Volume 2 in the Collected Works of M. A. K.

Halliday

Linguistic Studies of
Text and Discourse

M. A. K. Halliday
Edited by Jonathan Webster
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503

First published 2002

This collection © M. A. K. Halliday 2002

All rights reserved. No pan of this publication may be
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 CONTENTS

Preface Vll

Acknowledgements lX

PART ONE: LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Editor's introduction 3

1 The linguistic study of literary texts (1964) 5

2 Text as semantic choice in social contexts (1977) 23

PART TWO: HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS (NOVEL, DRAMA,

SCIENCE IN POETRY, POETRY IN SCIENCE)

Editor's introduction 85

3 Linguistic function and literary style:

an inquiry into the language of
William Golding's The Inheritors (1971) 88

4 The de-automatization of grammar:

from Priestley's An Inspector Calls (1982) 126

5 Poetry as scientific discourse:

the nuclear sections of Tennyson's
In Memoriam (1987) 149
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

'Descriptive linguistics in literary studies', from English Studies Today:

Third Series, edited by Alan Duthie, Edinburgh University Press, 1964,
pages 23-39. Reprinted by permission of Edinburgh University Press.
'The linguistic study of literary texts', from Proceedings ef the Ninth
International Congress ef Linguists, edited by Horace Lunt, Mouton,
1964, · pages 302-7. Reprinted by permission of Mouton de Gruyter.
'Linguistic function and literary style: an inquiry into the language of
William Golding's The Inheritors', from Literary Style: A Symposium,
edited by Seymour Chatman, Oxford University Press, 1971. © 1971
Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
'Text as semantic choice in social contexts', from Grammars and Descrip-
tions, edited by Teun A. van Dijk and Janos S. Petofi, Walter de Gruyter,
1977, pages 176-225. Reprinted by permission of Mouton de Gruyter.
'The de-automatization of grammar: from Priestley's An Inspector Calls',
from Language Form and Linguistic Variation: Papers Dedicated to Angus
McIntosh (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 15), edited by John M.
Anderson, John Benjarnins, 1982, pages 129-59. Reprinted by per-
mission ofJohn Benjamins.
'Foreword' and 'The nuclear sections of Tennyson's "In Memoriam"',
from Functions of Style, edited by David Birch and Michael O'Toole,
Pinter, 1988, pages vii-ix, 31-44.
'The construction of knowledge and value in the grammar of scientific
discourse: with reference to Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species',

IX
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

from I.A rappresentazione verbale e iconica: valori estetici e fanzionali. Atti

del XI Congresso Nazionale dell'A.I.A., Bergamo, 24-25 October
1988, edited by Clotilde de Stasio, Maurizio Gotti and Rossana
Bonadei, Guerini Studio, 1990, pages 57-80. Reprinted by permission
of Guerini Studio.
'Some lexicogrammatical features of the "Zero Population Growth
Text"', from Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-
raising Text (Pragmatics and Beyond, New Series 16), edited by William
C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, John Benjamins, 1992, pages
327-58. Reprinted by permission ofJohn Benjamins.
'So you say "pass" ... thank you three muchly', from What's Going on
Here? Complementary Studies of Professional Talk, edited by Allen D.
Grimshaw, Ablex, 1994, pages 175-229. Reprinted by permission of
Greenwood Publishing Group.
Extracts from The Inheritors by William Golding (pages 121-4) are
reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

X
 PART ONE

LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND

TEXTUAL MEANING
 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

'It is part of the task of linguistics to describe texts,' states Halliday in

'The linguistic study of literary texts'. What is a text? For sure, size
does not matter when defining what counts as a text. Rather, in 'Text
as semantic choice in social contexts', a text is described as 'a semantic
concept', 'a sociological event, a semiotic encounter'; it is 'the means
of exchange', 'the primary channel of the transmission of culture', 'the
semantic process of social dynamics'. Halliday stresses 'the essential
indetem1inacy of the concept of "a text"'; nevertheless, be it long or
short, prose or verse, spoken or written, literary or non-literary, any
text is accessible to linguistic analysis. Particularly if that linguistic
analysis is grounded in a theory which recognizes the 'textual' systems
of the language.
The first chapter, 'The linguistic study of literary texts', combines
two of Halliday's earlier works, both originally published in 1964:
Descriptive Linguistics in Literary Studies, and The Linguistic Study of
Literary Texts. Halliday emphasizes the point that the linguistic study of
literature, or "linguistic stylistics", 'is no different from any other
textual description; it is not a new branch or a new level or a new kind
of linguistics but the application of existing theories and methods.' As
he explains, 'A literary text has meaning against the background of the
language as a whole, in all its uses; how can its language be understood
except as the selection by the individual writer from the total resources
at his disposal? Yet all too often the observations about the language of
a work of literature bear no relation to any descriptive account of those
resources.' Only objective linguistic scholarship using the categories
of the description of the language as a whole, not 'ad hoc, personal
and arbitrarily selective statements', can contribute to the analysis of

3
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

literature and allow for 'the comparison of each text with others, by
the same and by different authors, in the same and in different genres.'
Halliday analyses W. B. Yeats' poem Leda and the Swan in terms of
'the "dine ofverbality", and the structure of the nominal groups', and
compares the findings with those from another Yeats poem His Phoenix,
Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur, and a passage of prose from the New
Scientist. Halliday also examines three short passages of modem English
prose, by John Braine, Dylan Thomas, and Angus Wilson, in terms of
nominal groups, lexical sets and cohesion. The concept of cohesion,
described as an alignment or grouping of various descriptive categories,
was developed particularly for literary textual analysis.
On the role of linguistics in literary analysis, Halliday concludes,
'Linguistics is not and never will be the whole of literary analysis, and
only the literary analyst - not the linguist - can determine the place of
linguistics in literary studies. But if a text is to be described at all, then
it should be described properly; and this means by the theories and
methods developed in linguistics, the subject whose task is precisely to
show how language works. The literary analyst is not content with
amateur psychology, armchair philosophy, or fictitious social history;
yet the linguistics that is applied in some accounts of literature, and the
statements about language that are used as evidence, are no less amateur,
armchair and fictitious.'
First published in 1977, the second chapter in this part, 'Text as
semantic choice in social contexts', begins by describing in detail the
semantic system, with particular attention to the textual (or text-
forming) component, and its corresponding structure-generating sys-
tems and cohesive relations. Halliday defines a text as 'an instance of
social meaning in a particular context of situation.' Text is the means
of exchange of meanings among societal members in the context of
situation. Halliday's notion of text encompasses the traditional and the
spontaneous, both literary and conversational. By way of illustration,
Halliday focuses on a narrative entitled Fables for Our Time, presenting
a situational interpretation of the text, and concluding with a system.ic
description of a single sentence from the same text. A sentence, after
all, is the product of 'numerous micro-acts of semantic choice'. It is a
lexicogramrnatical structure, which has 'its origin in the functional
organization of the semantic system.' In so doing, Halliday illustrates
the semiotic cycle: 'the network that extends from the social system, as
its upper bound, through the linguistic system on the one hand and the
social context on the other, down to the "wording", which is _the text
in its lexicogrammatical realization.'

4
 Chapter One

THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF

LITERARY TEXTS
(1964)

The starting point could be Jakobson's observation: "Insistence on

keeping poetics apart from linguistics is warranted only when the field
of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted. " 1 It is part of the task of
linguistics to describe texts; and all texts, including those, prose and
verse, which fall within any definition of "literature", are accessible to
analysis by the existing methods of linguistics. In talking of "the
linguistic study" of literary texts we mean, of course, not "the study of
the language" but "the study (of the language) by the theories and
methods of linguistics". There is a crucial difference between the ad
hoc, personal and arbitrarily selective statements offered, frequently in
support of a prefonnulated literary thesis, as "textual" or "linguistic"
statements about literature, and an analysis founded on general linguistic
theory and descriptive linguistics. It is the latter that may reasonably be
called "linguistic stylistics".
It is a prerequisite of such a study that both the theory and the
description should be those used in the analysis of the language as a
whole. Linguistic stylistics must be an application, not an extension, of
linguistics; this is the only way to ensure the theoretical validity of the
statements made. The justification for using linguistic methods in
literary analysis is that existing grammatical, lexical, phonological and

Two works are combined in this chapter:

'Descriptive linguistics in literary studies', first published in English Studies Today: Third
Series, edited by Alan Duthie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964, pp. 23-39.
'The linguistic study of literary texts', first published in Proceedin)/s if the Ninth International
Congress if Ling14ists, Cambridge, MA, 1962, edited by Horace Lunt. The Hague: Mouton,
1964, pp. 302-7.

5
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

phonetic theory is already valid and relevant for the purpose. At the
same time the descriptive statements made about a literary text are
meaningful only in relation to the total "pure" description of the
language concerned: if the linguist hopes to contribute to the analysis
of English literature he must first have made a comprehensive descrip-
tion of the English of the period at all levels. (It can presumably be
taken for granted that the categories of such a description will be
formally defined, and that the description will not be restricted to
below the rank of the sentence.) If for example all clauses of a particular
poem are shown to have the same structure, it is essential to know
whether or not this is the only permitted clause structure in the
language; and if not, what its relative frequency is in a large sample
representative of "the language in general".
Moreover, a text is meaningful not only in virtue of what it is but
also in virtue of what it might have been. The most relevant exponent
of the "might have been" of a work of literature is another work of
literature. Linguistic stylistics is thus essentially a comparative study. To
pursue the example above, we also need to know the relative frequency
of this clause structure in other works of the same period and the same
genre. The more texts are studied, the more anything said about any
one text becomes interesting and relevant.
We can therefore define linguistic stylistics as the description of
literary texts, by methods derived from general linguistic theory, using
the categories of the description of the language as a whole; and the
comparison of each text with others, by the same and by different
authors, in the same and in different genres.
While insisting that stylistic studies use the same methods and
categories as nonliterary descriptions, we must make the proviso that
such studies may require new alignments or groupings of descriptive
categories, through which the special properties of a text may be
recognized. This may include the bringing together of categories and
items described at different levels as well as those scattered throughout
the description of any one level. An example of such a grouping, in
which various grammatical and lexical features are brought together, is
cohesion.
The principal categories subsumed under cohesion are:

A. Grammatical
1. Structural (clauses in sentence structure)
(a) Dependence
(b) Linking

6
 THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS

2. Non-structural
(a) Anaphora
(i) deictics and submodifiers
(ii) pronouns
(b) Substitution
(i) verbal
(ii) nominal
B. Lexical
1. Repetition of item
2. Occurrence of item from same lexical set

The grammatical categories are drawn from a comprehensive descrip-

tion of the grammar of Modem English. A brief account of the
underlying theory is given in my paper 'Categories of the theory of
grammar' .2 Some commentary on these categories is given here.
Cohesion is of course a syntagmatic relation and, insofar as it
is grammatical, it is partly accounted for by structure. Structure is
the ordered arrangement of one or more items of the same rank
to form an item of the rank above: in English, the ways in which
a sentence can be made up of clauses, a clause of groups, a group
of words and a word of morphemes. All structure is thus in the
broadest sense cohesive. But with the smaller units there is little
consistent variation between texts. A more delicate treatment of
cohesion would certainly include at least some relations in clause or
group structure, for example apposition and rankshift; but in the first
instance structural cohesion can be limited to the relations between
clauses in sentence structure. These take various forms, of which the
most significant for literary texts are dependence and linking. Very
roughly, these can be glossed in traditional terms as "subordination"
and "co-ordination", the former including non-defining but not
defining relative clauses>'
Structure, however, is not the only cohesive factor operating at the
level of grammar. There are certain grammatical categories whose
exponents cohere with other items in the text, items to which they do
not stand in a fixed structural relation or indeed necessarily in any
structural relation at all. Principal among these are the anaphoric items
in the nominal and adverbial group; deictics, submodifiers and adverbs,
of which the most frequent are the, this, that, the personal possessives,
such, so, there and then; and the (personal) pronouns. These items are
regarded as cohesive only in their anaphoric use; this accounts for the
majority of occurrences of all except the, which is most frequently

7
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

cataphoric. Deictics and pronouns used cataphorically, pointing forward

to a modifier or qualifier as in the tall man, the man who came to dinner,
he who hesitates, it is useful to ask, are not cohesive; nor is the homophoric
the in the moon. Secondary in importance to anaphora, because much
less frequent in written English, is substitution: the use of do as lexical
item in the verbal group and one as head of the nominal group, as in he
might have done and a long one.
Lexical cohesion in its clearest form is carried by two or more
occurrences, in close proximity, of the same lexical item, or of items
paradigmatically related in the sense that they may belong to the
same lexical set. For example, in a passage by Leslie Stephen one
paragraph ends I took leave, and turned to the ascent of the peak; the next
paragraph begins The climb is pe,fectly easy. Thus in the new paragraph
the first lexical item, climb, coheres with ascent; later occur mountain
and summit cohering with peak. The lexical set is identified by privi-
lege of occurrence in collocation, just as the grammatical system is
identified by privilege of occurrence in structure; the set is a grouping
of items with similar tendencies of collocation. The occurrence of a
high frequency collocation, like ascent ... peak, is not here regarded
as being itself a cohesive feature, since there seems no reason for
assuming that such a collocation is any more cohesive than one of
low frequency: too many variables are involved, such as the lexical
power of the items and their grammatical relations. But in any case a
valid assessment of lexical cohesion depends on the study of colloca-
tions in very large samples of text, this being necessary to the recog-
nition of lexical sets; work of this kind on English texts is only just
beginning.
The features outlined in the last three paragraphs may be regarded as
the main types of cohesion in modern written English. 4 Frequently, of
course, cohesion is lexicogrammatical, as in the climb, quoted above,
with anaphoric deictic. It includes also other features, not listed here
but required by a more delicate analysis: for example, lexical variation
within a constant grammatical frame, and vice versa.
But it must not be thought that all statements in linguistic stylistics
require special alignments of categories. On the contrary, a straight-
forward linguistic description of a literary text, in which the text is
treated in exactly the same way as any other text that is being subjected
to linguistic analysis, reveals a great deal both about that text in
particular and about literary language in general. To quote Jakobson
again: 5 "The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the
message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language.'' It is this

8
 THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS

"set toward the message" that detennines the particular type of linguis-
tic patterning that is characteristic of literature.
If we keep the word "pattern" as a general, non-technical name for
all the organization, at all levels, that is a crucial property of language
as such, then the special property of literary language is the patterning
of the variability of these patterns. In other words, the creative writer
finds and exploits the irregularity that the patterns allow, and in
doing so superimposes a further regularity. It is this "regularity", as
we may reasonably call it provided we avoid giving the term an
arithmetical interpretation, that marks the "focus on the message".
This is clearly displayed by any good linguistic description of a text -
provided there exists already a good description, textual or otherwise,
of that language.
All illustrations in linguistics are misleading. Language does not
operate except in the context of other events; even where these are, as
with written texts, other language events, any one point made about a
piece of text which is under focus raises many further points extending
way beyond it into the context. This does not mean that no linguistic
statements can be self-sufficient, but that the only ultimately valid unit
for textual analysis is the whole text. It takes many hours of talking to
describe exhaustively even the language of one sonnet.
However, if students can be asked to comment on the language of
literary texts within the time limits of an examination, it should be
possible to give selective illustrations of what would be regarded as a
good answer to a question on the language of particular short texts. I
propose here to refer to W. B. Yeats' poem Leda and the Swan, and to
three short passages of modern English prose by John Braine, Dylan
Thomas, and Angus Wilson.

Leda and tire Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, the thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

9
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
W. B. Yeats
The first example will be the use of the in Leda and the Swan. The
relevant grammatical background can be summarized as follows. The
primary (least delicate) structure of the English nominal group is
(M)H(Q): a head, which may or may not be preceded by a modifier
and followed by a qualifier. Nearly everything occurring in the qualifier
is rankshifted: that is, is of a rank (in fact always clause or group) above
or equal to the unit in whose structure it is operating (here the group).
In the modifier, on the other hand, only compound "Saxon genitives"
and some modifiers of measurement are rankshifted; in general the
modifier is an ordered sequence of words (the word being the unit
immediately below the group in rank), proceeding from the most
grammatical to the most lexical. The first place in the structure of the
modifier is occupied by the word class known as "deictics", consisting
more delicately of three subclasses of which one contains the items the,
a, this, that, the personal deictics his, her, etc., and certain other words.
The contextual function of the deictics is to identify, and among them
the is unmarked and specific: that is, its function is to identify a specific
subset but to do so by reference to something other than itself; unlike
his or that, the· carries no power of identification but indicates that
something else present does. This "something else" may be either (1)
in the M/Q elements of the nominal group, (2) in the context,
linguistic or situational, or (3) in the head of the nominal group itself.
There are thus three distinct relations into which the as deictic enters,
respectively cataphoric, anaphoric, and homophoric. These can be
illustrated from the following passage:
Accordingly, after a peace-offering of tobacco, in return for a draught
of foaming milk, I took leave, and turned to the ascent of the peak.
The climb is perfectly easy, though I contrived to complicate matters
by going the wrong way. The absence of guides ·generally enables one
to enjoy a little excitement, the more agreeable because not contemplated
beforehand. Indeed, to confess the truth, a former attempt upon the
mountain had failed altogether by reason of my ingeniously attacking it
by the only impracticable route. It was with all the more satisfaction that
I found myself on the present occasion rapidly approaching the· summit,
and circumventing the petty obstacles which tried to oppose my progress.
Leslie Stephen

10
 THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS

For example:
Cataphoric:
The absence efguides
the only impracticable route
Anaphoric:
turned to the ascent of the peak. The climb
Homophoric:
the truth
In two instances, the more agreeable and all the more satisfaction, the is not
a deictic at all but a distinct formal item which operates as submodifier
in the nominal group.
The complete statement of the formal properties of these relations,
such that they can be recognized as distinct structures, is complex and
involves lexis as well as grammar - though in spoken English, since
tonicity (the placing of the tonic in the tone group) can be observed, it
is possible to make a purely grammatical statement that accounts for
most occurrences. In written English the general picture is as follows:
there is a high probability that
(a) if there is a modifier (other than the) or qualifier in the nominal
group, the is cataphoric,
(b) if there is no modifier or qualifier, then
(i) if in the preceding context there has occurred a lexical item
which is either the same item as, or from the same lexical set
as, the head of the nominal group, the is anaphoric,
(ii) if not, the is homophoric.
Table 1 (p. 20) shows all the nominal groups, other than those
consisting only of pronoun or personal name, in Leda and the Swan.
Out of a total of 25, no less than 15 have both a specific deictic (10
the, 5 others) and a modifier (other than the deictic) or qualifier or
both. This contrasts, for example, with Yeats' poem His Phoenix,
which contains 81 nominal groups of which only 17 are of this type.
In nominal groups with modifier or qualifier, if the, or other specific
deictic, is present it is usually cataphoric; moreover, samples of mod-
ern English prose writing show that the most frequent use of the is
in fact cataphoric reference to modifier or qualifier, not anaphoric
reference ("second mention") as often supposed. In Leda, however,
out of ten nominal groups having the and a modifier or qualifier,
only one, the brute blood <!.f the air, had the in cataphoric use. The
remainder, althou~h they have both (a) items whose place in structure

