Hi, I'm Paul Rogers. And this is an introduction to holiday and functional grammar. It's just have a few words about that before we start. This course is just this video. Although there are some exercises for you to do, there is nothing else apart from this course. Who would be interested in this course, I think two people to lots of people, one people who are doing some form of study of Applied Linguistics, and Michael Halliday is one of the giants of Applied Linguistics of the last 5060 years together with Noam Chomsky.

And so anyone who's studying Applied Linguistics would normally have at least some work on Halliday to do. But I don't want you to think that this is a very, very specific course that's related just to specialists. Anybody who's interested in how language works might be interested in Halladay in functional grammar as a different way of looking at how language is structured and put together. So let's make a start. I've divided the video into a number of sections and the first one is about grammar and meaning. Halladay states that language is a system of meanings now that needs to be unpacked a little bit for a holiday, there's no such thing as grammar and words.

They are intimately bound together. And so he often talks about lexical grammar, lexical from lexical from words and grammar, the structures the two of them are intimately bound together. And we're only interested in meaning language in isolation language that doesn't have any meaning to it or any specific meaning is not of any use to, to holiday. So we need to look at what is meant here. When people use language, their language acts are the expression of meaning and we'll talk about language acts What does a language act very shortly. Functional grammar is a study of how many's are built up through the use of words and other linguistic forms, such as tone and emphasis, as we shall see shortly.

If you've studied formal grammar, traditional grammar if you like it's largely divorced from meaning. We're only interested in parts of speech tenses, voice mood aspect, we're not interested in the real practical use of the language. in day to day, conversation or dented day to day written for and that's what holiday is trying to avoid. And again most studies of grammar tend to focus on the sentence as the basic unit. under investigation Chomsky for example, Chomsky transformational grammar looks at the sentence it looks at the deep structure of the sentence leading to the surface structure that is made manifest, if you look at it in sufficient analytical terms. So, functional grammar recognizes meaning and use as central features of language and you cannot separate them and you cannot divorce them.

So, holidays approach is therefore, very, very much more than just functional it's it's semiotic is, it's language in use. It's pragmatic. It's realistic, those kinds of things. Whenever we use language we are faced with choices. Let's have a look at some of those holidays explanation of how language works is that it consists of a set of systems, each of which offers the speaker or the writer choice of ways of expressing specific meaning for look at these three phases of text. Now, the first one is a straightforward question was the time.

The second one is almost a demand. And the third one is a statement from which a response and answer should be forthcoming. So what's the time question requiring an arm Sir, tell me the time please. That's imperative. That's an order. That's a command.

And the third one that declarative. I'd like to know the time Please, I'm not actually answering asking a question. But I'm making a statement that implies I want to have a response from it's a decoration. And we have these linguistic choices that operate at every point to production of language. For example, we going shopping, we may refer to a grocery shop as the supermarket, the store, the corner shop, Sainsbury's, we give it all kinds of names. And within context, we know what we mean.

The person we were communicating with knows exactly what we mean. We may address a father his dad, Daddy par. We may even call him by his first name, we may have a nickname for him. But we will know in the communicative competency that we exist, we We exhibit between other people in the same linguistic unit. We know exactly what we mean or who we mean. We might even change the word order.

In an interrogative interrogative such as the time what is it just the same as what's the time, but we might have a reason for using using that particular form. We have the flexibility that we can use. So looking at language in use. Now, these are a couple of quotations from Halliday himself. So let me read them through to you. The number of situations to which most very young children are exposed is relatively limited.

Usually the situation is found in the home environment in the company of family and friends. But as children grow and move into the wider society, the school and the community the range of situations in which they use language and expands, you have more to say about this show? Next, quotation from holiday. Since the speakers or writers choice of words is constrained by the situation of utterance, and since words in groups of groups of words take on special significance in particular contexts, the grammar must be able to account for the way in which the language is used in social situations. I mentioned flexibility earlier, that's hugely important for for holiday and hugely important in life, that we must have a system of language that is flexible, that can cope with a multitude of different contexts. The study of texts, this is a an important holiday and construct here because between spoken language written language to Halladay any form of language that we can record and we can observe and we can analyze is a text, it's a chunk of language.

