David Kellogg Misunderstanding Halliday On The Relation Between Language And Context

David Kellogg replied on sys-func on 31 Dec 2024, at 12:11:

But there are three problems that occur to me, and at least two of them stem from this very distinction [between the material-semiotic dialectic and the stratal relation between culture and language]. 

First of all, Halliday and Matthiessen note that the logico-semantic categories of elaboration, extension, and enhancement are fuzzy ones, with considerable overlap. This really must be so, not just because all language categories are fuzzy, but because we use "and", "but" and "so" to do all three: they are logico-semantic categories, viz. categories of thinking, and they won't obey the strong classification and framing that we use in lexicogrammar (and most particularly in transitivity). 

Secondly, as Chris has reiterated many times, there is a distinction between theoretical categories and descriptive ones. The categories of elaboration, extension, and enhancement are descriptive ones (and they are really designed around English, which is perhaps why they fit the simile of decorating a room, adding an annex, and enhancing the grounds that Halliday proposes in IFG so well. They are not theoretical categories, much less metaphysical ones, and when Halliday uses them to think about the grammatics, he stresses that this too is a simile.

Thirdly, and most importantly from my point of view, there are always far more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of even in the philosophy of language, much less the theory of experience that is encoded in the actual grammar. Birds, those "dinosaurs that learned to fly", don't really know about or obey the names we give them, and if we say that the relation between context and language is not causal, since ("because?") since cause is an enhancing relation, we are attributing to language a power over causality that it does not possess. Marx said that being determines consciousness, he meant that being got here first and consciousness was late to the party. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the indeterminacy here is with regard to which expansion relation is being realised by the forms and, but and so in a given instance, not with regard to the distinctions between the expansion relations themselves.

[2] This is the exact opposite of what is true. To be clear, in SFL Theory, 

• logico-semantic relations are categories of meaning, 
• thinking is a mental process that projects meaning. and 
• meaning is construed by wording, lexicogrammar.

[3] To be clear, Halliday's distinction between theoretical and descriptive categories applies to the distinction between theorising language and using the theory to describe languages. This is the opposite of using a description of English to think about a theory of language. Halliday (2002: 413-4):

But as a final step I will shift to another angle of vision and look at realisation and instantiation from inside the grammar – turning the tables by using the grammar as a way of thinking about the grammatics. …

The identifying relationship, as construed in the grammar of English, involves two particular functions, mutually defining such that one is the outward form, that by which the entity is recognised, while the other is the function the entity serves. This relationship of course takes a variety of more specific guises: form / function, occupant / role, sign / meaning, and so on. I labelled these grammatical functions “Token” and “Value”. This Token / Value relationship in the grammar is exactly one of realisation: the Token realises the Value, the Value is realised by the Token. It is thus analogous to the relationship defined in the grammatics as that holding between different strata. The grammar is modelling one of the prototypical processes of experience as constructing a semiotic relationship – precisely the one that is fundamental to the evolution of the grammar itself. …

Of course, the boot is really on the other foot: the grammatics is parasitic on the grammar, not the other way around. It is because of the existence of clause types such as those exemplified above that we are able to model the linguistic system in the way we do. The grammatics evolves (or rather one should say the grammatics “is evolved”, to suggest that it is a partially designed system) as a metaphoric transformation of the grammar itself. This is a further aspect of the special character of grammatics: while all theories are made of grammar (to the extent that they can be construed in natural language), one which is a grammar about a grammar has the distinctive metaphoric property of being a theory about itself.

[4] Here again, Kellogg confuses Halliday's notion of semiotic context, culture, with the material environment of language; see the previous post.