11
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

(at M or Q) makes them potentially defining, and (b) the item the
whose function is usually to show that such potentially defining items
are in fact defining, yet have non-cataphoric the. That is to say, in
spite of the the, the dark webs are not identified by their being dark -
like the loins, they are to be identified anaphorically, in fact by ana-
phoric reference to the title of the poem. The only other type of
writing I can call to mind in which this feature is found at such a
high density is in tourist guides and, sometimes, exhibition catalogues.
(I hope I need not add that this is in no sense intended as an adverse
criticism of the poem.)
The second example is the distribution of verbal items in Leda and
the Swan. Most of this poem, especially the first ten and a half lines, is
organized in nominal groups; they account for 69 of the 83 words in
this first part. There are 14 verbal groups in the poem, and in addition
four words of the class "verb" operating directly in the structure of (as
opposed to being rankshifted into) nominal groups (staggering, loosening,
broken, burning).
The table below represents a sort of scale of "verbness" in the use of
verbal items - the "dine of verbality", to give it a jargonistic label. On
the extreme left, most "verbish" of all, is the finite verbal group in free
clause; the further over to the right, the more the status of verb is
attenuated, until finally it is subordinated altogether to the nominal
element without even the formality of a rankshift. In Leda, with its
preponderance of nominal groups, the verbal items are considerably
deverbalized: contrast again His Phoenix, and also the 16 lines from
Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur beginning Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and
ran (columns as in Table 2 on p. 21):

1 2 3 4 5 6

Leda 5 2 3 4 4
His Phoenix 30 12 2 6 2 2
Marte d'Arthur 17 3 2
(extract)

Of various short passages examined for comparative purposes, the only

one showing a distribution at all comparable to that of Leda·was a
passage of prose from the New Scientist concerning the peaceful uses of
plutonium.
I am not of course saying that the language of Leda is like that of the
New Scientist. The two passages are alike in this respect: that is all.
Again, no evaluation is implied: even if one criticized the· highly

12
 THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS

nominal style of much scientific writing this is quite irrelevant to Leda,

since (i) the two are quite different registers, and what is effective in
one register may not be effective in another, and (ii) this feature cannot
be isolated from other features in which the two are quite different -
for example the lexical items concerned.
It is worth examining the lexical items in more detail. In the New
Sdentist passage, and also in His Phoenix (where, however, the
grammatical use of verbs is, as we have seen, highly "verbal"), the
lexical items operating as verbs are in general weak: that is, they are
items like be and have which are collocationally neutral. In His Phoenix,
for example, out of 48 finite verbal groups, 40 are accounted for by
the following items: be (13), have (12), know (4), do, go, say,.find, hear,
live, walk and talk, pick and choose, and please. By contrast many of those
in the Tennyson passage are powerful items: that is, items with
restricted ranges of collocation, like plunge, brandish, wheel, and flash. In
Leda, the few verbal items are varied in power, though medium rather
than extreme. But they get lexically more powerful as they get
grammatically less "verbal": in finite verbal group in free clause we
have hold, push, put on, feel; while at the other end of the scale, not
op~rating in verbal group at all, are stagger, loosen, and caress.
Lexical power is the measure of the restriction on high probability
collocations: the fewer the items with which a given item is likely to
collocate (put another way, the more strongly the given item tends to
be associated with certain other items), the more "powerful" it is said
to be. This, of course, has no evaluative connotations, nor has it
anything to do with a denotation of violence or movement. But in fact
in Leda the more powerful of the verbal lexical items are items of
violence; and it is precisely these that perform nominal rather than
verbal roles. Thus while the Tennyson passage, a straightforward
narrative, is characterized by a succession of fairly powerful lexical
items denoting movement, each constituting by itself a (generally
monosyllabic) finite verbal group in free clause, in Leda, where there
are lexical items of movement which are likewise fairly powerful, these
either are not verbs at all or are themselves verbs but subordinated to
the nominal elements in clause structure.
The third example is a comparison of one or two features in three
short passages of prose, which have in common the fact that each is the
description of a room. The passages, which are reproduced below, are
taken from Room at the Top by John Braine, Adventures in the Skin Trade
by Dylan Thomas, and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot by Angus Wilson;
they are referred to by the abbreviationsJB, DT, and AW.

13
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

I looked at it with incredulous delight: wallpaper vertically striped in

beige and silver, a bay window extending for almost the whole length
of the room with fitted cushions along it, a divan bed that looked like a
divan and not like a bed with its depressing daylight intimations of sleep
and sickness, two armchairs, and a dressing-table, wardrobe and writing-
table all in the same pale satiny wood. On the cream-painted bookcase
was a bowl of anemones and there was a fire burning in the grate,
leaving an aromatic smell, faintly acid and faintly flower-like, which I
knew but couldn't quite place ... There were three small pictures
hanging on the far wall: The Harbour at Aries, a Breughel skating scene,
and Manet's Olympe.
John Braine

Every inch of the room was covered with furniture. Chairs stood on
couches that lay on tables; mirrors nearly the height of the door were
propped, back to back, against the walls, reflecting and making endless
the hills of desks and chairs with their legs in the air, sideboards,
dressing-tables, chests-of-drawers, more mirrors, empty bookcases,
wash-basins, clothes cupboards. There was a double bed, carefully made
with the ends of the sheets turned back; lying on top of a dining table
on top of another table there were electric lamps and lampshades, trays
and vases, lavatory bowls and basins, heaped in the armchairs that stood
on cupboards and tables and beds, touching the ceiling. The one
window, looking out on the road, could just be seen through the
curved legs of sideboards on their backs. The walls behind the standing
mirrors were thick with pictures and picture frames.
Dylan Thomas

Her little bedroom at the hotel was ugly - the more hideous for
having been recently redecorated with a standard 'contemporary' wall-
paper. All over the walls floated gay little blue and pink cafe tables,
around them a few Vermouth and Pernod bottles and the word
'Montmartre' in pretty childish script. The design was no doubt carefully
chosen to enchant cross-Channel travellers; it had no message for Meg.
In the first weeks she had sought every excuse to be away from the
room; but now suddenly the wallpaper, the pink, bevel-edged, modern-
istic mirror, and the furniture of shaded pink and silver began to give
her a sense of anonymity. They were so remote from anything she
knew or cared for that she felt free, safe, and hidden.
Angus Wilson

(a) Nominal groups. In DT, all 49 nominal groups have lexical

item as head: there are no pronouns or other grammatical heads. Of
these only 11 have any lexical modification or qualification, ~nd of a
total of 5 lexical modifiers only empty has the value "epithet" in the

14
 THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS

group structure. By contrast in JB, which has 36 nominal groups of

which 4 have grammatical heads, of the remaining 32 with lexical
heads 16 have modifier or qualifier (or both) and 22 have deictics.
Likewise in AW, with 37 nominal groups of which 9 have grammatical
heads, 12 of the 28 with lexical heads are lexically modified or qualified
and 15 have deictics. The OT passage is a heap of mainly simple
nominal groups (that is, ones consisting of a noun only), with also
some heaping of clauses; in AW and JB we have the compound
nominal group as the centre of attention. All this is obvious; but the
fact that it is obvious does not excuse us from stating it accurately. Nor
is it useful to count items or patterns without a linguistic analysis to
identify what is to be counted.
The following table shows the number of nominal groups with
lexical heads, and with lexical and grammatical modifiers and qualifiers,
in the three prose passages. The last part of the table shows the
distribution of "head" items in the principal lexical sets (see next
paragraph).

JB DT AW
Nominal groups 36 49 37
Nominal groups with lexical head 32 49 28
with M/Q (lexical) 16 11 12
with D 22 19 15
Head from 'room' set 19 40 9
from 'furniture and decor' 14 34 5
from 'constructional' 5 6 4

(b) Lexical sets. Of the 49 lexical items as head of the nominal

groups in OT, 40 are assignable to a lexical set under the heading room:
34 of these to a set (subset of room) furniture and decor. Of the 32 lexical
heads in JB, only 14 are furniture; and of AW's 28, only 5. Construc-
tional items, however, such as wall, are distributed fairly evenly among
the three passages. In AW especially the furniture is of little interest:
even of the 5 non-constructional items, two are occurrences of
wallpaper and one, tables, refers to the design of the wallpaper - the
tables fl.oat; the other two items are furniture and mirror. It is interesting
to note the different parts played by lexical items from the sets
associated with the room theme in the three passages.
(c) Cohesion. The principal types of cohesion are shown in Table 3
(p. 21). The passages are too short to allow much to be said about their
relative degrees, and use of different types, of cohesion; but some
differences do emerge. In OT there is no grammatical cohesion at all

15
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

across sentences or across orthographic sub-sentences (and only one

instance even within a sentence: presupposition of"bondage" beginning
at re.fleeting). Cohesion is entirely lexical, by constant repetition of items
or occurrence of items from within one set. JB is likewise not cohesive
grammatically, except for some "linkage" between clauses and the
anaphoric it in the first sentence (and cohesion by structural parallelism,
an important type of grammatical cohesion about which too little is yet
known to permit accurate assessment); nor, however, is there much
lexical cohesion in the passage. AW on the other hand is more gram-
matically cohesive; apart from clause_ linkage, there are the anaphoric
pronouns it, she, they, and the anaphoric the in the walls and the design;
at the same time there is, as often in Angus Wilson, lexical cohesion by
occurrence of items within a set, for example ugly ... hideous.
Other points of interest include: the distribution of lexical items in
nominal groups as subject in clause structure; the use of original and of
familiar collocations - compare JB: picture/hang with DT picture/thick;
the use of items from the lexical sets of colour and smell; the
distribution of verbal groups and words in the "cline of verbality" and
the choice of lexical items, weak and powerful, operating in the verbal
groups. But enough has been said to illustrate textual analysis, and by
now perhaps the pass mark has been awarded. That the linguist can
suggest how to describe a text is perhaps, from the point of view of the
literary analyst, the main justification for his existence.
At the very beginning of this paper I used the term "application" to
refer to the study of literary texts by the theories and methods of
linguistics, and I would stress that it is in fact an application of linguistics
that is under discussion. We can be more specific than this. One branch
oflinguistics is descriptive linguistics, the study of how language works;
this contrasts both with historical linguistics, the study of how language
persists in time, and with institutional linguistics, the study of the
varieties and uses of, and the attitudes to, language. Within descriptive
linguistics, one kind of description is textual: the linguist describes a
text, written or spoken; this contrasts with exemplificatory description,
which presents the categories of the language and illustrates them, or if
formalized, generates a set of described sentences and derives others
from them. The linguistic study of literature is textual description, and
it is no different from any other textual description; it is not a new
branch or a new level or a new kind of linguistics but the application
of existing theories and methods. What the linguist does when faced
with a literary text is the same as what he does when faced V{ith any
text that he is going to describe.

16
 THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS

But all description involves institutional considerations, and literary

description is no exception. When we describe language we have to
find out and specify the range of validity of the description; this means
taking into account the variety represented, both dialect (variety
according to user) and register (variety according to use). Register and
dialect differences are of course variable in delicacy: we may talk of the
register of literature, subdivided into the registers of prose and verse,
each subdivided further into the various genres. At any particular point
on the scale of delicacy the total set of registers may form a continuum,
and there will certainly be a great deal that is common, linguistically,
to all; but there are also linguistic differences between them - otherwise
they would not be recognized as different registers. And just as in
dialect we eventually, when we get delicate enough, reach the individ-
ual: every speaker his own idiolect, or bundle of available individual
dialects: so also in register we come finally to the individual - every
speaker, and writer, his own bundle of individual registers. Again, it
does not need a new branch of linguistics to recognize and account for
individual styles: all language is individual activity in a given variety,
and thus there is an institutional basis, in the technical sense of
institutional linguistics, in all description, literary or otherwise.
This does not mean, however, that for each text or individual writer
we start again with a totally new description, with a new set of
categories unrelated to what has gone before. Indeed, if many of the
things written about the language of particular works of literature are
much less useful than they might have been, this is more often than
not because the writer, having neither made a description of the
language himself nor used one made by someone else (other than the
misty image of English that is still so often given in our schools), has
invented a set of ad hoc categories for each text he has examined. What
is said has therefore no relation to what was said about any other text,
still less to any description of the language as a whole. If the linguistic
analysis of literature is to be of any value or significance at all it must
be done against the background of a general description of the
language, using the same theories, methods and categories. A literary
text has meaning against the background of the language as a whole, in
all its uses; how can its language be understood except as the selection
by the individual writer from the total resources at his disposal? Yet all
too often the observations about the language of a work of literature
bear no relation to any descriptive account of those resources.
The same point applies to the comparison of texts: it is impossible to
compare one text with another unless both have been described in the

17
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

same way. All literary analysis, if one is at all interested in the special
properties of the language of literary texts or of a particular genre, is
essentially comparative. This makes it all the more essential to be
consistent, accurate and explicit: to base the analysis firmly on a sound,
existing description of the language. While this means restraining oneself
from inventing new categories, a temptation to which the literary
analyst must be especially exposed, it does not of course preclude new
alignments of established categories, such as Professor McIntosh's use of
"involvement" in studying Shakespearean dialogue. 6 These may be
required in any linguistic study, but they are perhaps especially fruitful
in comparative literary studies. Another example is the relation of
cohesion referred to above, which is very valuable in comparing long
texts. The concept of cohesion has been developed especially for literary
textual analysis; but every category brought together under this heading
is drawn from the total description of English and has exactly the same
range of application whatever the text to which it is applied.
Of course no amount of faithful adherence to the same description
will be of any use if the description is not a good one in the first place.
We are still plagued with steam grammars, with their ragged categories,
their jumbled criteria and their fictions; descriptions of English which
give little insight into the way the language works or indeed the way
any language works, except perhaps the Latin they were originally
modelled on. This kind of pre-linguistic linguistics is no use for literary
studies. It is no paradox that it is modem scientific, including statistical,
linguistics that proves really illuminating when applied to the study of
literature - no paradox at least to anyone who studies language
seriously, since the study of language perhaps more than anything else
shows up the artificial nature of the dichotomy between arts and
sciences. Not only do we need to be able to state accurately the role of
a particular pattern or item in the language, what it contrasts with,
what it may and may not combine with and so on; we may want to
know its probability of occurrence under various definable conditions.
It is of no interest to show that nine-tenths of all clauses in a certain
poem are, say, of the class "interrogative" unless we know how this
relates to the probabilities of occurrence of this and the other terms in
the mood system. The originality of a person's use of his language
consists in his selecting a feature not where it is impossible (has not
been previously selected) but where another would be more probable
- and even more in his balanced combination of the improbable with
the probable, as in the lexis of Leda and the Swan, which is an interesting
blend of old and new collocations. ·

18
 THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS

I have stressed grammar, but this is of course only one of the levels
involved, and the usefulness oflinguistic theory in application to literary
studies depends on its ability both to comprehend and to integrate all
the levels of language. That is another reason for insisting on the need
for up-to-date linguistics: not only must the literary analyst have access
to theories for the description of all levels of linguistic patterning -
grammar, lexis, phonology and phonetics, and their graphic parallels -
but he must be able to see them in interaction as they must always
interact in any language event. He may want to analyse, for example,
her loosening thighs as a grammatical item, with a certain structure - is it
the same as the staggering girl, or not?; as a collocation in lexis - is loosen
the same lexical item as loose?; as a piece of English phonology - how
does it exploit the patterns of English rhythm and intonation?; and in
terms of its phonetic properties. He may feel he needs to do all this so
that he can see what it is doing in the poem. I have not, for lack of
time, given illustrations of phonological and phonetic analysis; but this
is a good place to point out that when we speak of "linguistics" in
literary studies, this is really a shorthand for "the linguistic sciences",
an~ is to be taken to include them both - linguistics and phonetics.
If it is considered that the meaning of a piece of literature lies
between rather than within the lines, it seems likely that linguistics has
no message. This is not to say that the literary allusion is outside the
scope of linguistic analysis; on the contrary, all use of language is
allusion, and textual allusion is only one endpoint on a scale the other
end of which is the context of our whole previous experience of the
use of an item or pattern: hence the insistence that a work ofliterature,
like any other piece of language activity, is meaningful only in the
perspective of the whole range of uses of the language. Similarly it is
not to say that literary "figures of speech" cannot be analysed; it is true,
however, that they do need rigorous linguistic definition. Again there
is no sharp line to be drawn between metaphor and non-metaphor;
but if linguistics cannot describe certain parts of language it is likely to
be of little use for any application. Linguistics is not and will never be
the whole of literary analysis, and only the literary analyst - not the
linguist - can determine the place of linguistics in literary studies. But
if a text is to be described at all, then it should be described properly;
and this means by the theories and methods developed in linguistics,
the subject whose task is precisely to show how language works. The
literary analyst is not content with amateur psychology, armchair
philosophy, or fictitious social history; yet the linguistics that is applied
in some accounts of literature, and the statements about language that

19
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

are used as evidence, are no less amateur, armchair and fictitious. It is

encouraging that literary scholars are coming more and more to reject
such staterpents, and to demand a standard of objective linguistic
scholarship that is no less rigorous than the standard of literary scholar-
ship which they expect, and exact, from themselves.

Table 1 Deixis in nominal groups in Leda and the Swan

~
+M/Q - MIQ

D M ',Q MQ
the staggering the thighs the great the loins
girl caressed by wings the air
the dark webs the dark beating his bill
the feathered webs above the his breast
glory her nape staggering her nape
the broken wall caught in girl his knowledge
the burning his bill the strange his power
roof and heart beating
tower the brute
+D
blood
specific the indifferent
of the air
beak
those terrified
vague fingers
that white rush
her helpless
breast
her loosening
thighs
+D non- a sudden blow a shudder in
specific the loins
-D body

20
 THE 'LINGUISTIC STUDY OF LITERARY TEXTS

Table 2 Verbal items in Leda and the Swan and the fifteen lines from
Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur

Items in
Iterns in verbal group (i.e. operating nominal group
at 'predicator' in clause structure) (i.e. not
operating at P.)

l 2 3 4 5 6
Clause class
Independent Dependent Rankshifted
(system: status)
(irrelevant)
Group class
Finite Finite Non-finite Finite Non-finite
(system: finiteness)

hold lie drop beat stagger

push let catch up caress loosen
feel master catch burn
Leda and the Swan engender lay break
put on

5 2 3 - 5 4

rose (2) shock leaping seen

ran. dipt flashing cloth'd
plung'd whirl'd
dutch'd
wheel'd
threw
made
Morte d' Arthur shot
flash'd
fell
caught
brandish'd
drew
went

15 2 3 - 2 -

Note: Compare the narrative style in Tennyson (the most 'active' verbs in the most 'verbal'
setting) with the tension set up in Leda (the most 'active' verbs in the least 'verbal'
setting, as if describing a picture rather than recounting an event).