So we don't care if it's spoken or written, as long as the purpose of that language is real, it's in a real or an actual circumstances spoken by real people. Now, this is a this is a very pointed observation against say, Chomsky, because Chomsky says, I can make up any any form of language I want, as long as you understand what I'm saying that's valid. It doesn't have to have been used in a context in the past. Halladay disagrees, he says, We've got to have a proper piece of language that we that is an actual instance that has been used. He also believes that a grammar that is only satisfactory for the analysis of individual sentences will be complete. We don't have a lot to say about this.

This is the concept of cohesion and coherence. His work on discourse. Halliday and his son his partner in this initially insisted that a text must have texture and be cohesive. Now, let's just unpick that one as well a little bit. The discourse is a longer piece of of text or utterance and discourse analysis is the ability to analyze the skill of analyzing a pattern of speech, a piece of text, whatever. Now in contemporary linguistics for a long time, applied linguistics, we these were two separate ways of looking at language.

I remember for example, when I did my master's degree in applied linguistics, we had one whole section that was on discourse analysis, and another whole section that was on sentence grammar, and the two were kept Very much as part. Now holiday doesn't agree. He thinks that again we must look holistically at language. And the looking at language at the sentence level is inadequate, it's incomplete. We need to look at not only what he's said or written but how it relates to the next part of the next part and the next part, how it coheres. How it is has cohesion as a as a real example of language.

Okay, now I want us to have a look at this example. Here's a piece of text. Where do turtles live? They live throughout the warmer sections of the world. Some are aquatic, others are amphibious. And the third group of tortoises don't go near the water except to drink.

Look at the words in red. And think about what they are referring to. I think you'll agree with me They actually refer in each case to turtles. All right, they were the turtles live they live in throughout the walls. So they are turtles, some, some turtles are aquatic, others other turtles are amphibians and a third group of turtles. So these words are what we call reference.

That's our E f e r e n t referent, and reference at an asset floral reference is a word that refers to something elsewhere in the text, if it refers backwards, so in the case of some or a third or group or others, we're referring back to add all of these are referring back. We call that anaphoric. reference, a pH or ic anaphoric. Reference. If we start a sentence with let's say a pronoun like he he wasn't good. boxer in the world he was from Louisville, Kentucky.

He was robbed by he was Mohammed Ali. All those keys before you get to Mohammed Ali are looking forward to when you're going to get to Muhammad Ali's name, that is categoric reference, see at a pH Ric. So reference refer forwards or backwards in a text that helped to give text cohesion. This is holiday's concept of cohesion of linkage of making a text, whole meaning relevant, it's all down to meaning yet again, I'm sure you've all seen examples of where you might have two people in conversation. So john and Bill, john said to bill I liked her and he said and then he said, and then he said, and after one you think Hang on, which he is this is this he john is this he bill. And that's when the writer has been ambiguous.

He has not made it clear which he is referred to there. So that's where we were text cohesiveness and coherence breaks down. Okay, Part Five, rank. Now here's an interesting one. Holiday likes longer stretches of language. But he's obviously fully cognizant of the fact that the meaning of a text is is constructed out of component parts there are there are individual building blocks that make up the language.

And these building blocks these constituent parts of language, he gives them a hierarchy. And the hierarchy is the sentence, clause, group, word. And finally, morpheme some of those words may be unfamiliar to you, but we're going to cover them now. Some of it is. As a sentence, recent research is shedding new light on how acupuncture might work that we still have no definite answers. That sentence is made up of clauses, to basically, recent research is shedding new light on how acupuncture might work.

And the second cause, though, we still have no definite answers, we can reduce it further and make it into groups or pairs if you like in this case of words, recent research is shedding new light no definite answers. Then we reduce it further to words and finally to morphemes. Now word about an explanation about morphemes. morpheme is is in linguistics terms, this the smallest unit of language that is recognizable by itself. So that if you look at the First one there it's answer. Now we call that a free morpheme.

