burrows' 1990 Sound, Speech, Music, which sets out from a basic phenomenological starting point to characterise the differing affordances and meanings of the two systems. I have also been deeply influenced by my own personal and professional experience as a language learner and language teacher, and likewise by my personal experience as a music learner (piano and voice) and my professional experience as a vocal accompanist/repetiteur. So when I think and particularly when I write about these issues, always in the back of my mind is the nagging thought "How is this going to be useful to performers", by which term I include learners and teachers and users of language and music.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the metafunctions are not slippery; they are very clearly defined. For example, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 7-8):

The ideational metafunction is concerned with construing experience — it is language as a theory of reality, as a resource for reflecting on the world. … The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with enacting interpersonal relations through language, with the adoption and assignment of speech roles, with the negotiation of attitudes, and so on — it is language in the praxis of intersubjectivity, as a resource for interacting with others. The textual metafunction is an enabling one; it is concerned with organising ideational and interpersonal meaning as discourse — as meaning that is contextualised and shared.

For more detailed discussion, see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 511-32).

[2] To be clear, this 3x3 model does not apply to semiotic systems other than language because language is unique in having a content plane that is stratified into semantics and grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: xi). This is demonstrated by the fact that it is not possible to read aloud the texts of such systems. As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 600) point out:

… through projection, we construe the experience of 'meaning' — as a layered, or stratified, phenomenon, with 'meanings' projected by sensing and 'wordings' projected by saying …

[3] To be clear, this is the opposite of SFL methodology, in as much as it gives priority to view 'from below', expression, rather than the view 'from above', the meaning that is expressed.

[4] To be clear, the human voice is not the default expression of music. Rather, it is the default expression of song, that is, of language that is organised on the basis of music variables.

[5] To be clear, as supporting argument for McDonald's model, this is another instance of the logical fallacy known as the Appeal to accomplishment – an assertion is deemed true or false based on the accomplishments of the proposer. 

Ed McDonald On Musical Meanings As Concrete And General

Edward McDonald wrote to: sys-func on 20 Nov 2023, at 09:59:

… This reflects my understanding of the nature of musical meaning as concrete but general. Musical meanings are concrete, again in my opinion but informed by a wide range of research across a number of disciplines, because they express our human embodiment: music represents a kind of semiotic transformation of our experience of our own and other people’s bodies moving through space and time. 

At the same time, musical meanings are general, because, to borrow the insight of one philosopher of music, music is like body language: when we observe someone’s body language, including their gait, posture, facial expression, and gaze, we can “read off” its meaning, but only in general terms. We can tell that someone is sad, but not why; we can pick up that someone is highly agitated, but we don’t know the circumstances that gave rise to that agitation – unless we use language to ask them about it. 

So language, in contrast to music, is more abstract, more detached from our embodied experience, but at the same time because it supplies us with a system of categories we can apply to that experience, linguistic meanings are more specific. 

So from this point of view, we can see that soundtrack / expression music – “songs with words” – and score / mood music – “songs without words” – take on, as you might expect, the general semiotic characteristics of the systems of language and music with which they are mostly closely identified in each case.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this reason for musical meanings being 'concrete' is based on a misunderstanding, since it has the (Token–Value) relation backwards. It is the movement of bodies — in playing instruments — that expresses music, not the other way around. That is, McDonald claims that musical meanings are concrete because he misconstrues them as the more concrete Token instead of the more abstract Value.

[2] To be clear, this is another instance of the logical fallacy known as Appeal to accomplishment – an assertion is deemed true or false based on the accomplishments of the proposer.

[3] To be clear, one way to understand the difference between music and body language is through the theory of experience that has naturally evolved in English. Music is the Scope of the material Process of playing, whereas body language is a behavioural Process that 'manifests states of consciousness' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 302).

[4] To be clear, this reason for musical meanings being 'general' is based on a misunderstanding, since it confuses elaboration (generality) with enhancement (cause: reason).

[5] To be clear, this is another instance of the logical fallacy known as ipse dixit, a bare assertion, since no supporting argument has been made, and the claim that the meanings of music are concrete is based on a misunderstanding; see [1].

[6] To be clear, this point has not been demonstrated; see [1] to [5] above.