21
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Notes
1. See Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.): Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1960), p. 352.
2. Word, 17 December 1961 (see Volume 1, Chapter 2).
3. A more correct theoretical statement of structural cohesion is that it is
presupposition at the rank of the sentence. Presupposition is the special
relation between elements of a non-chain-exhausting structure that have as
their exponents terms in a non-choice-exhausting system. Thus in I'll come
if you want me the structural relation of "conditioning" clause and "condi-
tioned" clau~, which is a type of dependence, is one of presupposition.
4. I omit here phonological cohesion: that with grammatical categories
expounded directly by phonology, for example (British English) tone 4 in
anaphoric use. ,.
5. Op. cit., p. 356.
6. See Angus McIntosh, '"As You Like It": a grammatical clue to character',
Review ef English Literature, 4.2, April 1963.

22
 Chapter Two

TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE

IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS
(1977)

1 The semantic system

1. 1 Initial assumptions
First, and least controversially, let us assume that the semantic system is
one of three levels, or strata, that constitute the linguistic system:
Semantic (semology)
Lexicogrammatical (lexology: syntax, morphology and lexis)
Phonological (phonology and phonetics).
These are strata in Lamb's "stratificational" sense.
Second, let us assume that the semantic system has the four com-
ponents experiential, logical, interpersonal and textual. The first two of
these are closely related, more so than other pairs, and can be combined
under the heading of "ideational" (but see 1.3 below):

Ideational Interpersonal Textual

Experiential Logical

Third, let us assume that each stratum, and each component, is

described as a network of options, sets of interrelated choices having
the form "if a, then either b or c". Variants of this general form include:
"if a, then either x or y or z and either m or n; if x, or if m, then either
p or q; if both y and n, then either r ors or t" and so on. The description

First published in Grammars and Descriptio11s, edited by Teun A. van Dijk and Janos S.
Petofi. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977, pp. 176-226.

23
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

is, therefore, a paradigmatic one, in which environments are also defined

paradigmatically: the environment of any option is the set of options
that are related to it, including those that define its condition of entry.
The description is also open-ended: there is no point at which no
further sub-categorization of the options is possible.
Fourth, let us assume that each component of the semantic system
specifies its own structures, as the "output" of the options in the
network (each act of choice contributes to the formation of the
structure). It is the function of the lexicogrammatical stratum to map
the structures one on to another so as to form a single integrated
structure that represents all components simultaneously. With negligible
exceptions, every Qf)erational instance of a lexicogrammatical construct
in the adult language - anything that reaJ.izes text - is structured as the
expression of all four components. In other words, any instance of
language in use "means" in these various ways, and shows that it does
so in its grammar.
Fifth, let us assume that the lexicogrammatical system is organized
by rank (as opposed to by immediate constituent structure); each rank
is the locus of structural configurations, the place where structures from
the different components are mapped on to each other. The "rank
scale" for the lexicogrammar of English is:
CLAUSE ......
.__ _ _ _ __...,
.. CLAUSE
COMPLEX

GROUP: Verbal Nominal Adverbial Prepositional ...... GROUP

COMPLEX

WORD:
I
Verb Noun
I
Adverb
I
Preposition ~ WORD
COMPLEX

MORPHEME ..,_
_______..,._ MORPHEME
COMPLEX

Complexes are univariate (recursive) structures formed by paratactic or

hypotactic combinations - co-ordination, apposition, modification and
the like - at the rank in question; a clause complex may be formed for
example by two clauses in co-ordination. All other structures are
multivariate (non-recursive). A "sentence" is defined as a clause com-
plex. See Huddleston (1965), Hudson (1967 and 1971), and Sinclair
(1972).

24
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

1. 2 Structural con.figurations
It follows from the above that each type of unit - clause, verbal group,
nominal group, etc. - is in itself a structural composite, a combination
of structures each of which derives from one or other component of
the semantics.
A clause, for example, has a structure formed out of elements such
as Agent, Process, Extent; this structure derives from the system of
transitivity, which is part of the experiential component. Simul-
taneously it has a structure formed out of the elements Modal and
Propositional: this derives from the system of mood, which is part of
the interpersonal component. It also has a third structure composed of
the elements Theme and Rheme, deriving from the theme system,
which is part of the textual component.
For example:
Ithe Grays Iretired Ito their beds I
Experiential TRANSITIVITY Medium Process Location:
locative
Interpersonal MOOD Modal Propositional
Textual THEME Theme Rheme

It is not the case that the same constituent structure (same bracketing)
holds throughout, with only the labels differing. This is already clear
from this example: the thematic and modal structures are simple binary
ones, whereas the transitivity structure is not. In any case, the represen-
tation just given is oversimplified; the Modal constituent includes the
finite element in the verb, and consists of Subject plus Finiteness,
yielding an analysis as follows:

Clause: I the Grays I 'did I retire' I to their beds

(1) Medium Process I Location: locative
(2) Modal Propositional
Subject Finite
(3) Theme Rheme

There may be differences at other points too; in general it is character-

istic of lexicogrammatical structures that the configurations deriving

25
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

from the various functional components of the semantic system will

differ not only in their labelling but in their bracketing also.
The logical component is distinct from the other three in that all
logical meanings, and only logical meanings, are expressed through the
structure of "unit complexes": clause complex, group complex and so
on. For example:

Clause the Grays stopped maligning and retired

complex: the hippopotamuses to their beds

Logical: (Clause) A - - - - -...~ (Clause) B

(co-ordination)

1. 3 Functional components ef the system

The grouping of semantic components differs according to the perspec-
tive from which we look at them.
From the standpoint of their realization in the lexicogrammatical
system (i.e. "from below"), the logical component, since it alone is,
and it always is, realized through recursive structures, is the one that
stands out as distinct from all the others.
From the standpoint of the functions of the linguistic system in
relation to some higher-level semiotic that is realized through the
linguistic semiotic (i.e. "from above"), it is the textual component
that appears as distinct, since the textual component has an enabling
function in respect of the other components: language can effectively
express ideational and interpersonal meanings only because it can create
text. Text is language in operation; and the textual component embod-
ies the semantic systems by means of which text is created.
From the point of view of the organization within the semantic
system itself (i.e. "from the same level"), the experiential and the
logical go together because there is greater systemic interdependence
between these two than between other pairings. This shows up in
various places throughout the English semantic system (the general
pattern may well be the same in all languages, though the specifics are
different): for example, the semantics of time reference, of speaking
("X said -"), and of identifying ("A = B") all involve some interplay
of experiential and logical systems. To illustrate this from the semantics
of speaking, the process 'say' is an option in the transitivity system,
which is experiential; whereas the relation between the process of
saying and what is said - the "reporting" relation - is an option in

26
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

the logical system of interclause relations. The picture is something

like the following:
Functional components of semantic systems,
seen from different vantage points:
Semiotic - functional ("from above"):

(extrinsic) (enabling)

Ideational Interpersonal Textual

Semantic ("from their own level"):

Ideational Interpersonal Textual

Logical Experiential

Lexicogrammatical ("from below"):

(univariate) (multivariate)

Logical Experiential Interpersonal Textual

Table 1 sets out the principal semantic systems arranged by function

and rank, showing their functional location in the semantic system and
their point of origin in the lexicogrammar.

1. 4 Systems ef the spoken language

In considering the nature of text, we have to take note of the fact that
certain semantic systems are realized through the medium of phonolog-
ical systems which have no counterpart in the written language.
In English there are two important systems of this kind: the
INFORMATION system, and the system of KEY.
The information system, which derives from the textual compo-
nent, determines how the text is organized as a flow of messages. It
does not operate through a unit on the lexicogrammatical rank scale
but specifies a distinct constituent structure of its own, which we
refer to as "information structure". The information structure is
realized through the intonation system of the phonology; and the
structural unit, the information unit, is realized as a phonological
constituent (i.e. a unit on the phonological rank scale), the one which
is generally known as the tone group, or tone unit. This is the carrier

27
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Table 1 Functional components of the semantic system

IDEATIONAL TEXTUAL
INTERPERSONAL
LOGICAL I EXPERIENTIAL (COHESION\
STRUCTURAL NON-STRUCTURAL
I. CLAUSE STRUCTURE
,...,
~ clause: clause: clause:
expansion transitivity, mood, modality theme reference
"e
.!!
Q.
modulation; polarity
0 identity
" verbal group:
l
.f.!
projection
verbal group:
types of process; tense
verbal group:
person, polarity .!i...
.,,...
voice; contrast
substitution/
ellipsis

e (paratactic
C: nominal group: nominal group: -~ nominal group: conjunction
and
';; hypotactic)
types of participant;
class, quality,
person ('role')
....ii
0
deixis
l;i
!'.)
quantity, etc.
.!19 lexical cohesion:
"
.!!
Q. adverbial group: adverbial group: 0 adverbial group: reiteration,
e
u
0 prepositional group:
types of circumstance
prepositional group
comment
§ prepositional group:
conjunction
collocation

-2. INFORMATION STRUCTURE

...
information unit: infonnation unit:
key information
distribution and
focus

of one complete tone contour. See Halliday (1967b), Elmenoufy

(1969), Halliday (1970).
Since it is realized through intonation, which is not shown in the
writing system, the information structure is a feature of the spoken
language only; and any interpretation of the information structure of a
written text depends on the "implication of utterance" which is a
feature of written language. There are two aspects to this: (1) the
interpretation of the paragraphological signals that the written language
employs, such as punctuation, underlining and other forms of emphasis;
(2) the assumption of the "good reason" principle, namely that the
mapping of the information structure on to other structures will take
the unmarked form except where there is good reason for it to do
otherwise (or, to put the same thing in another way, that it will take
the form that is locally unmarked).
This does not mean that we are left with only one possible reading
of a text, because in any real text there will be both ambiguities and
conflicts in the "co-text", the relevant textual environment at any
point. Different features may be counted as relevant; some features
will allow more than one interpretation; and some features will run
counter to others in the pressures they exert. But there will aiways be

28
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

a vast number of theoretically possible readings that are ruled out by

the co-text, so that the number of sensible interpretations is reasonably
small.
To illustrate this point adequately would take a lengthy article in
itsel( But a brief illustration of it is given after the discussion of the
information system and the systems of "key", at the end of 2.4. Since
the information system is part of the textual component it is treated
in the context of the discussion of that component, in the next main
section (2.3, below).
The system that we are referring to as "key" is not part of the
textual component, but of the interpersonal component. It detennines
the role of each message unit in the interaction of speaker and hearer.
In fact there is no single system of key; the term is a covering label
for a whole number of specific sub-systems related to the interpersonal
system of mood. These systems operate with the information unit as
their locus of origin, and are realized through variations in "tone":
that is, in the intonation contour that is associated with each tone
group. The systems of "key" are referred to briefly in Section 2.4 for
the purposes of the illustration.

2 The textual ( text-forming) component

2.1 Text-forming resources 1if the system
The entire semantic system is "text-forming", in the sense that a text
is the product of meanings of all four kinds - experiential, logical and
interpersonal, as well as textual.
The textual component, however, is the component whose func-
tion is specifically that of creating text, of making the difference
between language in the abstract and language in use. In other words
it is through the semantic options of the textual component that
language comes to be relevant to its environment, as distinct from
decontextualized language like words listed in a dictionary or sen-
tences in a grammar book.
The Prague school were the first to identify this component, and it
came to be known in their work as "functional sentence perspective";
see Danes (1974). There it has been defined lexicograrnmatically, as a
component of sentence structure; and in consequence the concept of
"FSP" is not taken to include those features which are not aspects of
sentence structure - the set of features that has been grouped together
under the heading of "cohesion" (see below).

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 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

The text-forming resources of language are partly structural (in the

sense that they are organized as structure-generating networks of
options) and partly not. An example of one that is not structural is
anaphoric reference by a third person pronoun such as he. The person
system itself, in whatever form it appears in the language in question
(it will generally be relatable to some idealized norm such as first/
second/third, singular/plural), is a structure-generating system; but it
is not the person system as such that is text-forming. The text-forming
agency is the relation between he and its antecedent; and this is not a
· structural relation in the defined sense.
The textual component of English is made up of the following: (I)
The structure-generating systems (those of functional sentence per-
spective), which are of two kinds, (i) thematic systems and (ii) infor-
mation systems; see Halliday (1968). (II) The cohesive relations, which
are of four kinds, (i) referential, (ii) substitutive-elliptical, (iii) conjunc-
tive and (iv) lexical; see Gutwinski (1974), Halliday and Hasan (1976).
These are what provide texture in the lan-guage. There is no implica-
tion here that these are universal features; they may be, or they may
not. But the systems in each network, and the way the systems are
realized, are specific to the language in question. '
These systems are outlined in subsections 2.2-2.7.

2.2 THEMATIC systems

The thematic systems are systems of the clause, and represent the
speaker's organization of the clause as a message. The basic structure
through which this organization is realized is that of Theme and
Rheme, which in tum is expressed through the order of the elements:
the Theme comes first.
The Theme is typically a single element in the clause structure, like
they in they called up their friends and neighbors (s. 16), late that evening (s.
12), to the Grays (s. 10); including complex elements (group com-
plexes) like an arrogant gray parrot and his arrogant mate (s. 1). Often it
is foregrounded by being enclosed in a predication, for example it was
long after midnight before (s. 17).
Very frequently, however, the Theme has the form of a nominali-
zation, a device which allows two or more elements to be taken together
as the Theme. There are no examples of this in the text. If, instead of
he calls her snooky-ookums (s. 2), in which the Theme is he, the author
had written what he calls her is snooky-ookums, the Theme would have
been (what) he calls her. This is the function of nominalization in the

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 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

clause: it permits the expression of all possible options in the thematic

organization. (Note that the tender things they said to each other during the
monolithic give-and-take ef their courtship is not an example of a multiple
Theme; it is a simple Theme consisting of one nominal group only -
which happens to have a clause embedded in it as Qualifier).
The thematic system is speaker-oriented, in the sense that the Theme
is the speaker's chosen point of departure, and the choice of Theme is
independent of what has gone before. In the typical, or unmarked,
instance, the Theme is selected from among the elements that are also
Given (see 2.3 below): it is something that the speaker is also presenting
as environmentally recoverable to the hearer. Hence the most usual
type of Theme is a personal pronoun; about half of those in the text
are of this kind. But the theme system is not determined by external
factors, and with only minor restrictions any alignment of clause
elements as Theme and Rheme will be possible.
For each of the principal options in the MOOD system, there is an
unmarked choice of Theme. In the declarative and imperative moods,
the unmarked Theme is the Subject; and it is important to stress in this
connection that the function of Subject in the clause is no less a
semantic function than other clause functions such as Agent or Theme.
It is a function deriving from the interpersonal component, via the
system of mood: the Subject is the "mood-carrying" (modal) nominal,
meaning "I state that X ... " in the declarative and "I want that X ... "
in the imperative.
In the interrogative mood, the unmarked Theme depends on the
type of interrogative: it is the WH-element in a WH-type interroga-
tive, and the finite element of the verb in a yes/no interrogative. In
either case the meaning is "I want to know X", where X is either the
interpretation of the WH-element, or the polarity ("yes or no?",
expressed in the finite verb).
Theme Rheme
he calls her snooky-ookums declarative (s. 2)
("you") listen to those squawks imperative (s. 13)
what in the world can they see in each WH-interrogative (s. 14)
other?
can you believe that? yes/no interrogative (s. 3)

The principle that initial position is thematic in function explains a great

many features of sequence ("word-order") in the grammar of English,
both in the clause and in other units. The unmarked theme of a question
is what the questioner wants to know; hence in a WH-interrogative the

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 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

WH-element comes first, and in a yes/no interrogative the finite

element, which is the one that carries the polarity, comes first. The
unmarked theme of a command is 'I want (me/you/us) to .. .'; hence
the modal Subject comes first - optionally omitted in the unmarked
"you" option. The same principle lies behind the tendency for the
Subject to come first in a declarative; only here it is much weaker,
and more readily overridden by marked themes of various kinds. It
also extends to other units than the clause: it is essentially the same
thematic principle which determines the assignment of initial position
in the group, where it is not subject to choice: the deictic element in
the nominal group, the element expressing primary tense or modality
in the verbal group, and the preposition in the prepositional group. In
each case these are the elements which relate the group to its environ-
ment, and so determine its relevance in the message; hence in a
language in which initial position is strongly thematic, such as English,
they will tend to float to the frontA1nd stay there.

2.3 INFORMATION systems

The information systems organize the discourse into quanta of infor-
mation, or message blocks, called "information units", and determine
the internal structure of each information unit.
The structure of the information unit is made up of the elements
Given and New. These are realized through the phonological systems
of intonation. Each information unit is encoded as one unit of
intonation, or "tone group"; and the New element is marked out by
the use of tonic prominence as a culminative feature - the syllable on
which the tonic prominence falls is the last accented syllable of the
New. The element bearing the culminative tonic accent is said to bear
the "information focus".
The unmarked place for the New element is at the end of the
information unit. In such instances, i.e. when the final element is New,
what precedes may be either Given or New. In all other instances, i.e.
when some non-final element is presented as New, then every other
element in the information unit is thereby signalled as Given.
The meaning of Given is 'treated by the speaker as recoverable to
the hearer from the environment'. Conversely, New means 'treated as
non-recoverable'. Non-recoverable does not imply that the item in
question cannot have occurred before, but that if it has, the meaning
that is associated with it is non-recoverable in the context. For example,

32
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

D' you want to speak to John, or to Mary? - I want to speak to John.

Have you met John and Mary Smith? - I know John.

In both instances, John is shown as New in the response; not because it

has not occurred before, but because it is carrying other information
('John is the one I want to speak to', 'John but not Mary') that the
speaker assumes to be non-recoverable to the hearer - since otherwise,
presumably, he would not have asked the question in the first place. It
is important not to confuse the concept of New with that of 'no
previous mention'.
The intonational prominence - the tonic accent - marks the
culmination of the New, so that anything following is automatically
Given; this includes all inherently Given elements - anaphoric and
deictic items - that happen to occur finally in the information unit.
The status of what precedes is governed by two principles: (1) the
system of marking, and (2) the structural hierarchy of the grammar (the
"rank scale");

(1) (a) If the information focus falls on an element that is other than
the last accented element in the information unit (an "accented"
element being any element that is not "inherently Given"), the focus is
marked.
Semantically this means that the information structure is environ-
mentally specific; there is no indetemiinacy, and all else in the
information unit is Given. Example (s. 11):
(But they decided instead to ... ) // 1 gossip a/bout the / shameless /
pair//

Here the focus is on gossip, which is non-final; it is therefore marked,

and signals the shameless pair as explicitly Given. (This happens also to
provide an excellent illustration of another cohesive principle, a form
oflexical cohesion, whereby a "general word" is introduced as a Given
element (here the word pair) to serve as the carrier of an attitudinal
Epithet (here shameless).)