It's free because it's able to stand alone I could say the word morpheme. Sorry, I could say the word answer. And anybody who speaks the same language as me will know the meaning of that word. But I want to be able to say not answer, but answers. So the bound morpheme is the letter S, making it into a plural. Now that letter s must relate to morpheme.

It must relate to, to answer, it must be connected. Because it's a bound morpheme it cannot stand alone answer can stand alone. Shed can stand alone as a verb. But in or din is the bound morpheme it needs to be bound to shed to make sense. Okay, so those are the constituent parts of the holiday incentives Holiday Inn textual organization. The clause is perhaps more important as the built within the context of building blocks because in functional grammar, the basic unit is said to be the clause.

What is a clause? Well, a clause is usually a group of words which contains a main verb. So a clause can be dependent, it can be independent, if a clause is independent, then it it can stand alone as an individual utterance. So if I say the man, I know the man who lives next, I know the man next door. I know the man next door. That's an independent clause.

If I say I know the man next door comma who comes from America who comes from America is a dependent clause and it can't stand on its own who comes from America that's meaningless? We mean who comes from America? What what person What are you talking about? But if I say the the man next door this is this is a definite thing the man next door well we know he's not the man who lives upstairs the man who lives downstairs the man in in whatever, them I know the man who lives there, the man next door, I know the man next door. I know the man next door. I know the man who comes from America lives next door.

Can you see how there's two sentences there's two clauses become as one and one is a dependent clause and one is an independent clause. Now it is at this level, this rank that we can begin to talk about how things happen, and how people feel in the world around us. If he said The rank of the clause that we use language, usually use language anyway to interact with others. Let's now consider the following sentence from a previous slide and it consisted of four clauses. So these are from the turtles we looked at. Now, there are four clauses that make up at least part of that text, okay.

You can see that in each case, that is, there is a verb in there which makes it a clause. But only I think the first one, possibly the third one could stand as independent clauses. constituency is concerned with the structural organization of the sentence, or how the sentence is built up out of its various Part. So look at these days. There's a sentence we know that contained four clauses. So sentence is the top of the hierarchy.

And those four clauses are subordinate to that. But we can then look at the clause itself. So there's the sentence constituency. Let's look at now clause. Here we've got a clause. It's made up of groups of words.

And in each group, there are two or three words. So that is now clause constituents. Now, this is where I think Halladay gets very, very interesting indeed, the functions and meta functions of language let's have a look. We can't state this often enough functional grammar is grammar in use. It's not studied in isolation. It has to be real language.

But it's too simple to leave it like that. So Halladay then further divides a piece of text into three separate areas, grammatical functions, communicative functions and meta functions. And we're going to need to look at all those three grammatical functions well, remember we said Halladay thinks of it as lexical grammar. So it's words and structure linked together. Each part. Being word group or clause must be seen as being part of the systems have a language it must obey the rules.

In other words, this is not merely looking at lexical items to see which parts of speech they represent. A given item might be the subject of a clause For example, we can't see words in isolation, just groups of words in isolation. Don't make text the communicative functions Very, very common to language teachers, for example, because we language teachers, we're always looking at a situation we're looking at the context, consider these. Let's say a language teacher is in class. And a language teacher might say good afternoon as a greeting to the class, let's say that he's teaching at two o'clock. Now consider this.

Suppose that language teacher is teaching at nine o'clock in the morning, 9am. And the student arrives at 930. Suppose he says then to that student, good afternoon. He has a very different communicative function. He's basically saying, hey, you're late. It's sarcastic.

It's perhaps not very polite. But it has a distinct grammatical, sorry, communicative function. He is making the student very, very much aware without saying You're late. He's making it humorous. We would hope And therefore, it has a totally different communicative function. Method functions holiday list as three ideational which is subdivided into experiential and logical so something about those second interpersonal and textual we look at each of them in turn.

The ideational meta function is when language is used to organize, understand and express our perceptions of the world and of our own consciousness. Now, let's take a moment to consider that there is a very famous sociolinguistics socio linguist of the 1960s and mostly in the 1970s basil Bernstein, who once came up with the very memorable phrase, the limits of one's language are the limits of one's world. Now, our experiential knowledge of the world around us has an incredible effect on how we speak how we write whatever considered children, children have a much more limited awareness of the world than an adult. And therefore their their horizons are much more limited, and their language is much more limited. So it's experiential. It's concerned with content and ideas, you wouldn't expect a child to be able to come up with the same sort of content and ideas in his speech or his writing, as an adult might do.

