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.
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[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.
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