(1) (b) If the focus falls on the last accented element (last element
other than any that are "inherently Given"), it is unmarked. Semanti-
cally this means that the information structure is not environmentally
specific; and indetenninacy results. In this case, the whole information
unit may be New; or the New may begin at any structural boundary.
The only restriction is that the New cannot be discontinuous: G+ N,
N+G, G+N+G are all possible structures, but N+G+N is not - the

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 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

last can be achieved only by encoding as a sequence of two information

units. For an example see below under (2).

(2) The focal element, the element that is defined by the tonic
prominence, is the highest-ranking sub-constituent for which the
prominence is culminative. That is to say, if the information unit is
one clause (this being, as a matter of fact, the unmarked form of the
mapping), the focal constituent will be a group - the group being the
next-ranking unit below the clause - provided the tonic promi-
nence falls on the last accented syllable in the entire group.
Example (s. 15):

I I l would as / soon / live with a / pair of/ unoiled / garden / shears / /

where the tonic prominence on shears marks the entire group a pair ef
unoiled garden shears as being the focal constituent (since the information
unit is a clause). If the tonic prominence had been assigned to unoiled,
the focal constituent would be only the word unoiled itself, since the
prominence would not be culminative for the whole nominal group,
but only for the word. In the former instance, with the reading we
have assumed, the information structure is unmarked. In the latter, the
information structure would be marked, and would therefore presup-
pose a specific semantic environment, in which the point at issue was
'what kind of garden shears would you as soon live with?'
The information system, in contrast to the thematic system, is
hearer-oriented. That is to say, the meaning that is encoded in the
Given-New structure is that of 'recoverable, or not recoverable, to the
hearer'. This in tum depends on the environment, both verbal and
non-verbal; if a meaning is recoverable, it is in some '\Nay or other (but
there are many possible ways) present in the environment. Since the
environment includes the preceding text, the information structure
often serves to relate a piece to what has gone before it. But recovera-
bility is not a simple matter of previous mention; and in any case it is
the speaker's decision what he is going to treat as recoverable. He is
free to use the system as he pleases, and frequently uses it to great effect
as a means of constructing the environment it is designed to reflect.
The speaker has total discretion; he is constructing all the meanings
at once. The reader of a written text is in the peculiar position of
having discretion at just those points where the written medium
happens to be most ambiguous; of which the information system is
one. He can, if he chooses, read sentences 2 and 3 as ·

34
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

II 4 he calls her // 1 snooky / ookums said / Mrs. /Gray // 2 can /

you believe / that //

which imposes the interpretation 'Do you believe that's her name? -
that's what he calls her'. The only grounds for rejecting this are that it
doesn't make sense (of the text; it makes perfectly good sense of the
sentence). There could, of course, be no better grounds than that. But
it illustrates the kind of decision that a reader is making all the time,
whereas a hearer has the solution presented to him readymade.
We tend to think of the information unit as being unlike the
lexicogrammatical units of clause, group and so on, in that while
the latter are specified simultaneously by all semantic components,
the former is defined solely by the textual component. A clause is the
domain of systems of all kinds, experiential (e.g. transitivity), interper-
sonal (e.g. mood), and textual (e.g. theme); whereas the information
unit is the domain only of the information systems. But this is not
wholly true. The information unit is also exploited by the interper-
sonal component as the carrier of the systems of KEY: those, related to
mood, whereby the speaker selects the key signature that attaches to
the particular role assignment he is making for himself and for the
hearer. The choice of key is expressed by the tone contour; and the
point of origin for this choice is the information unit - since the
information unit is encoded as a tone group, and one tone group is
one complete tone contour, the two naturally coincide. So the
information structure operates as a kind of distinct but simultaneous
constituent hierarchy, or "rank scale"; one that is mapped on to the
conventional grammatical hierarchy of clause, group, word and mor-
pheme, but realizes a different set of semantic systems. The rationale
for this is very simple: the information structure is simply the phono-
logical system doing extra work. It is the phonological hierarchy that
is being "borrowed" for the occasion.
The various types of phonological contrast, those of intonation, of
rhythm or "pulse", and of articulation, are organized as a distinct
constituent hierarchy, or "phonological rank scale"; in English, tone
group, foot (or stress group), syllable, phoneme. This hierarchy, and the
"phonotactics" that is based on it, functions as a whole in the realization
of the lexicogrammatical system. But once it has come into being, so
to speak, particular parts of it function on their own in the representation
of particular semantic systems, which can thus be regarded as "bypassing"
the grammar - as "meanings encoded directly in sounds" - although
for theoretical reasons it is useful to include them in the systematic

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 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

representation at the lexicogrammatical level. Prominent among these

are the ones that we are referring to as systems of key.
The "key" systems are not part of the textual component. But there
is some overlap between them and the information systems, which is
of significance for text description. The next subsection explains this
point.

2. 4 Digression: the systems ef "key"

The KEY is expressed by the choice of TONE, the system of pitch
contours that is carried by the tone group. In its bare essentials, this is
a system of five tones: fall (tone 1), rise (tone 2), low rise (tone 3), fall-
rise (tone 4), rise-fall (tone 5).
These tones have different meanings - that is, they realize different
semantic systems - according to their modal environment: according
to whether they occur in the environment of a declarative, an interrog-
ative, or an imperative, and what kind of declarative, interrogative or
imperative it is. For example, a rising tone (tone 2) on a yes/no
interrogative means a "straight" question; the same tone ori a WH-
interrogative means (according to where the prominence is located)
either an "echo" question or a question embedded in a request for
permission to ask it; and on a declarative it means a contradiction.
The pitch contour as specified in this way begins on the point of
tonic prominence (as defined in 2.3 above). This prominence, although
often interpreted in terms of stress ("primary stress" in the theory of
supra-segmentals), is in fact melodic prominence: the point of concen-
tration of the melodic contour (the main fall, the fall-and-tum, etc.). If
there is any part of the tone group before the tonic accent, this is the
locus of a sub-melody or ','pretone" which adds further specification to
the meaning. Since, as already noted, everything that comes after the
tonic prominence is "Given", there are no "post-tones", but only
predictable prolongations of the contour, known as "tails".
For a narrative text with dialogue it is relevant to note that all
quoting clauses function as tails to preceding quoted (direct speech)
passages:
// 1 • I would as / soon / live with a / pair of/ unoiled / garden /
shears / said her in/amo/ratus //

There is an optional silent beat at the end of the quoted clause:

/ shears. said her in/amo/ratus //.

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 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Once again, in reading a written text we assume unmarked choices:

we assume the unmarked key unless there is good reason in the
environment for the choice of another one - which then becomes the
locally unmarked choice, since the environment sets up a local norm.
So, for example, on a yes/ no interrogative such as Can you believe that?
(s. 3), taken in isolation, we would assign a tone 2 (rising). However,
the text environment shows that here it is to be interpreted not as a
straight question but as an exclamation; so it will be assigned a tone
that is unmarked for exclamations (tone 5, or a certain variety of tone
1). It could be argued that the specific meanings that are present in the
question itself, expressed by the lexical verb believe in second person
with "potential" modulation, are sufficient to convey the sense of
exclamation; but this does not affect the point - rather it illustrates a
more general point, that of the flexibility and relative indeterminacy of
what it is that constitutes the environment.
It would be out of place here to describe the systems of key in
detail; for a fuller account, see Halliday (1967b), and also Halliday
(1970). In any case many of them are relevant only to spoken texts in
spontaneous verbal interaction, and are not activated in the reading of
a written text aloud. But there is one system which lies on the
borderline of key and information structure (and hence on the border-
line of the interpersonal and textual components) which is, on the
contrary, more activated in loud reading than in any other variety of
English; so we will refer to this in a final illustration from the text.
Given a pair of successive information units, one an unmarked (tone
1) declarative and the other semantically related to it, there is a system
of options for the latter, which is realized as a choice among tone 1,
tone 3 and tone 4. There is, further, an unmarked association between
this and the three syntactic forms which this relation may take: (1)
independent (unrelated) clause with parallel structure, (2) paratactically
related clause, and (3) hypotactically related clause. These unmarked
patterns can be illustrated as follows:
(1) II 1 the hippopotamuses stopped criticizing the Grays;
II 1 the Grays stopped maligning the hippopotamuses II
(2) II 3 the hippopotamuses stopped criticizing the Grays,
II 1 and the Grays stopped maligning the hippopotamuses II
(3) II 4 when the hippopotamuses stopped criticizing the Grays,
II 1 the Grays stopped maligning the hippopotamuses II

Variation in meaning is achieved by means of marked combinations:

tone 4 with an independent clause, tone 3 with a hypotactic clause,

37
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

and so on. And the contrast between tone 3 and tone 4, indicating
different degrees of dependence, is available to almost any information
unit that is contingent on another one having tone 1.
If now we consider a sentence such as the last one of the main
paragraph (s. 11), we find a large number of possible interpretations,
including but by no means limited to the following:
But they decided to phone their friends and gossip about the
instead and neighbors shameless pair
I I 3 ... instead II 3 ... neighbors II 1 . gossip ... II
II 3 ... instead II 1 ... neighbors II 1 . gossip ... II
II 4 ... instead II 3 ... neighbors II 1 . gossip ... II
II 4 ... instead II 1 ... neighbors // 1 . gossip ... II
II 1 ... neighbors II 1 . gossip ... II
II 4 ... instead II 1 .... gossip ... II

each of which includes a number of sub-varieties. All these are different

"readings" of the text, and all have different meanings, slight and subtle
though these may be. This illustrates the way in which the information
structure, and associated systems of key, are supplied by the reader in
the loud-reading (and at least in a certain type of silent reading) of a
written text. Reading a text is not a purely receptive activity; the
reader is also a speaker, even if he is only talking to himself.

2. 5 Referential cohesion
Certain elements in the linguistic system have the property that they
are interpretable only by reference to something other than themselves.
These are the personals, demonstratives (including the) and compara-
tives; for example she, this, earlier as in She's shy. This is what I meant.
You should have come earlier. These are perfectly intelligible on their
own; but they are interpretable only when we know who "she" is,
what "this" is, and "earlier" than what.
The reference may be exophoric, to some phenomenon located out-
side the text and in the context of situation; or endophoric, to an element
within the text, typically something that has preceded (anaphoric) but
sometimes to something that follows (cataphoric). So she may refer to
someone present and identifiable, or to someone previously mentioned;
this likewise to some object present and identifiable, or to something -
an object or other phenomenon, or a fact - just mentioned or about to
be mentioned; earlier may involve comparison with the present moment
("than now") or with some time previously mentioned. In a written
narrative, all reference can be assumed to be endophoric; 'but the

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 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

possibility of exophoric reference appears at one remove in the dialogue

that is embedded in the narrative. For example in He calls her snooky-
ookums ... Can you believe that? (s. 2/3), he and her are exophoric to the
narrative, whereas that is endophoric to the dialogue and refers to "(the
fact that) he calls her snooky-ookums".
Reference is a semantic relation and is usually assumed, no doubt
justifiably, to be in origin exophoric; and this explains why it takes the
forms it does. Personal reference depends on the concept of personal
roles in the speech situation ("some person or object other than speaker
and addressee"); demonstrative reference is based on proximity ("near"
or "not near"; in some languages it is specifically tied to the concept of
person, the meanings being "near me", "near you", "not near either of
us"); comparative reference involves a conception of likeness and
unlikeness between phenomena. The word the functions as the
unmarked demonstrative; it signals that the referent can be identified,
but without locating it on any semantic scale.
Whatever its origin in the linguistic system, reference is a primary
text-forming agency, since all endophoric reference contributes to the
making of a text. It is a signal that the interpretation is to be sought
elsewhere; and if the source lies in some other word or words in the
text, cohesion is set up between the two passages in question. This
cohesion is independent of the linguistic structure, and so may extend
beyond any structural unit; it provides an alternative to structure as a
means of cohering one part of the meaning with another.
There are numerous instances in the text of reference as a cohesive
relation, across sentence boundaries, both endophoric within the nar-
rative and exophoric from the dialogue to the narrative. Examples from
sentences 13-15: (dialogue to narrative) demonstrative those [squawks],
personal they, comparative as soon; (narrative to narrative) the [male
hippopotamus], the [female hippopotamus], her [inamoratus].

2. 6 Substitutive and elliptical cohesion

Certain elements which are not referential in the above sense create
texture by substitution: they function as alternatives to the repetition of
a particular item, and hence cohere with the passage in which that item
occurs. For example if the question vVhy aren't you listening to the music?
is answered by I am doing, the word doing is a substitute for listening to
the music, and hence it signals that the response is in fact an answer to
the question. This relation is also independent of structure; there may
or may not be a sentence boundary in between.

39
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Substitution, in turn, is a particular form of ellipsis, in which the

ellipsis is filled by an explicit counter, or placeholder. Another possible
form of response above would be simply I am, with listening to the music
presupposed by ellipsis. Similarly in What are you doing?- Listening to the
music, the response is an elliptical version of I'm listening to the music, this
time with the modal element I am omitted; and again the ellipsis provides
cohesion between the answer and the question that preceded it.
Reference, it was pointed out, is a semantic relation, in which the
source of interpretation of some element is to be sought elsewhere;
with "elsewhere in the text" as a special case. Ellipsis, by contrast, is a
purely fom1al relation, in which some item is to be transported from
elsewhere to fill a designated slot. Ellipsis is essentially a relation within
the text, and not, like reference, a relation of text to environment in
which the relevant environmental feature may happen incidentally to
be located in the text. For this reason substitutive and elliptical relations
are not found in semiotic systems other than language, whereas
referential relations often are.
Substitution and ellipsis are primarily associated with spoken
language, especially spontaneous conversation. The only examples in
the text are "No", and "Capsized bathtub, indeed!" in sentences 4 and 6.

2. 7 Conjunctive cohesion
Any pair of adjacent sentences may be related by one of a small set of
semantic relations, which may be described in most general terms
under the four headings of 'and', 'yet', 'so', and 'then' (additive,
adversative, causal, temporal). Each of these covers a wide range of
more specific meanings.
Like other cohesive relations, these have their structural counterparts
in the form of relations within the sentence, for example in the hypotactic
structures with besides, although, because, after. But the systems of options
are different under these two conditions, the cohesive and the structural.
Each one of the types of conjunctive relation has in principle two
interpretations, according to the functional-semantic component from
which it is derived. Either the conjunctive meaning resides in the
ideational component, as a relation within the thesis; or it resides in the
interpersonal component, as a relation within the speech process. These
have been referred to respectively as "external" and "internal", taking
the communication process as the point of departure_: a relation
between things - between phenomena that constitute the ideational

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 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

content of the discourse - is one that is external to the communication

process.
The distinction is not totally clear cut, and many instances are
indeterminate. It appears clearly in a pair of examples such as the
following, where the relation is a temporal one:

(external) First of all the machine broke down. Next it started to make
alarming noises inside.
(internal) First of all the machine has broken down. Next it doesn't
belong to me anyway.

In the first, the temporal successivity is between the two phenomena

which constitute the thesis; in the second, it is between the two steps
in the argument, in the speaker's unfolding of his role in the speech
situation.
In a narrative text the conjunctive relations are likely to be mainly
of the external kind; an example is the adversative in sentences 10 and
11: . . . they thought of calling the A. B. [. . . . But they decided instead to
phone their friends and neighbors. The basic meaning of the adversative
relation is unexpectedness: "contrary to the expectation set up by the
environment". An example of this relation in its internal sense is
possibly to be found in sentences 9 and 10:

The tender things they said to each other ... sounded as lyric to them
as flowers in bud ... To the Grays, however, the bumbling romp of
the lover and his lass was hard to comprehend and even harder to
tolerate ...

where the meaning is 'by contrast', 'on the other hand', and the
adversative relation resides not so much in the phenomenon of there
being the two attitudes ('seemed good to the hippos but bad to the
parrots') as in the narrator's juxtaposing of them as a step in the
narrative, brought out by the foregrounded status of the Grays as a
marked Theme in the second sentence.

2. 8 Lexical cohesion
This is the special kind of texture that is achieved by the use of
vocabulary, (a) by reiteration and (b) by collocation. Both of these can
be exemplified from the text (numerals refer to sentences):

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 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

(a) Reiteration (semantic). Keyword: lover (in title)

:s:_
same word
.
same
referent
lover 1, 8
including excluding unrelated
same referent same referent referent
lovemaking 10 love 18
synonym inamoratus 15 courtship 9 mate 1
endeannent 12
super- male 5 qffection 5 female 5, 16
ordinate male 16
general creatures 10
word pair 11

The display reflects the fact that the word lover is semantically complex;
it contains the two components of affection and mating, and both of
these elements are reiterated throughout the text. There is a certain
arbitrariness in both dimensions of the table, but each is motivated by
general considerations, the vertical dimension representing the organ-
ization of the system and the horizontal the patterning of the text. The
vertical dimension is really a continuity, ranging from (1) repetitions
(of the same lexical item - which is itself by no means a determinate
concept; here we take the morpheme love as criterial), through (2)
synonyms at more or less the same level of generality, to (3) related
items of greater generality, those which are higher in the lexical
taxonomy, up to (4) the class of "general words" that figure at the top,
which have very little specific content and occur mainly as cohesive
agents. The horizontal dimension shows the referential relationship
between the reiterated item and the base word: co-referential, inclusive,
exclusive or unrelated.
(b) Collocation Qexical). Keyword: lover (in title). Cohesive chain
formed of items related by collocation:
lass (title) - lover (1) - lass (1) -
affection (4) - spring (8) - lover (8) -
lass (8) - young (8) - oblivious (8) -
happily (8) - tender (9) - lyric (9) -
flowers (9) - bud (9)
These are pairs or sets of items that have a strong tendency in the
system to co-occurrence; hence when they do co-occur in a text, the
effect is cohesive. The two concepts of reiteration and collocation are

42
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

overlapping: lexical items that typically collocate with one another (i.e.
are related in the lexical system) are often those which are partially
synonymous (i.e. are related in the semantic system). But they are not
identical concepts; the relationships are on two different levels. There
is no, or only a tenuous, semantic link between lover and spring: but
these are regularly collocated in English writing from Shakespeare to
the present day. Conversely, there is no strong collocational bond
between courtship and endearment, or between lover and inamoratus - it
must be rare to find the latter pair in the same text under any
circumstances! The lexical structure of a text depends on both types of
relationship, and on the interplay that occurs between the two.
The sequences illustrated are probably the most pervasive in the
present text, but there are other important strands of lexical cohesion,
for example the motifs of derision (arrogant - scornful - sharp-tongued -
mocking - derision) and of monstrosity. For a detailed study and
interpretation of collocational patterning in English, see Sinclair et al.
(1970).
Cohesion can be thought of as a process in the text, the linking of
some element - often but not always an element that is inherently
presupposing - to something that has gone before, or in certain
instances to something that is to follow. It would be wrong, however,
to conceive of it as having no place in the semantic system, as what
some linguists call a "surface" phenomenon. Cohesion is also a relation
in the system. As such it is not directional, though it is ordered in the
case of inherently presupposing elements (reference items and substi-
tutes). The meaning of this relation in its most general terms is that of
"co-interpretation". This in tum takes on a number of more specific
meanings according to the type of cohesion: co-referentiality (identity
of reference) is one of these more specific meanings. Co-interpretation
refers to the fact that the elements that are "tied" by the cohesive
relation are interpreted (not identically but) as a whole, with mutual
dependence or "solidarity" between them.
A general treatment of cohesion, covering reference, substitution,
ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, will be found in Halliday and
Hasan (1976). This book also contains a scheme of analysis and notation
for describing the cohesive properties of a text. For a treatment of
cohesion in English literary texts see Gutwinski (1974).