Now, the logical side of this is the relationship between those content and ideas. How do you rationalize what you're saying? How do you organize it? How do you structure it so that it's communicable. So that's the ideational meta function. The interpersonal meta function is where language is used to enable us to participate in communicative acts with other people to take on rolls into Express and understand feelings, attitudes and judgments.

Now, just consider where that breaks down. It might break down when you've got two people who have an imperfect command of each other's language. I mean, I can get by with rudimentary French, for example, but I wouldn't like to get myself involved in a serious political discussion in French with a French person. I think the the barriers to successful communication on my part would break down. Yeah. So Halladay argues that these functions and meta functions have molded the shape of our language and fix the course of its evolution.

Now, the last of these magic functions is textual. And this is where language is used to relate what is said or written to the real world and to other linguistic events. This involves the use of language to organize the text itself. This comes back to our use of reference For example with the turtles, this is how how we relate a longer piece of of language and how it is standing alone successfully as a text what Halliday calls a text hide its ability to function as a piece of land. So, here's a very important consideration. newcomers to functional grammar are sometimes confused by meta functions, because they expect them to operate independently and discreetly.

So there's ideational there, there's interpersonal there, there's textual that this is completely wrong. in almost any incidents of language use, all three meta functions operate simultaneously and together in the expression of meaning you can't really separate them out. Oh, that's it. ideational bit there. And that's a textual bit there. And that's an interpersonal bit there.

They are linked because that's what causes the whole language to to function as a holistic piece of text or its own its own kind. Now, word classes we might say this is holidays way of talking about parts of speech. The ancient Greeks divided language into eight sometimes nine categories. Okay, I think most of us will know what those categories are and then individual examples in terms of holiday and grammar. There are eight pluses Let's see how he analyzes a sentence using those eight classes. Look at that sentence suit a massive system was developed consisting largely of numerous flood barriers to dams and several branch canals.

In that sentence, according to a holiday and analysis, we have six nouns, system flood barriers downs, branch and canals. We have one adjective massive, we have three numerals, because they're reflecting at least some kind of numeracy then numerous to several there is one determiner, this is the indefinite article. There are three verbs was developed and consistent. There's one preposition, there are two adverbs, and there's one conjunction. So we've now broken that sentence down into those eight constituent parts. This is quite a complicated one.

This is where we look at who's doing the action, or where in the sentence in the context in the piece of text that we're looking at, who is responsible for what? I like to do these two sentences? Okay. Wedgwood experimented ceaselessly This is presumably Mr. Wedgwood, the potter designing his porcelain or his pottery in the 18th 19th century. And the computer with an external hard drive works in the same way one of the one of the subjects of those two sentences. The first one's easy.

It's a proper noun Mr. Wedgwood is the subject of the sentence. Then the second one because it's not just a computer. It's a computer with an external hard drive. So we need that those. What is it six, seven words there to make up this subject. So it's a nominal group.

It's not it's not one word, it's a group. Now, how do they in terms functions like subject are not necessarily realized by nouns alone, but often by nominal groups. Nominal groups consist of a head which is usually a noun, and possibly modifiers, what Halladay calls modifiers. However, Halladay does not restrict himself to subject alone, equally valid our actor and theme can follow, I've just noticed that I've spelt holiday with three L's after goodness knows how many times of checking through my text, I still able to make mistakes. I wonder if you probably saw it as well. Now look at this sentence, ball.

This is the mathematician, I assume, will from which we get Boolean algebra, ball had already written an important paper on this subject. Now in this sentence, who does what with what and to whom? Well, it's book Mr. Ball. But he's not only this subject, he's an actor, he's actively doing something. So we would call him the actor. Now, look at these sentences.