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3 The nature of text

3. 1 Text and "non-text"
The features discussed in the last section - thematic systems, informa-
tion systems, and the various types of cohesion - represent the
specifically text-forming resources of the linguistic system. The first
two are structural, in the sense that options in these systems contribute
to the derivation of structure: thematic options to the lexicogrammat-
ical structure, being realized through the clause, and informational ones
to what we have called the information structure, a distinct though
related hierarchy that is realized directly in the phonological system,
through the tone group. The cohesive relations are non-structural, not
being realized through any form of structural configuration.
It should be stressed that all these are aspects of the semantic system.
They are options in meaning, which like other options in meaning are
realized through the organization at other strata.
In order to give a complete characterization of texture we should
have to make reference also to "generic" structure, the form that a text
has as a property of its genre. The fact that the present text is a
narrative, and of a particular kind, as specified in the general title Fables
for Our Time - that is, it is a complex of a traditional narrative form,
the fable, and a later form, the humorous essay, to which this has been
adapted - defines for it a certain generic structure, which determines
such things as its length, the types of participant (typically animals given
human attributes, or at least human roles, and engaging in dialogue),
and the culmination in a moral.
The generic structure is outside the linguistic system; it is language
as the projection of a higher-level semiotic structure. It is not simply a
feature of literary genres; there is a generic structure in all discourse,
including the most informal spontaneous conversation; see Sacks et al.
(1974). The concept of generic structure can be brought within the
general framework of the concept of register, the semantic patterning
that is characteristically associated with the "context of situation" of a
text; see Section 4 below, and also Gregory (1967), Halliday (1974),
Hasan (1973). The structure of the narrative genre, especially traditional
forms of narrative, has been extensively studied across a wide range of
different languages, and we shall not attempt to discuss it here; see for
example Taber (1966), Chabrol and Marin (1971).
These three factors - generic structure, textual structure (thematic
and informational), and cohesion - are what distinguish· text from

44
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

"non-text". One does not normally meet "non-text" in real life,

though one can construct it for illustrative purposes. Here is a passage
in which only the thematic structure has been scrambled; everything
else, including all other aspects of the texture, is well-formed:
Now comes the President here. It's the window he's stepping through
to wave to the crowd. On his victory his opponent congratulates him.
What they are shaking now is hands. A speech is going to be made by
him. "Gentlemen and ladies. That you are confident in me honours me.
I shall, hereby pledge I, turn this country into a place, in which what
people do safely will be live, and the ones who grow up happily will be
able to be their children."
These patterns are not optional stylistic variants; they are an integral
part of the meaning of language. Texture is not something that is
achieved by superimposing an appropriate text form on a pre-existing
ideational content. The textual component is a component of meaning
along with the ideational and interpersonal components. Hence a
linguistic description is not a progressive specification of a set of
structures one after the other, ideational, then interpersonal, then
textual. The system does not first generate a representation of reality,
then encode it as a speech act, and finally recode it as a text, as the
metaphors of philosophical linguistics seem to imply. It embodies all
these types of meaning in simultaneous networks of options, from each
of which derive structures that are mapped on to one another in the
course of their lexicogrammatical realization. The lexicogrammar acts
as the integrative system, taking configurations from all the components
of the semantics and combining them to form multilayered, "poly-
phonic" structural compositions.

3. 2 The text as a semantic unit

The quality of texture is not defined by size. There is a concept of a
text as a kind of super-sentence, something that is larger than a sentence
but of the same nature. But this is to misrepresent the essential quality
of a text. Obviously one cannot quarrel with the use of the term "text"
to refer to a string of sentences that realize a text; but it is important to
stress that the sentences are, in fact, the realization of text rather than
constituting the text itself. Text is a semantic concept.
The same problem has arisen in linguistics with the conception of
the sentence as a super-phoneme. A sentence is not an outsize phono-
logical unit; it is a kxicogrammatical unit that is realized in the
phonological system, which has its own hierarchy of units. It may be

45
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

that the sentence in some language or other is marked off by the

phonological system, so that it can be identified at the phonological
level; but that does not make the sentence a phonological concept.
There is developmental evidence that a child builds up his phonology
from both ends, as it were, constructing a phonological system on the
one hand and individual phonological representations of lexicogram-
matical elements on the other - both particular word phonologies and
generalized syllable phonologies at the same time; see Ferguson and
Farwell (1973). In other words a system is built up both as a tactic
system, in its own right, and as the piecemeal realization of elements of
a higher-level system. We find an analogous process taking place at the
next level up. The child both constructs a lexicogrammatical system
and, simultaneously, lexicogrammatical representations of semantic ele-
ments. Just as he develops a word phonology side by side with a
syllable phonology, he also develops a text grammar side by side with
a clause grammar. The "text grammar" in this sense is the realization,
in the lexicogrammar, of particular elements on the semantic stratum;
and it explains the important part played in language development by
the learning of large stretches of "wording" as uninterrupted wholes.
A text, as we are interpreting it, is a semantic unit, which is not
composed of sentences but is realized in sentences. A text is to the
semantic system what a clause is to the lexicogrammatical system and a
syllable to the phonological system. It may be characterized by certain
lexicogrammatical features, just as a clause may be characterized by
certain phonological features; but this does not make it a lexicogram-
matical unit (given that such a unit is to be defined, as we have defined
it, by its being the locus of lexicogrammatical structures).
Whether or not, and in what sense, there is a rank scale, or hierarchy,
of semantic units, as some linguists have suggested, must be left
undecided. A clause is only one of a number of structure-carrying units
in the grammar, and it is not entirely clear why it should be singled
out as the primary grammatical constituent; the same applies to the
syllable, or any unit that is selected as the basic unit for phonology.
The concept of semantic units is much less clearcut, since the concept
of semantic structures is less clearcut. In any case the linguistic system
as a whole is not symmetrical, as Lamb pointed out in his review of
Hjelmslev; see Lamb (1966). Moreover the distinguishing feature of
the semantic system is its organization into functional components.
These determine, not units of different sizes, but simultaneous config-
urations of meanings of different kinds. The semantic analogue of the
rank scale would appear to be not some kind of a hierarchy of structural

46
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units but the multiple detemunation of the text as a unit in respect of

more than one property, or "dimension" of meaning.
Let us express this more concretely in relation to the text that is
under consideration. It constitutes "a text" as defined by the textual
component: not only has it a generic structure, but it is also internally
cohesive, and it functions as a whole as the relevant environment for
the operation of the theme and infonnation systems. In other words it
has a unity of what we have called "texture", deriving from the
specifically text-fom1ing component within the semantic system, and
this is sufficient to define it as a text. But we are likely to find this
unity reflected also in its ideational and interpersonal meanings, so that
its quality as a text is reinforced by a continuity of context and of
speaker-audience relationship. In fact this "artistic unity" is already
contained in the concept of generic structure, and reflected in the
specific fom1s taken by the cohesive relations. So there is a continuity
in the time reference (every finite verb in the narrative is in simple past
tense, every one in the dialogue is in simple present); in the transitivity
patterns (the process types are those of perception, cognition, verbali-
zation, and attribution, except for the very last sentence; and there is a
rather even distribution among them); in the attitudinal modes, the
form of the dialogue, and so on.
In other words, a text is a semantic unit defined by the textual
component. This is not a tautology; rather it is the reason for calling the
textual component by that name. A text has a generic structure, is
internally cohesive, and constitutes the relevant environment for selec-
tion in the "textual" systems of the grammar. But its unity as a text is
likely to be displayed in patterns ofideational and interpersonal meaning
as well. A text is the product of its environment, and it functions in that
environment. In Section 4 we shall explore briefly the way in which we
can conceptualize the relation of text to its environment, and the
processes whereby specific aspects of a speaker's or writer's semantic
system tend to be activated by - and hence, in turn, to shape and modify
- specific aspects of the environment in which meanings are exchanged.
Meanwhile we should stress the essential indeterminacy of the
concept of "a text". Clauses, or syllables, are relatively well-defined
entities: we usually know how many of them there are, in any instance,
and we can even specify, in terms of some theory, where they begin
and end. A text, in the nom1al course of events, is not something that
has a beginning and an ending. The exchange of meanings is a
continuous process that is involved in all human interaction; it is not
unstructured, but it is seamless, and all that one can observe is a kind

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 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

of periodicity in which peaks of texture alternate with troughs - highly

cohesive moments with moments of relatively little continuity. The
discreteness of a literary text is untypical of texts as a whole.
By "text", then, we understand a continuous process of semantic
choice. Text is meaning and meaning is choice, an ongoing current of
selections each in its paradigmatic environment of what might have
been meant (but was not). It is the paradigmatic environment - the
innumerable sub-systems that make up the semantic system - that must
provide the basis of the description, if the text is to be related to higher
orders of meaning, whether social, literary or of some other semiotic
universe. The reason why descriptions based on structure are of limited
value in text studies is that in such theories the paradigmatic environ-
ment is subordinated to a syntagmatic frame of reference; when
paradigmatic concepts are introduced, such as transformation, they are
embedded in what remains essentially a syntagmatic theory. By what at
first sight appears as a paradox, since text is a syntagmatic process (but
see Hjelmslev (1961), Section 11), it is the paradigmatic basis of a
description that makes it significant for text studies. Hence in glosse-
matics, and similarly in the "systemic" version of system-structure
theory, the syntagmatic concept of structure is embedded in a theory
that is essentially paradigmatic. Here the description is based on system;
and text is interpreted as the process of continuous movement through
the system, a process which both expresses the higher orders ofmeaning
that constitute the "social semiotic", the meaning systems of the
culture, and at the same time changes and modifies the system itself.

3. 3 The text as projection of meanings at a higher level

What is "above" the text? If text is semantic process, encoded in the
lexicogrammatical system, what is it the encoding of in its tum?
What is "above" depends on one's perspective, on the nature of the
enquiry and the ideology of the enquirer. There are different higher-
level semiotics, and often different levels of meaning within each.
This point emerges very clearly if one considers literary texts. To say
that a text has meaning as literature is to relate it specifically to a literary
universe of discourse as distinct from others, and thus to interpret it in
terms of literary norms and assumptions about the nature of meaning.
The linguistic description of a text which is contextualized in this way
attempts to explain its meaning as literature - why the reader interprets
it as he does, and why he evaluates it as he does. This involves relating
the text to a higher-level semiotic system which is faceted and layered

48
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

in much the same way as the linguistic system itself. An example of this
"layering" from the present text is the use of the generic form of the
fable as the vehicle of a humorous essay, already referred to above. The
"level of literary execution" is part of the total realizational chain; see
Hasan (1971).
When there is foregrounding of lexicogrammatical ot phonological
features in a literary text, particular forms of linguistic prominence that
relate directly to some facet of its literary interpretation, this is closely
analogous to the "bypassing" phenomenon that is found within the
linguistic system when some element in the semantics is realized directly
in phonological terms (cf. 2.3 above). At this point there is isomorphism
between two adjacent strata, and the phenomenon can be represented
as a straight pass through one of the strata! systems. We have referred
to this already in relation to the information and "key" systems in the
semantics of English: an example is the bandwidth of a falling tone
expressing the degree of "newness" or semantic contrast involved in a
statement. It is possible in such a case to set up a grammatical system as
an interface between the semantics and the phonology; and there are
strong reasons for doing so, since there is a systematic interrelationship
between this and other grammatical systems, although strictly in its own
terms the grammatical representation is redundant because there is
neither neutralization nor diversification at this point.
The point is a significant one because a great deal of stylistic
foregrounding depends on an analogous process, by which some aspect
of the underlying meaning is represented linguistically at more than one
level: not only through the semantics of the text - the ideational and
interpersonal meanings, as embodied in the content and in the writer's
choice of his role - but also by direct reflection in the lexicogrammar or
the phonology. For an example of this from a study ofWilliam Golding's
novel The Inheritors see Chapter 3 of this volume, where it is suggested
that the particular impact of this novel on reader and critic may be
explained by the fact that the underlying semiotic is projected simul-
taneously on to the semantics, in the content of narrative and dialogue,
and on to the grammar in the highly untypical transitivity patterns that
characterize, not so much individual clauses (none of which is in itself
deviant), but the distribution of clause types in the writing as a whole.
The present text does not display this feature of multi-level fore-
grounding to any great extent because it is both short and prose. A
verse text, however short, provides scope by virtue of its generic form
for the sort of patterned variability of patterns which is involved in this
kind of multiple projection; whereas in a prose text it is likely to appear

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only in rather long-range effects, as deflections in the typical patterns of

co-occurrence and relative frequency. But there are minor instances:
for example the phonaesthetic motif of the final syllable in sna.ffte, bumble,
wu.ffle and gurble, and incongruity involved in the use of synonyms of
different "tenor" (see Section 4 below) such as mate, lover, inamoratus.
To summarize this point: a text, as well as being realized in the
lower levels of the linguistic system, lexicogrammatical and phonolo-
gical, is also itself the realization of higher-level semiotic structures with
their own modes of interpretation, literary, sociological, psychoanalytic
and so on. These higher-level structures may be expressed not only by
the semantics of the text but also by patterning at those lower levels;
when such lower-level patterning is significant at some higher level it
becomes what is known as "foregrounded". Such foregrounded pat-
terns in lexicogrammar or phonology may be characteristic of a part or
the whole of a text, or even of a whole class or genre of texts, a classic
example being the rhyme schemes of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean
sonnets as expression of two very different modes of artistic semiotic
(patterns of meaning used as art forms).

3 .4 The text as a sodosemiotic process

In its most general significance a text is a sociological event, a semiotic
encounter through which the meanings that constitute the social system
are exchanged. The individual member is, by virtue of his member-
ship, a "meaner", one who means. By his acts of meaning, and those
of other individual meaners, the social reality is created, maintained in
good order, and coutinuously shaped and modified.
It is perhaps not too far-fetched to put it in these terms: reality
consists of meanings, and the fact that meanings are essentially indeter-
minate and unbounded is what gives rise to that strand in human
thought - philosophical, religious, scientific - in which the emphasis is
on the dynamic, wave-like aspect of reality, its constant restructuring,
its periodicity without recurrence, its continuity in time and space.
Here there is no distinction between relations among symbols and
relations among the "things" that they symbolize - because both are of
the same order; both the things and the symbols are meanings. The
fact that aspects of reality can be digitalized and reduced to ordered
operations on symbols is still consistent with the view of reality as
meaning: certain aspects of meaning are also captured in this way. Pike
expressed this property of the linguistic system by viewing language as
a
particle, wave and field; each of these perspectives reveals different

50
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

kind of truth about it: see Pike (1959). Linguistic theory has remained
at a stage at which particulateness is treated as the norm, and a number
of different and not very clearly related concepts are invoked to handle
the non-particulate aspects of language. As far as text studies, and text
meaning, is concerned, however, we cannot relegate the indeterminacy
to an appendix. The text is a continuous process. There is a constantly
shifting relation between a text and its environment, both paradigmatic
and syntagmatic: the syntagmatic environment, the "context of situ-
ation" (which includes the semantic context - and which for this
reason we interpret as a semiotic construct), can be treated as a constant
for the text as a whole, but is in fact constantly changing, each part
serving in tum as environment for the next. And the ongoing text-
creating process continually modifies the system that engenders it,
which is the paradigmatic environment of the text. Hence the dynamic,
indeterminate nature of meaning, which can be idealized out to the
margins if one is considering only the system, or only the text, emerges
as the dominant mode of thought as soon as one comes to consider the
two together, and to focus on text as actualized meaning potential.
The essential feature of text, therefore, is that it is interaction. The
exchange of meanings is an interactive process, and text is the means
of exchange: in order for the meanings which constitute the social
system to be exchanged between members they must first be repres-
ented in some exchangeable symbolic form, and the most accessible of
the available forms is language. So the meanings are encoded in (and
through) the semantic system, and given the form of text. And so text
functions as it were as potlatch: it is perhaps the most highly coded
form of the gift. The contests in meaning that are a feature of so many
human groups - cultures and sub-cultures - are from this point of view
contests in giving, in a re-encoded form in which the gift, itself an
element in the social semiotic (a "meaning") but one that in the typical
or at least the classic instance is realized as a thing, is realized instead as
a special kind of abstract symbol, as meanings in the specifically
linguistic sense. Such a gift has the property that, however great its
symbolic value (and however much it may enrich the recipient), it
does not in the slightest degree impoverish the giver.
We can see this aspect of text, its function as exchange, most clearly
in the phenomenon of semantic contest: in competitive story-telling,
exchange of insults, "capping" another's jokes and other forms of
verbal exploit. Oral verse fom1s such as ballads, lyrics, and epigrammatic
and allusive couplets figure in many cultures as modes of competing,
and even written composition may be predominantly a competitive

51
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

act: late Elizabethan sonnets provide an outstanding example. In all

such instances the aim is to excel in meaning, in the act of giving and
the value of the gift. But it is not too fanciful to see the element of the
gift as one component in all literature, and in this way to show how
the act of meaning, and the product of this act, namely text, comes to
have value in the culture.
The reason for making this point here needs to be clarified. It is
natural to conceive of text first and foremost as conversation: as the
spontaneous interchange of meanings in ordinary, everyday interaction.
It is in such contexts that reality is constructed, in the microsemiotic
encounters of daily life. The reason why this is so, why the culture is
transmitted to, or recreated by, the individual in the first instance
through conversation rather than through other acts of meaning, is that
conversation typically relates to the environment in a way that is
perceptible and concrete, whereas other genres tend to depend on
intermediate levels of symbolic interpretation. A literary text such as
the present one creates its own immediate context of situation, and the
relating of it to its environment in the social system is a complex and
technical operation. Conversation, while it is no less highly structured,
is structured in such a way as to make explicit its relationship to its
setting; though it is no less complex in its layers of meaning, the various
semiotic strategies and motifs that make it up are - by no means always,
but in significantly many instances, and typically in the case of contexts
that are critical in the socialization of a child: see Bernstein (1971) -
derivable from features of the social environment. Hence to understand
the nature of text as social action we are led naturally to consider
spontaneous convepation, as being the most accessible to interpreta-
tion; and to draw a rather clear line between this and other, less
immediately contextualizable acts of meaning such as a poem or prose
narrative. It is perhaps useful in text studies, therefore, to bring out
those aspects of the semiotic act that are common to all, and that
encompass what is traditional as well as what is spontaneous, and relate
to literary as well as to conversational texts. The very general concept
of a text as an exchange of meanings covers both its status as gift and
its role in the realization and construction of the social semiotic.

4 Text and situation

4.1 The situation as a determining environment
We have taken as our starting point the observation that meanings are
created by the social system and are exchanged by the members in the

52
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

form of text. The meanings so created are not, of course, isolates; they
are integrated systems of meaning potential. It is in this sense that we
can say that the meanings are the social system: the social system is
itself interpretable as a semiotic system.
Persistence and change in the social system are both reflected in text
and brought about by means of text. Text is the primary channel of
the transmission of culture; and it is this aspect - text as the semantic
process of social dynamics - that more than anything else has shaped
the semantic system. Language has evolved as the primary mode of
meaning in a social environment. It provides the means of acting on
and reflecting on the environment, to be sure - but in a broader
context, in which acting and. reflecting on the environment are in tum
the means of creating the environment and transmitting it from one
generation to the next. That this is so is because the environment is a
social construct. If things enter into it, they do so as bearers of social
values.
Let us follow this line of reasoning through. The linguistic system
has evolved in social contexts, as (one form of) the expression of the
social semiotic. We see this clearly in the organization of the semantic
system, where the ideational component has evolved as the mode of
reflection on the environment and the interpersonal component as the
mode of action on the environment. The system is a meaning potential,
which is actualized in the form of text; a text is an instance of social
meaning in a particular context of situation. We shall therefore expect
to find the situation embodied or enshrined in the text not piecemeal,
but in a way which reflects the systematic relation between the
semantic structure and the social environment. In other words, the
"situation" will appear, as envisaged by Hymes (1971), as constitutive
of the text; provided, that is, we can characterize it so as to take
cognizance of the ecological properties of language, the features which
relate it to its environment in the social system.
A text is, as we have stressed, an indeterminate concept. It may be
very long, or very short; and it may have no very clear boundaries.
Many things about language can be learnt only from the study of very
long texts. But there is much to be found out also from little texts; not
only texts in the conventional forms of lyric poetry, proverbs and the
like, but also brief transactions, casual encounters, and all kinds of
verbal micro-operations. And among these there is a special value to
the linguist in children's texts, since these tend to display their environ-
mental links more directly and with less metaphorical mediation. (For
a description of a short piece of child language, showing its relationship

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 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

to the context of situation which engendered it, see Halliday (1975)).

We find all the time in the speech of young children examples of the
way in which they themselves expect text to be related to its environ-
ment: their own step-by-step building up of layers of metaphorical
meaning affords a clear and impressive illustration of this point.
The question to be resolved is, how do we get from the situation to
the text? What features of the environment, in any specific instance,
called for these particular options in the linguistic system? It may be
objected that this is asking the old question, why did he say (or write)
what he did; and that is something we can never know. Let us make it
clear, therefore, that we are not asking any questions that require to be
answered in terms of individual psychology. We are asking: what is the
potential of the system that is likely to be at risk, the semantic
configurations that are typically associated with a specific situation type?
This can always be expressed in personal terms, if it seems preferable to
do so; but in that case the question will be: what meanings will the
hearer, or reader, expect to be offered in this particular class of social
contexts? The meanings that constitute any given text do not present
themselves to the hearer out of the blue; he has a very good idea of
what is coming. The final topic that will be discussed here is that of
text and situation. In what sense can the concept of "situation" be
interpreted in a significant way as the environment of the text?

4.2 Semiotic structure of the situation: field, tenor and mode

It was suggested in the first section that the options that make up the
semantic system are essentially of three or four kinds - four if we separate
the experiential from the logical, as the grammar very clearly does.
We shall be able to show something of how the text is related to the
situation if we can specify what aspects of the context of situation
"rule" each of these kinds of semantic_ option. In other words, for each
component of meaning, what are the situational factors by which it is
activated?
The question then becomes one of characterizing the context of
situation in appropriate terms, in terms which will reveal the systematic
relationship between language and the environment. This involves some
form of theoretical construction that relates the situation simultaneously
to the text, to the linguistic system, and to the social system. For this
purpose we interpret the situation as a semiotic structure; it is an instance,
or instantiation, of the meanings that make up the social system.
Actually it is a class of instances, since what we characterize will be

54
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

a situation type rather than a particular situation considered as unique.

The situation consists of:
(1) the social action: that which is "going on", and has recognizable
meaning in the social system; typically a complex of acts in some
ordered configuration, and in which the text is playing some
part; and including "subject-matter" as one special aspect,
(2) the role structure: the cluster of socially meaningful participant
relationships; both permanent attributes of the participants and
role relationships that are specific to the situation; including the
speech roles, those that come into being through the exchange
of verbal meanings,
(3) the symbolic organization: the particular status that is assigned to
the text within the situation; its function in relation to the social
action and the role structure; including the channel or medium,
and the rhetorical mode.
We shall refer to these by the terms "field", "tenor" and "mode". The
environment, or social context, of language is structured as a field of
significant social action, a tenor of role relationships, and a mode of
symbolic organization. Taken together these constitute the situation, or
"context of situation", of a text.
We can then go on to establish a general principle governing the
way in which these environmental features are projected on to the text.
Each of the components of the situation tends to determine the
selection of options in a corresponding component of the semantics. In
the typical instance, the field determines the selection of experiential
meanings, the tenor determines the selection of interpersonal meanings,
and the mode determines the selection of textual meanings.
Semiotic structure Functional component
associated with
of situation of semantics
,, ,,
field (type of social action) experiential
,, II
tenor (role relationships) interpersonal
II II
mode (symbolic organization) textual
The selection of options in experiential systems - that is, in transitivity,
in the classes of things (objects, persons, events, etc.), in quality,
quantity, time, place and so on - tends to be determined by the nature
of the activity: what socially recognized action the participants are
engaged in, in which the exchange of verbal meanings has a part. This
includes everything from, at one end, types of action defined without

55
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

reference to language, in which language has an entirely subordinate

role, various forms of collaborative work and play such as unskilled
manipulation of objects or simple physical games; through intermediate
types in which language has some necessary but still ancillary function,
operations requiring some verbal instruction and report, games with
components of scoring, bidding, planning, and the like; to types of
interaction defined solely in linguistic terms, like gossip, seminars,
religious discourse and most of what is recognized under the heading
of literature. At the latter end of the continuum the concept of
"subject-matter" intervenes; what we understand as subject-matter can
be interpreted as one element in the structure of the "field" in those
contexts where the social action is inherently of a symbolic, verbal
nature. In a game of football, the social action is the game itself, and
any instructions or other verbal interaction among the players are part
of this social action. In a discussion about a game of football, the social
action is the discussion, and the verbal interaction among the partici-
pants is the whole of this social action. Here the game constitutes a
second order of "field", one that is brought into being by that of the
first-order, the discussion, owing to its special nature as a type of social
action that is itself defined by language. It is to this second-order field
of discourse that we give the name of "subject-matter".
The selection of interpersonal options, those in the systems of mood,
modality, person, key, intensity, evaluation and comment and the like,
tends to be determined by the role relationships in the situation. Again
there is a distinction to be drawn between a first and a second order of
such role relationships. Social roles of the first order are defined without
reference to language, though they may be (and typically are) realized
through language as one form of role-projecting behaviour; all social
roles in the usual sense of the term are of this order. Second-order
social roles are those which are defined by the linguistic system: these
are the roles that come into being only in and through language, the
discourse roles of questioner, informer, responder, doubter, contradicter
and the like. (Other types of symbolic action, warning, threatening,
greeting and so on, which may be realized either verbally or non-
verbally, or both, define roles which are some way intermediate
between the two.) These discourse roles determine the selection of
options in the mood system. There are systematic patterns of relation-
ship between the first-order and the second-order roles. An interesting
example of this emerged from recent studies of classroom discourse,
which showed that in the teacher-pupil relationship the role of teacher
is typically combined with that of questioner and the role of pupil with

56
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

that of respondent, and not the other way round (c( Five to Nine
(1972), Sinclair et al. (1972)) - despite our concept of education, it is
not the learner who asks the questions.
The selection of options in the textual systems, such as those of
theme, information and voice, and also the selection of cohesive patterns,
those of reference, substitution and ellipsis, and cortjunction, tend to be
determined by the symbolic forms taken by the interaction, in particular
the place that is assigned to the text in the total situation. This includes
the distinction of medium, written or spoken, and the complex sub-
varieties derived from these (written to be read aloud, and so on); we
have already noted ways in which the organization of text-forming
resources is dependent on the medium of the text. But it extends to
much more than this, to the particular semiotic function or range of
functions that the text is serving in the environment in question. The
rhetorical concepts of expository, didactic, persuasive, descriptive and
the like are examples of such semiotic functions. All the categories
under this third heading are second-order categories, in that they are
defined by reference to language and depend for their existence on the
prior phenomenon of text. It is in this sense that the textual component
in the semantic system was said to have an "enabling" function vis-a-vis
the other two: it is only through the encoding of semiotic interaction
as text that the ideational and interpersonal components of meaning
can become operational in an environment.
The concept of genre discussed in Section 3 (p. 44) is an aspect of
what we are calling the "mode". The various genres of discourse,
including literary genres, are the specific semiotic functions of text that
have social value in the culture. A genre may have implications for other
components of meaning: there are often associations between a particular
genre and particular semantic features of an ideational or interpersonal
kind, for example between the genre of prayer and certain selections in
the mood system. Hence labels for generic categories are often function-
ally complex: a concept such as "ballad" implies not only a certain text
structure with typical patterns of cohesion but also a certain range of
content expressed through highly favoured options in transitivity and
other experiential systems - the types of process and classes of person
and object that are expected to figure in association with the situational
role of a ballad text. The "fable" is a category of a similar kind.
The patterns of determination that we find between the context of
situation and the text are a general characteristic of the whole complex
that is formed by a text and its environment. We shall not expect to be
able to show that the options embodied in one or another particular

57
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

sentence are determined by the field, tenor and mode of the situation.
The principle is that each of these elements in the semiotic structure of
the situation activates the corresponding component in the semantic
system, creating in the process a semantic configuration, a grouping of
favoured and foregrounded options from the total meaning potential,
that is typically associated with the situation type in question. This
semantic configuration is what we understand by the register: it defines
the variety ("diatypic variety" in the sense of Gregory (1967)) that the
particular text is an instance 0£ The concept of "register" is the
necessary mediating concept that enables us to establish the continuity
between a text and its sociosemiotic environment.

4.3 The situation of the present text

The "situation" of a written text tends to be complex; and that of a
fictional narrative is about as complex as it is possible for it to be. The
complexity is not an automatic feature of language in the written
medium: some written texts have relatively simple environments,
which do not involve layers of interpretation. An example is a warning
notice such as Beware of the dog.
The complexity of the environment of a written text arises rather
from the semiotic functions with which writing is typically associated.
In the case of fictional narrative, this is not even necessarily associated
with writing: it is a feature just as much of oral narrative, traditional or
spontaneous (in their different ways).
In a fictional text, the field of discourse is on two levels: the social
act of narration, and the social acts that form the content of the
narration. For our present text the description of the field would be in
something like these terms:

1 (a) Verbal art: entertainment through story-telling

(b) (i) Theme: human prejudice ("they're different, so hate
them!"). Projected through:
(ii) Thesis ("plot"): fictitious interaction of animals: male/
female pairs of hippopotamuses, parrots.

The tenor is also on two levels, since two distinct sets of role
relationships are embodied in the text: one between the narrator and
his readership, which is embodied in the narrative, and one among the
participants in the narrative, which is embodied in the dialogue:

58
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

2 (a) Writer and readers; writer adopting role as recounter: specifi-

cally as humorist (partly projected through subsidiary role as
moralist), and assigning complementary role to audience.
(b) Mate and mate: animal pair as projection of husband and wife;
each adopting own (complementary) role as reinforcer of
shared attitudes.

Since under each of the headings of "field" and "tenor" the text has
appeared as a complex of two distinct levels, we might be tempted to
conclude that a fictional narrative of this kind was really two separate
"texts" woven together. As a purely abstract model this could be made
to stand; but it is really misleading, not only because it fails to account
for the integration of the text - and in any sensible interpretation this
is one text and not two - but also because the relation between the
two levels is quite different in respect of the tenor from what it is in
respect of the field. As regards the tenor, the text does fall into two
distinct segments, the narrative, and the dialogue; each is characterized
by its own set of role relationships, and the two combine to form a
whole. As regards the field, however, there is no division in the text
corresponding to the two levels of social action: the whole text is at
one and the same time an act of malicious gossip and an act of verbal
art, the one being the realization of the other. We could not, in other
words, begin by separating out the two levels and then go on to
describe the field and the tenor of each; we have to describe the field
of the text, and then the tenor of the text, and both in different ways
then reveal its two-level semiotic organization.
The oneness of the text also appears in the characterization of the
mode, the symbolic structure of the situation and the specific role
assigned to the text within it:

3 Text as "self-sufficient", as only form of social action by which

"situation" is defined.
Written medium: to be read silently as private act.
Light essay; original (newly-created) text projected on to tra-
ditional fable genre, structured as narrative-with-dialogue, with
"moral" as culminative ele1nent.

Even a general sketch such as this suggests something of the complexity

of the concept of "situation" applied to a written narrative. The
complexity increases if we seek to make explicit the semiotic overtones
that are typically associated with the interpretation of a literary text; in
particular, as in this instance, the manysided relationship between the

59
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

plot and the theme or themes underlying it. If the "context of

situation" is seen as the essential link between the social system (the
"context of culture", to use another of Malinowski's terms) and the
text, then it is more than an abstract representation of the relevant
material environment; it is a constellation of social meanings, and in
the case of a literary text these are likely to involve many orders of
cultural values, both the value systems themselves and the many specific
sub-systems that exist as metaphors for them. At the same time, one of
the effects of a sociosemiotic approach is to suggest that all language is
literature, in this sense; it is only when we realize that the same things
are true of the spontaneous verbal interaction of ordinary everyday life
(and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than Harvey Sacks' brilliant
exegesis of conversational texts, which is in the best traditions ofliterary
interpretation) that we begin to understand how language functions in
society - and how this, in tum, has moulded and determined the
linguistic system.
If therefore there are limits on the extent to which we can demon-
strate, in the present instance, that the text has its effective origin in the
context of situation, this is only partly because of its peculiarly difficult
standing as a complex genre of literary fiction; many other types of
linguistic interaction are not essentially different in this respect. There
are more favourable instances; we have already referred in this connec-
tion to children's language, where there is not so much shifting of
focus between different orders of meaning. Not that the speech of
children is free of semiotic strategies - far from it; but the resources
through which their strategies are effected tend to be less complex, less
varied and less ambiguous - children cannot yet mean so many things
at once. The present text, which is a good example of adult multiva-
lence, is for that very reason less easy to derive from the context of
situation, without a much more detailed interpretative apparatus. But
certain features do emerge which illustrate the link between the
semantic configurations of the text and the situational description that
we have given of the field, tenor and mode. These are set out in the
subsection which follows.

4. 4 Situational interpretation of the text

1 Story-telling - tense: every finite verb m narrative portions 1s m
simple past tense
Theme/thesis - transitivity: predominantly
(a) mental process: perception, e.g. listen; cognition, e.g. believe;

60
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

reaction, e.g. surprise, shock; (b) verbal process, introducing quoted

speech. Animal participant as Medium of process (Cognizant,
Speaker); note that there is a grammatical rule in English that the
Cognizant in a mental process clause is always "human", i.e. a thing
endowed with the attribute of humanity,
- vocabulary as content (denotative meanings), e.g. inamoratus as
expression of "mate".
2 Writer as recounter - mood: every clause in narrative portions is
declarative (narrative statement).
Writer as humorist - vocabulary as attitude (connotative meanings),
e.g. inamoratus as expression of mock stylishness.
Writer as moralist - mood: special mood structure for proverbial
wisdom, laugh and the world laughs ...
"Husband and wife" as players in game of prejudice-reinforcement
- mood and modulation: clauses in dialogue portions switch rapidly
among different moods and modulations, e.g. the sequence declara-
tive, modulated interrogative, negative declarative, moodless, declar-
ative (statement, exclamatory question, negative response,
exclamation, statement).
3 Self-sufficiency of text - cohesion: reference entirely endophoric
(within text itself). Note reference of her to !..Ass in title, suggesting
highly organized text.
Written medium - information: no information structure, except as
implied by punctuation, but "alternative" devices characteristic of
written language, viz (i) higher lexical density per unit grammar, (ii)
less complexity, and more parallelism, of grammatical structure, (iii)
thematic variation (marked and nominalized themes), which suggests
particular information structure because of association between the
two systems, typically of the form ([Theme] Given) [Rheme (New)],
i.e. Theme within Given, New within Rheme.
Genre: narrative with dialogue - quoting structures: thematic form
of quoted followed by quoting, with the latter (said + Subject)
comprising informational "tail", e.g. "He calls her snooky-ookums", said
Mrs. Gray expresses "dialogue in context of original fictional
narrative".

When the text is located in its environment, in such a way as to show

what aspects of the environment are projected on to what features of the
text, a pattern emerges of systematic relationship between the two. The
linguistic features that were derived from the "field" were all features
assigned to the ideational component in the semantic system. Those

61
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

deriving from the "tenor" are all assigned to the interpersonal component;
and those deriving from the "mode", to the textual component.
The logical component enters in to the picture in a dual perspective
which we shall not attempt to discuss in detail here. The meanings
that make up this component are generalized ideational relations such
as co-ordination, apposition, reported speech, modification and sub-
modification; as such they form a part of the ideational component. But
once in being, as it were, they may also serve to relate elements of the
other components, interpersonal and textual. To take a simplest example,
the meaning 'and' is itself an ideational one, but the 'and' relation can as
well serve to link interpersonal as ideational meanings: hell and damnation!
as well as snakes and ladders. Compare, in the present text, the "and-ing"
of alliterative (textual) features in disdain and derision, mocking and monstrous.
It should perhaps be stressed in this connection that the interpreta-
tion of the semantic system in terms of these components of ideational
(experiential, logical), interpersonal and textual is prior to and indepen-
dent of any consideration of field, tenor and mode. Such an interpreta-
tion is imposed by the form of internal organization of the linguistic
system. Hence we can reasonably speak of the determination of the
text by the situation, in the sense that the various semantic systems are
seen to be activated by particular environmental factors that stand in a
generalized functional relationship to them.
This picture emerges from a description of the properties of the text,
especially one in terms of the relative frequency of options in the
different systems. Much of the meaning of a text resides in the sort of
foregrounding that is achieved by this kind of environmentally moti-
vated prominence, in which certain sets of options are favoured
(selected with greater frequency than expected on the assumption of
unconditioned probability), as a realization of particular elements in the
social context. The inspection of these sets of options one by one, each
in its situational environment, is of course an analytical procedure; their
selection by the speaker, and apprehension by the hearer, is a process
of dynamic simultaneity, in which at any moment that we stop the
tape, as it were, a whole lot of meaning selections are going on at
once, all of which then become part of the environment in which
further choices are made. If we lift out any one piece of the text, such
as a single sentence, we will find the environment reflected not in the
individual options (since these become significant only through their
relative frequency of occurrence in the text), but in the particular
combination of options that characterizes this sentence taken as a
whole. As an example, consider the sentence:

62
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

"I would as soon live with a pair ef unoiled ,{!arden shears", said her
inamoratus.