Now in the first one, we've added the word already. So now we're bringing in some sort of time consideration. Then, in the second sentence we've got on this subject, and in the third sentence, we've got an important paper. So let's look at those separately for a minute in these two sets, sentences bool has the function of active but the item which we're using in the clause is different. The theme. This is this rather silly sentence, it's, most people wouldn't write like this.

But consider this he also began to have ideas of his own these he wrote up. So the author might have chosen to place the subject or the actor, he first in the clause, but for textual reasons opted for these, thereby pushing the subject into second place. Now, why would we want to put the subject in second place? Why would we want to? Well, it could be for dramatic effect. There's all sorts of reasons why we say things why.

When we have the subject, the we think a year of clauses exchange and relates primary is the interpreter. No matter function, alright, in the second one we looked at the actor, and now is the clause as representation. So now we're thinking of it in the ideational meta function context. And lastly, we're looking at theme. So now this is the clause as message. And this is the choice of starting point, the order of the elements in the in the sentence Now, let me give you an example of that.

I can remember reading some years ago about Muhammad Ali when he was very famous boxer. Now it was it was a journalistic piece. Now you would have expected and it was it was going to, you know, go through his career, his sporting career, you might have seen the journalist right. Mohammed Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and blah, blah, blah. We'll go down as a narrative. But he didn't.

He did it in a totally different way. He said he was the finest boxer, boxer, his generation. He was from Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. He won the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympic Games. He was probably the finest boxer that has ever graced the sport. He was Muhammad Ali.

Now, why did he do it that way? What is a journalist? And the most important thing for a journalist to do is get the message across and have people read. So imagine now I'm reading this. He was, what is he? Why is he telling him?

Oh, I'll read on. And then as I'm reading it, is you talking about Mohammed Mohammed Ali? Well, let's get on see if I'm right. You can see the way the writer was engaging with me there was good was this good? Now, it might not work for everybody, but I can see why he did it that way. And close His message there is much more important than the actual actor.

I hope you can see that. Now we're nearly at the end. So now I'm going to conclude by giving you some exercises to do in your own time. And if you want to communicate with me about having done these exercises or enter into any sort of email exchange, I'll be happy to do so but have a look at these first. Imagine you're in a room with someone you know, well, you would like the other person to turn on a heater or possibly an air conditioner if you're in a Hot Country. Think of three ways of asking them to turn the heater on or the air conditioner on using an interrogative form a declarative form and an imperative form.

You remember what those three are, if not go back and have a look afterwards, but three ways of asking them to turn the heater on Exercise two. Now here's an interesting one. How many ways can you think of asking someone to stop smoking? And would the way you speak differ depending on whether you are talking to a your boss, be a boy of 12. See a person whom you find very attractive but don't know very well. And D your mother.

Now we're stepping into the area of sociolinguistics here a bit, but that doesn't matter. There's lots of overlapping in linguistics anyway. Think of those four contexts, those four different people and how you would ask that question. One of the eight parts of speech in the most widespread version of traditional grammar is Interjection. This is exemplified By such expressions as Ouch, oh help try to think of reasons why many grammars exclude this category. And I'll ask a supplementary question.

Why do you think I personally hate the overuse of the exclamation mark in text and why I ruthlessly suppress it? In my own writing? Why? and exercise for from any text of your own choice? Can you find them an is an example of a numeral function functioning as the modifier of a head noun, or as a head alone. If you can find one of each I'd be interested to know what they are.

I have been enormously helped in prepper in preparing this video lecture by the use of this book, the functional analysis of English by Thomas and Mary law that was published by Arnold in 1995. And as far as I'm concerned, as far as I'm aware anyway, it's still in print. I would if you're interested in Halladay and functional grammar, I suggest you have a look at this book. It's an excellent, detailed look at how holiday and grammar works. Now, as you can see, there is my email address. I'm more than happy to engage in correspondence with you.

If you'd like to send me your thoughts on some of those exercises, if you'd like to know a little bit more about holiday and grammar, anything you'd like, if you'd like to write to me there, I will do my best to respond to you. And I can also work towards giving you a certificate of completion for having done this course. If you've stuck with me to the very end. Very good, well done. Congratulations. I hope you know a bit more now about holiday in functional grammar.

Thanks a lot. Bye bye