This sentence combines the relational process of accompaniment, in live

with; the class of object, unoiled garden shears, as circumstantial element;
and the comparative modulation would as soon (all of which are ideational
meanings) as realization of the motif of human prejudice (field, as in 1
(b) above). It combines declarative mood, first person (speaker) as
Subject, and the attitudinal element in would as soon, expressing personal
preference (these being interpersonal meanings), as realization of the
married couple's sharing of attitudes (tenor). Not very much can be
said, naturally, about the specific text-forming elements within a single
sentence; but it happens that in its thematic structure, which is the
clause-internal aspect of texture, this sentence does combine a number
of features that relate it to the "mode": it has the particular quoting
pattern referred to above as characteristic of dialogue in narrative,
together with, in the quoted clause, the first person Theme in active
voice that is one of the marks of informal conversation. In fact it displays
in a paradigm form the crescendo of "communicative dynamism"
described by Firbas (1964, 1968) as typical of spoken English.
We shall not find the entire context of situation of a text neatly laid
out before us by a single sentence. It is only by considering the text as
a whole that we can see how it springs from its environment and is
determined by the specific featnres of that environment. And until we
have some theoretical model of this relationship we shall not really
understand the processes by which meanings are exchanged. This is the
significance of attempts towards a "situational" interpretation of text.
Verbal interaction is a highly coded form of social act, in which the
interactants are continuously supplying the information that is "miss-
ing" from the text; see on this point Cicourel (1969). They are all the
time unravelling the code - and it is the situation that serves them as a
key. The predictions that the hearer or reader makes from his knowl-
edge of the environment allow him to retrieve information that would
otherwise be inaccessible to him. To explain these predictions requires
some general account of the systematic relations among the situation,
the linguistic system, and the text.
The text is the unit of the semantic process. It is the text, and not
the sentence, which displays patterns of relationship with the situation.
These patterns, the characteristic semantic trends and configurations
that place the text in its environment, constitute the "register"; each
text can thus be treated as an instance of a class of text that is defined

63
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

by the register in question. The field, tenor and mode of the situation
collectively detennine the register and in this way function as consti-
tutive of the text.
What is revealed in a single sentence, or other unit of lexicogram-
matical structure, is its origin in the functional organization of the
semantic system. Each of the semantic components, ideational (experi-
ential and logical), interpersonal and textual, has contributed to its
makeup. The final section offers a detailed interpretation of one
sentence of the present text, in terms of systems and structures; taking
the same sentence as before, and presenting it as the product of
numerous micro-acts of semantic choice. This will complete the
semiotic cycle, the network that extends from the social system, as its
upper bound, through the linguistic system on the one hand and the
social context on the other, down to the "wording", which is the text
in its lexicogrammatical realization.

5 Analysis of a sentence
"I would as soon live with a pair ef unoiled garden shears", said her
inamoratus.

5. 1 Systemic descriptions
(All system networks are simplified so as to show only those portions chat are relevant to the sentence
under description. Systems in which only unmarked selections are made in this sentence, such as
polarity and voice, are omitted entirely.)

A. Logical
a) Clause complex (= sentence)
(This sentence is a clause complex consisting of two clauses in "quoting" relation. For the notion
of the "complex" (clause complex, group complex, etc.) see 1.1 above. All complexes, and only
complexes, display a recursive option of the form

]-----
... [re-enter)
(any complex)-----' stop

In other words, they embody recursive options, as distinct from embeddings.)

64
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

,, rparatactic (A-+B-+ ... )

'TAXIS---t_
hypotactic (a-+(3-+ ... )

clause
complex expansion (addition/condition}
TYPE
LOGIC identity ('equals'}
RELATI
projection ('says'}

!SYSTEMIC clause complex: (paratactic/projection)

DESCRIPTION

!STRUCTURAL
~ESCRIPTION
B: Quoted +-A: Quoting I
Note:_The intersection of these two systems yields the following paradigm of clause complex types:

tactic h tactic
expansion co-ordinate conditional, causal, concessive
identity appositive non-defining relative
projection quoting (direct speech) reporting (indirect speech)

Examples from the text:

Coordinate (s. 17)

(AA - AB) - (BA - BB)
the hippopotamuses and/ell and the Grays and retired
stopped crilicizing asleep, stopped maligning to their beds.
the Grays the hippopotamuses

Appositive (s. 11)

A --+ B
gossip about the and describe them in mocking and monstrous metaphors
shameless pair; involving skidding buses on icy streeJs and
overturned moving vans.

Quoting (s. 15)

B A
"I would as soon live with a pair of said her inamoratus.
unoiled garden shears ",
Conditional, etc. (s. 10)
a --+ fl
for a time they thought ofcalling on the ground that monolithic lovemaking
the A..B.L, or African Bureau of by enormous creatures who should have
Investigation, become decent fossils long ago was prob-
ably a threat to the security ofthe jungle.

Non-defming relative (s. I)

a - fl
An arrogant gray parrot and his arrogant mate who h"flpened to be
listened, one African afternoon, in disdain and hippopotamuses.
derision, to the lovemaking ofa lover and his lass,

65
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Reporting (s. S)
a p
ldontsee how any male in his right mind could entertain q/fectlon for
afemale that has no more charm than a capsized bathtub.

b) Group complexes: NONE

nominal group I
verbal group would live
adverbial group as soon
prepositional group with a pair of unolled garden shears
nominal group a pair of 1D1oiled garden shears
verbal group said
nominal group her lnamoratus

These groups are all "simplexes"; they contain no logical (paratactic or hypotactic) structures. Examples of
group complexes would be:
as soon, or sooner
her lnamoratus, the male hippopotamus
one African afternoon at halfpast Jorn:

c) Word complexes
Note: Verbal, nominal and adverbial groups consisting of more than one element are simultaneously
structured both as word constructions (multivariate) and as word complexes (univariate). For example,

unoiled garden shears

Logical:

Experiential:
-
y

Epithet +
p
Modifier

Classifier +
a
Head

Thing
word complex:
univariate structure

multivariate structure
System network
paratactic
'TAXIS'--+ [
hypotactic
{
word complex
TYPE OF expansion
LOGICAL--+
RELATION Ldentity

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 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Note: The intersection of these two systems yields the following paradigm of word complex types:
aratactic h tactic
expansion co-ordinate modifying
identity appositive defining appositive

Verbal group would live

SYSTEMIC verbal group: (hypotactic/expansion)
DESCRIPTION

!STRUCTURAL
DESCRIPTrON
p:Modifier +-a: Head I
Adverbial group as soon
SYSTEMIC adverbial group: (hypotactic/expansion)
DESCRIPTION

STRUCTURAL p:Modifier +-a: Head

DESCRIPTION

Nominal group a (pair of (unoiled garden shears))

SYSTEMIC nominal group: (hypotactic/expansion)
DESCRIPTION

STRUCTURAL p:Modifier +-a: Head

DESCRIPTION (a: Head -P:Modifier)
+- :Modifier +-a: Head

Verbal group said ('did say')

SYSTEMIC verbal group: (hypotactic/expansion)
DESCRIPTION

STRUCTURAL p:Modifier +-a: Head

DESCRIPTION

Nominal group her inamoratus

SYSTEMIC nominal group: (hypotactic/expansion)
DESCRIPTION

STRUCTURAL p:Modifier +-a: Head

DESCRIPTION

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 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Note: The nominal group/ can be regarded as having a logical structure consisting of a: Head only. A
prepositional group resembles a clause in having no logical structure; sec C. lntctpersonal, below.

B. Experiential
a) Clauses
System network

l
material

mental -{personal (Speaker: individual hwnan)

non-personal tstatement (Process: 'say')

verbal [wording ---+ question
(Medium command
=Speaker; verbal -
Process:
Verbaliz-
ation)
~ non-verbal
sounding/
spelling

il TRANSITIVITY
~ (+ Process; equative
0 +Medium) [

--+ aacriptive --+

(Medium
~ Attribu-
t neutral

imperfective (Process:
'stay')
perfective

l
end;+
Attribute)
rclational extent
intensive location
~ manner
relational ____., cin;;wn.. --+- cause
(Process: [ stantial accompaniment (Process:
relation) matter 'be with')
possessive
existential

In addition, the Process may be accompanied by a Modulation, realized through (by pre-selection in) verbal
group, adverbial group, or both:
willing (active) (adv. gp.: 'willingly')

MMODULATION
- [

other
(passiv
(vbl. gp.: 'probable')

permitted

,. (+ Modul- ·1ated .r obliged

u ation) neccss1 ~compelled

[ neutral
-+ oblique (hypothetical) (vbl. gp.: oblique)

68
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Clause / would as soon live with a pair of unoi/ed garden shears

SYSTEMIC clause: (relational: relational: ((ascriptive:
DESCRIPTION imperfective)/ (circumstantial: accompaniment)))
/ modulated: willin obli ue

STRUCTURAL Process: relation+ Modulation+ Medium =

DESCRIPTION Attribuend + Attribute

Clause said her inamoratus

SYSTEMIC clause: verbal: (personal/(verbal: wording: statement))
DESCRIPTION

STRUCTURAL Process: verbalization + Medium = Speaker: individual

DESCRIPTION

b) Verbal groups
System network
PROCES~ taxonomies of processes (Thing: lexical verb), inclu-
TYPE ding: process: action: verbal: statement (:say, state,
announce, etc.) process: relation: ascriptive:
imperfective(: live, keep, stay, etc.)
verbal
group
(+Thing:
I past (Tense: past)

process; TENSE - [present (Tense: present)

+ Tense)
future

Verbal group would live

SYSTEMIC verbal group: (present/ (relation: ascriptive:
DESCRIPTION im ective

STRUCTURAL Tense: present + Thing: process

DESCRIPTION

69
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

c) Nominal groups
System network
PART!- taxonomies of participants (Thing: lexical now,),
CIPANT-+ incl.: human/ social role: sex (:inamoratus)
TYPE object I artefact: tool (:shear..)
---+ associated taxonomies, including:

sub-dass: agriculture(+ Classifier: garden)

quality: state: lubrication(+ Epithet: unoiled)

common
(Thing:
common) quantity:
l NUMfil!4[cow,t
mass
-+[one
more

1
w,measured
MEASURE•[ collecti.ve/
measured partitive/
nominal (+ Num- quantltative
group erative
(+Thing) = Head) descriptive:
bifurcation
_Jself (Thing: I) (Numerative:
proper pair of)
(Thing: , lnon-self (other persons/ objects/ places/
proper) institutions)

Nominal group/
SYSTEMIC nominal group: proper: self
DESCRIPTION

ISTRUCTURAL
DESCRIPTION
Thing: self

Nominal group a pair ofunoi/ed garden shears

SYSTEMIC nominal group: common: object: artefact: (tooV
DESCRIPTION a "culture/ lubrication/ bifurcation

STRUCTURAL Numerative: measure + Epithet + Classifier+ Thing: common:

DESCRIPTION ob"ect

Nominal group her inamoratus

SYSTEMIC nominal group: common: human: social role: sex
DESCRIPTION

ISTRUCTURAL Thing: common: human I

DESCRIPTION

70
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

d) Adverbial group
System network
extent

TYPE
OF

STANCE
--+
CIRCUM-
t location
manner
(Thing: manner)
cause
accompaniment
means
- + Lquality: modulation: 'willingly'
(Thing: soon)
similarity

adverbial matter
group
(+Thing:
circum-
stance) equal (Comparative: as)
[
compared -
COMPAR:...._. [ (+ Comparative) unequal
ISON uncompared

Adverbial group as soon

SYSTEMIC adverbial group: (manner: quality: modulation) I
DESCRIPTION com ared / ual

STRUCTURAL Comparative + Thing: circumstance

DESCRIPTION

e) Prepositional group
System network

extent
location
TYPE OF ~ manner
__...., cause
PROCESS accompaniment (Process: with)
preposi- matter
tional
group
(+ Process:
circum-
stantial; - , . (to 'nominal group' network
+Medium) (Medium: nominal group))

Prepositional group with a pair of unoiled garden shears

SYSTEMIC prepositional group: accompaniment
DESCRIPTION

STRUCTURAL Process: circumstantial + Medium

DESCRIPTION

71
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

C. Interpersonal
a) Information unit
System network

l~m,
mild
TONIC _[neutral
[ strong (tone I+)

information neutral
Unit PRE- - - o , [
TONIC insistent (pre-tone- I)

marked
(tone 2, 3, 4, or 5)

Information unit / would as soon live with a pair of unoi/ed garden shears said her lnamoratus

SYSTEMIC infonnation unit: characteristic (declarative) key:

DESCRIPTION stron / insistent

STRUCTURAL Pre-tone-I "Tone I+

DESCRIPTION
'

b) Clauses
System network
---. [declarative (Subject· Finite)

Interrogative
indicative {
(Mood: Subject ---+ [attitudinal(+ Attitude= Modulation)
clause MOOD--+[ + Finite)
(+Modal;+ non-attitudinal
Proposition imperative
= Predicator ( ... ))

Clause / would as soon live with a pair of unoiled garden shears

SYSTEMIC clause: finite: indicative: (declarative/
DESCRIPTION attitudinal

STRUCTURAL Modal <Subject • Finite • Attitude> • Propositional <Predicator>

DESCRIPTION

Clause said her inamoratus

Note: A clause having the features 'quoting/ given' does not enter into the mood system. It is structured as
Predicator· Subject (optionally Subject· Predicator if Subject is personal pronoun); the Predicator is
a 'quoting' verb, finite, in simple past or present tense.

72
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

c) Verbal groups
System network

[fmite(+ Finite)

verbal - [possible
group
modalmcl
other -
certain -
[virtually
(Finite [neutral absolutely
MODALITY • [ =Modal) -
oblique (Modal: would/could/should/
might)
non-modalmcl
(Finite= Tense)

Verbal group would live

SYSTEMIC verbal group: (finite: modalized: (probable/ oblique))
DESCRIPTION

STRUCTURAL F"tnite=Modal + Predication

!)ESCRJPTION
I
.
'
Verbal group said
SYSTEMIC
_DESCRIPTION
verbal group: (finite: non-moclalized) I
.
'
STRUCTURAL Finite (=Tense) + Predication
DESCRIPTION
I
.
'
d) Nominal groups
System network
speaker only (Person:/)
[
speaker -
speech roles - [ speaker plus
PERSON addressee(s)
('RO~[ [male (Person•Human: male)
(+Person) [human - -
female
nominal other ('lm....__.
group person')
non-human-
[thing (Person-Thing: object)
fact

----+ taxonomy of varieties of connotation(+ Connotation),

incl. mock-stylish (Connotation=Thing: in""'°"""')
undesirable (Connotation=Epithet: 11110iled)

Nominal group/
SYSTEMIC
DESCRIPTION
nominal group: speech role: speaker I.
'
STRUCTURAL Person: speaker
DESCRIPTION
I
.
'

73
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Nominal group a pair of unoiled garden shears

SYSTEMIC nominal group: ((other person: non-human: thing)/
DESCRIPTION undesirable

STRUCTURAL Connotation (=Epithet) + Person: other

DESCRIPTION

Nominal group her inamoratus

SYSTEMIC nominal group: ((other person: human: male)/
DESCRIPTION mock-s lish

STRUCTURAL Connotation (=Thing) = Person: other

DESCRIPTION

e) Adverbial group: No interpersonal structure

f) Prepositional group: No interpersonal structure

D.Textual
a) Information unit
System network

clause com-
unmarked
(B-New·
~lause
B
r[ unmarked (Given· New:
culminative focus)

information __/ plex: B: Quoted\__ [A=Given) marked

focus \ + A : Quoting /
marked

Information unit B: / would as soon live with a pair of unoiled garden shears
A: said her inamoratus

SYSTEMIC information unit: unmarked (clause complex: quoting)

DESCRIPTION information focus: unmarked clause information focus

STRUCTURAL B =(Given· New) ·A= Given; Pre-tonic· Tonic

DESCRIPTION tonic • 'tail'

b)Clauses
System network
extended
(modulation/time/modality etc.)
[
unmarked ----+ (Theme=(Theme • Extension))
- [ (Theme=Subject)
unextended
clause eclarativ marked
(+Theme,
+ • Rheme)

single theme
[
- multiple theme

74
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Clause/ would as soon live with a pair ofunoiled garden shears

SYSTEMIC clause: ((unmarked (declarative) theme: extended:
DESCRIPTION modulation / sin le theme

STRUCTURAL Theme <Theme • Extension> • Rheme

DESCRIPTION

Clause said her inamoratus

Note: A clause having the features 'quoting/given' does not enter into the Theme system. It consists of a
Rheme element only.
c) Verbal groups: No textual systems (see note at end)
d) Nominal groups
System network
non-selective
non-possessive (//she I

specific-
[
1-[ personal-+
who, etc.)

[possessive(mylherlwhose,
etc.)
demonstrative (this, etc.)
selective
referential (//my I this, etc.)
[
--+ interrogative (who I whose, etc.)
DEIXIS, singular (a I one)
(+ Deic· [
tic) { - - non-singular (some I some)
partial
unmarked (a I some)
[
nominal restricted---+ -+[
group marked (one I some)
non-specific - [ total (each I every I all I both)
unrestricted (any I either I no I neither)

pronoun (Deictic = Head)

[
-+ determiner (Deictic = Modifier (initial))

Nominal group /
SYSTEMIC nominal group: ((specific: selective: ((personal:
DESCRIPTION non- ssessive / referential / ronoun

!STRUCTURAL
DESCRIPTION
Deictic = Head: pronoun

75
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

Nominal group a pair of unoiled garden shears

SYSTEMIC nominal group: (non-specific: restricted: partial:
DESCRIPTION sin lar I unmarked / determiner

STRUCTURAL Deictic= Modifier: determiner·

DESCRIPTION

Nominal group her inamoratu.s

SYSTEMIC nominal group: (specific: selective: ((personal:
DESCRIPTION ssessive / referential I determiner

STRUCTURAL Deictic= Modifier: determiner· ..

DESCRIPTION

c) Adverbial group: no textual structure

f) Prepositional group: no textual structure

5. 2 Generalized structural descnptions

A. Generalized structures by rank

a) Clause complex "/ would as soon live with a pair said her inamoratus
of unoiled garden shears"

Logical: B: oted A: otin

b) Information II-)+• !would as I soon

unit I live with a pair of
I unoiled I garden Is hears I said her i I namo I raJus II
Textual Given. ... New I Given
Information

lnterpersonal: Pretone -I I Tone I+

key

c) Clause I would I as soon I live I with a pair of

IDIOiled
l garden
shears

Experiential:
transitivity;
Participant ! Process
I
Participant

modulation Medium= Process: I Modulation I Attribute

Attribuend relation

Interpersonal: Modal I Propositional

mood Subject I Finite I Attitude I \ Predicator

Textual: Theme Rheme

theme Theme I Extension
Combined: Subject I Predicator I Ad1unct (ll I I Adjunct (2)

76
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

d) Nominal group I
Logical: modiftcation u: Head
Experiential: taxonomy of participants ing:self
Interpersonal: person Pcnon: speaker
Textual: deixis Deictic: oun

e) Verbal group would live

Logical: modification P:Modifier u:Head
Experiential: taxonomy of processes; tense Tense: present Thing: process
Interpersonal: finiteness; modality Finite=Modal Predication

f) Adverl>ial group as soon

Logical: modification p: Modifier u:Head
Exper.: taxonomy of circumstances Com tive Thing: circumstance

g) Propositional group with a pair of llflOiled garden

shears
Exper.: taxonomy of circumstances Process: circ. Medium

h) Nominal group a ir of unoiled ga,den shears

Logical: P: u:Head
Mod. u: Head IP: Modifier
y:Modifier P: Modifilu: Head
Experiential: Numerative: Epithet Classifier Thing: common
measwe
Interpersonal: Connotation Person: other
Textual: Deictic

i)Clause (did) said (say) her inamoratus

Experiential:
transitivity
Process
Process: verbalization I Participant
Medium= Speaker
Interpersonal: Modal Pro itional
mood Finite Predicator !Subject
Textual: theme Rheme

j) Verbal group (said,=) id say

Logical: modification jl:Modifier a: Head
Exper.: taxonomy of process; tense Tense: past Things: process
Interpersonal: finiteness Finite Predicator

k) Nominal group her I1namoratus

Logical: modification jl: Modifier u: Head
Exper.: taxonomy of participants Thing: common
Interpersonal: person, connotation Person=Connotation
Textual: deixis Deictic

77
B. Generalized structure showing all ranks
LXGR: 1111 I would I as soon I live I with [a pair ofunoiledgarden shears] II said I her inamoratus Ill
<did say>
PHON: II - I +, I would as I soon I live with a pair of/ unoi/ed I garden Is he a rs said her i I namo I ratus II

Cl. comp.: LOO Ill B: Quoted IIA:Quoting Ill

Info. unit: INT. II Pre-tone: - I /Tone: I+ II
TEXT. //Given ... ... New !Given //

Clause: EXP. II Medium I Process I Modulation I IAttribute II Process I Medium

Clause: INT. !Propositional Modal I Prop "1 I
''Modal
Subject I Finite !Attitude I I Predicator I
II Finite I Predic. I Subject
Clause:
TEXT.
JJTheme
Theme I Extension
IRheme IIRheme

Clause:
<combined>
II Subject I Predicator IAdjunct (I} I !Adjunct (2) II Predicator ISubject

+
n.gp.
I
V.
would
gp.
live
adv. gp.
as soon
I prep. gp.
with
n.gp.
[a pair of
V.gp.
'did say'
n. gp.
her inamoratus
unoiled garden
shears]
Group: LOO
(word
Ia: Head IP: Modifier
+-a: Head
IP +-a I [P+-(aa-+aP
(a13Y+-aPP+-aPn))]
IP +-a
Ip
+-(l

comp!.)
Group: EXP. Thing Tense Thing Comp. Thing I Process Medium Tense Thing Thing
[Numerative
Epithet Classifier
Thing]
Group: INT. IPerson IFinite Predic., [Connotation
Person]
IFinite Predic. Connotation=
Person
I
Group:
TEXT.
IDeictic [Deictic] IDeictic
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

5.3 A note on the description

Systems in which this sentence does not select, or selects only
unmarked options, are omitted from the networks. This includes sub-
systems derived by further differentiation: nearly every network is
open-ended to the right. The networks therefore give only a partial
representation of the systems associated with each unit.
With a few exceptions (e.g. deixis in the nominal group), realizations
are shown only for options selected by this sentence. They are shown
in parentheses following the option in question. Realizations include
insertion of elements, sub-categorization, ordering of elements, and
pre-selection of options in systems of lower rank. An example of the
last is the realization of modulation in the clause through selection in
the modality system in the verbal group and the "manner" taxonomy
in the adverbial group.
Vocabulary enters in as "most delicate grammar". Lexical selections
are not distinct from grammatical ones; lexical items appear as one
form of the realization of systemic options, typically as the last step in
sub-categorization. Certain systems thus have the effect of specifying
lexical taxonomies. Such taxonomies are like other sets of options in
being functionally specific.
It follows from the functional organization of the grammar that the
final "wording" (realization at the lexicogrammatical level) is the
product of a large number of selections, simultaneous and ordered. For
example, the words I and would each stands, as realization, at the
intersection of a set of options from one or more than one functional
component. The order of elements in the clause derives from a
combination of options in the mood and theme systems, and so on.
We have stressed the functional organization of the system, and
taken the functional components as dominating over the structural
hierarchy, or "rank scale". This is because we are approaching the
lexicogrammar from the semantic end, as the realization of meanings. ·
In fact, the functional organization is clearly predominant in the clause;
it is difficult to describe the clause other than as a composition of
structural configurations each deriving from its own functional net-
work. As one goes down the rank scale, the perspective changes. In
the group structures, the functional components are less clearly distinct,
and there is more interplay among them. For example, modality in the
verbal group represents both modulation (experiential) and modality
(interpersonal) in the clause; and modality and tense interact with each
other and with polarity. So the verbal group is equally well, or perhaps

79
 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL MEANING

better, represented as a single system network; likewise the other

groups. Systems of the word (not discussed here) can be represented
only in this way, except that the logical component of word structure
remains distinct. Here we are concerned with text as semantic choice,
and so have highlighted the semantic element in the organization of
the grammatical system by using a functional interpretation of the
structure throughout.
This is not to say that there are not elements of the different kinds
of meaning in the makeup of the smaller units, but merely that these
do not appear as independent systems and structures. For one thing,
there are connotative choices in verbs and adverbs as well as in nouns;
note the choice of said in contrast to wuffled or gurbled (not referred to
because unmarked). Another example is one already noted in 2.2
above, the contribution of textual meaning to the structure of the
group. In the clause, there is a choice of theme; any element, or
combination of elements, can take on thematic value, realized by its
being put first. But there is an unmarked choice, depending on the
selection of mood: WH-element, finite verb, or subject; this being in
each case the characteristic theme of such a clause, 'now this is the
element I want supplied', and so on. In the group, there is no choice
of theme; the order of elements is fixed. But it is the thematic principle
that determines this fixed sequence, and explains why, in the verbal
and nominal group, the element that has deictic value comes first: this
is the element that relates to the "here and now". The thematic feature
is present in the structure of the group, although not as an independent
option in the way that it is in the clause.

'The Lover and His Lass' by James Thurber

1. An arrogant gray parrot and his arrogant mate listened, one African
afternoon, in disdain and derision, to the lovemaking of a lover
and his lass, who happened to be hippopotamuses.
2. "He calls her snooky-ookums," said Mrs. Gray.
3. "Can you believe that?"
4. "No," said Gray.
5. "I don't see how any male in his right mind could entertain
affection for a female that has no more charm than a capsized
bathtub."
6. "Capsized bathtub, indeed!" exclaimed Mrs. Gray.
7. "Both of them have the appeal of a coastwise fruit steamer with a
cargo of waterlogged basketballs."

80
 TEXT AS SEMANTIC CHOICE IN SOCIAL CONTEXTS

8. But it was spring, and the lover and his lass were young, and they
were oblivious of the scornful comments of their sharp-tongued
neighbors, and they continued to bump each other around in the
water, happily pushing and pulling, backing and filling, and snort-
ing and snaffling.
9. The tender things they said to each other during the monolithic
give-and-take of their courtship sounded as lyric to them as flowers
in bud or green things opening.
10. To the Grays, however, the bumbling romp of the lover and his
lass was hard to comprehend and even harder to tolerate, and for a
time they thought of calling the A.B.I., or African Bureau of
Investigation, on the ground that monolithic lovemaking by enor-
mous creatures who should have become decent fossils long ago
was probably a threat to the security of the jungle.
11. But they decided instead to phone their friends and neighbors and
gossip about the shameless pair, and describe them in mocking and
monstrous metaphors involving skidding buses on icy streets and
overturned moving vans.
12. Late that evening, the hippopotamus and the hippopotami were
surprised and shocked to hear the Grays exchanging terms of
endearment.
13. "Listen to those squawks," wuffied the male hippopotamus.
14. "What in the world can they see in each other?" gurbled the
female hippopotamus.
15. "I would as soon live with a pair of unoiled garden shears," said
her inamoratus.
16. They called up their friends and neighbors and discussed the
incredible fact that a male gray parrot and a female gray parrot
could possibly have any sex appeal.
17. It was long after midnight before the hippopotamuses stopped
criticizing the Grays and fell asleep, and the Grays stopped malign-
ing the hippopotamuses and retired to their beds.
18. Moral: Laugh and the world laughs with you, love and you love alone.

81
 PART TWO

HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

(NOVEL, DRAMA, SCIENCE IN POETRY,
POETRY IN SCIENCE)
 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

Turning to 'highly valued texts', M. A. K. Halliday examines the

works of the novelist, William Golding, whose prose offers 'a particular
way oflooking at experience';). B. Priestley, the dramatist, who creates
a world of meaning through dialogue; Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose
poetry constructs 'a semiotic universe at the intersection of science and
poetry'; and Charles Darwin, the scientist, whose 450 pages of intense
scientific argument has a unique place in the history of ideas. Whether
prose or poetry, drama or scientific discourse, each is 'an "instantiation"
of the linguistic system' and therefore may be studied as one would any
kind of language, in terms of the linguistic resources that contribute to
the realization of its 'meaning potential'.
The first paper in this part, 'Linguistic function and literary style: an
inquiry into the language of William Golding's The Inheritors' appeared
in 1971. Halliday begins by explaining how 'the total network of
meaning potential is actually composed of a number of smaller net-
works, each one highly complex in itself but related to the others in a
way that is relatively simple: rather like an elaborate piece of circuitry
made up of two or three complex blocks of wiring with fairly simple
interconnections.' Each block corresponds to one of the functions of
language: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Each function defines a
set of options or choices, all of which are meaningful, none meaning-
less, some of which will become more prominent than others. Halliday
uses the term prominence 'as a general name for the phenomenon of
linguistic highlighting, whereby some feature of the language of a text
stands out in some way.' What stands out in Golding's The Inheritors
are selections in transitivity. 'Transitivity,' as Halliday explains in this
paper, 'is the set of options whereby the speaker encodes his experience

85
 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

of the processes of the external world, and of the internal world of his
own consciousness, together with the participants in these processes
and their attendant circumstances; and it embodies a very basic distinc-
tion of processes into two types, those that are regarded as due to an
external cause, an agency other than the person or object involved, and
those that are not . . . Transitivity is really the cornerstone of the
semantic organization of experience; and it is at one level what The
Inheritors is about.'
J. B. Priestley is described by Halliday in 'The de-automatization of
grammar: from Priestley's An Inspector Calls' (1982) as 'at once a
novelist, dramatist, essayist, autobiographer, critic, and social historian.'
The predominant themes in his plays include interdependence and
social responsibility: 'no man is an island'; and time: 'time is not ticking
our lives away'. Halliday acknowledges the much criticized 'flat and
naturalistic' language spoken by Priestley's characters, and the declarat-
ive manner in which the themes are sometimes enunciated. However,
in An Inspector Calls, the time theme is 'a motif that permeates the
interaction of the participants, and is more or less covertly woven in to
the dialogue.' Once the dramatist stops 'defining the nature of the
world' and starts 'implying his world rather than presenting it', the
language is likely to become 'de-automatized'. Halliday prefers Muka-
fovsky's term 'de-automatization' to 'foregrounding' 'since what is in
question is not simply prominence but rather the partial freeing of the
lower-level systems from the control of the semantics so that they
become domains of choice in their own right.' To 'de-automatize'
means to 'try to interpret the grammar in terms that go beyond its
direct realizational function'; 'to focus out the background, and let the
words and structures speak for themselves'. In An Inspector Calls the
complex interrelationship of themes related .to obligation, personality
and time are built from semantic systems ohime, mood and polarity.
The last two papers in this part, 'Poetry as scientific discourse: the
nuclear sections of Tennyson's In Memoriam' (1987) and 'The construc-
tion of knowledge and value in the grammar of scientific discourse:
with reference to Charles Darwin's The Origin ef Species' (1990) explore
works that share a common birthright, both being 'constituted out of
the impact between scientific and poetic forces of meaning.' While
Tennyson's In Memoriam is science in poetry, Darwin's The Origin of
Species is poetry in science. Halliday employs the same 'grammatics' to
interpret and understand both. Halliday looks at the central passage in
Tennyson's In Memoriam in terms of its logical structure, n:iood, and
transitivity patterns, revealing a rhetorical and logical dynamic that

86
 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

celebrates the liberating power of knowledge. From his analysis of the

final two paragraphs of Darwin's The Origin of Species, Halliday shows
how 'the clauses are rather clearly organized, through their textual
functions of Theme (in Theme-Rheme) and New (in Given-New),
around a small number of distinct but interlocking motifs' culminating
in a resounding lexicogrammatical cadence that 'brings the clause, the
sentence, the paragraph, the chapter and the book to a crashing
conclusion with a momentum to which I can think of no parallel
elsewhere in literature.'

87
 Chapter Three

LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND

LITERARY STYLE: AN INQUIRY INTO
THE LANGUAGE OF WILLIAM GOLDING'S
THE INHERITORS
(1971)

My main concern, in this paper, is with criteria of relevance. This, it

seems to me, is one of the central problems in the study of "style in
language": I mean the problem of distinguishing between mere lin-
guistic regularity, which in itself is of no interest to literary studies, and
regularity which is significant for the poem or prose work in which we
find it. I remember an entertaining paper read to the Philological
Society in Cambridge some years ago by Professor John Sinclair (1965),
in which he drew our attention to some very striking linguistic patterns
displayed in the poetry of William McGonagall, and invited us to say
why, if this highly structured language was found in what we all agreed
was such very trivial poetry, we should be interested in linguistic
regularities at all. It is no new discovery to say that pattern in language
does not by itself make literature, still less "good literature": nothing is
more regular than the rhythm of Three Blind Mice, and if this is true of
phonological regularities it is likely to be true also of syntactic ones.
But we lack general criteria for determining whether any particular
instance of linguistic prominence is likely to be stylistically relevant or
not.
This is not a simple matter, and any discussion of it is bound to
touch on more than one topic, or at the least to adopt more than one
angle of vision. Moreover the line of approach will often, inevitably,
be indirect, and the central concern may at times be lost sight of round
some of the corners. It seems to me necessary, first of all, to discuss and
to emphasize the place of semantics in the study of style; and this in

First published in Literary Style: A Symposium, edited by Seymour Chatman .. London and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 330-68.

88
 LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND LITERARY STYLE: WILLIAM GOLDING

tum will lead to a consideration of "functional" theories of language

and their relevance for the student of literature. At the same time these
general points need to be exemplified; and here I have allowed the
illustration to take over the stage: when I re-examined for this purpose
a novel I had first studied some four years ago, The Inheritors by William
Golding, there seemed to be much that was of interest in its own
right. 1 I do not think there is any antithesis between the "textual" and
the "theoretical" in the study of language, so I hope the effect of this
may be to strengthen rather than to weaken the general argument. The
discussion of The Inheritors may be seen either in relation to just that
one work or in relation to a general theory; I am not sure that it is
possible to separate these two perspectives, either from each other or
from various intermediate fields of attention such as an author, a genre,
or a literary tradition.
The paper will fall into four parts: first, a discussion of a "functional
theory of language"; second, a reference to various questions raised at
the Style in Language Conference of 1958 and in other current
writings; third, an examination of certain features of the language of
The Inheritors; and fourth, a brief resume of the question of stylistic
relevance. Of these, the third part will be the longest.

1 The concept of "function" in language and linguistics

The term function is used, in two distinct though related senses, at
two very different points in the description of language. First it is used
in the sense of "grammatical" (or "syntactic") function, to refer to
elements of linguistic structures such as actor and goal or subject and
object or theme and rheme. These "functions" are the roles occupied
by classes of words, phrases, and the like in the structure of higher
units. Secondly, it is used to refer to the "functions" of language as a
whole: for example in the well-known work of Karl Biihler (1934), in
which he proposes a three-way division of language function into the
representational, the conative and the expressive (see also Chapter 2 of
Vachek 1966).
Here I am using "function" in the second sense, referring, however,
not specifically to Biihler's theory, but to the generalized notion of
"functions of language". By a functional theory of language I mean
one which attempts to explain linguistic structure, and linguistic
phenomena, by reference to the notion that language plays a certain
part in our lives, that it is required to serve certain universal types of
demand. I find this approach valuable in general for the insight it gives

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into the nature and use of language, but particularly so in the context
of stylistic studies.
The demands that we make on language, as speakers and writers,
listeners and readers, are indefinitely many and varied. They can be
derived, ultimately, from a small number of very general headings; but
what these headings are will depend on what questions we are asking.
For example, if we were to take a broadly psychological viewpoint and
consider the functions that language serves in the life of the individual,
we might arrive at some such scheme as Biihler's, referred to above. If
on the other hand we asked a more sociological type of question,
concerning the functions that language serves in the life of the
community, we should probably elaborate some framework such as
Malinowski's (1935) distinction into a pragmatic and a magical func-
tion. Many others could be suggested besides.
These questions are extrinsic to language; and the categorizations of
language function that depend on them are of interest because, and to
the extent that, the questions themselves are of interest. Such categori-
zations therefore imply a strictly instrumental view oflinguistic theory.
Some would perhaps reject this on the grounds that it does not admit
the autonomy of linguistics and linguistic investigations. I am not
myself impressed by that argument, although I would stress that any
one particular instrumental view is by itself inadequate as a general
characterization of language. But a purely extrinsic theory of language
functions does fail to take into account one thing, namely the fact that
the multiplicity of function, if the idea is valid at all, is likely to be
reflected somewhere in the internal organization of language itsel£ If
language is, as it were, programmed to serve a variety of needs, then
this should show up in some way in an investigation of linguistic
structure.
In fact this functional plurality is very clearly built into the structure
of language, and forms the basis of its semantic and "syntactic" (i.e.
grammatical and lexical) organization. If we set up a functional frame-
work that is neutral as to external emphasis, but designed to take into
account the nature of the internal semantic and syntactic patterns of
language, we arrive at something that is very suggestive for literary
studies, because it represents a general characterization of semantic
functions - of the meaning potential of the language system. Let me
suggest here the framework that seems to me most helpful. It is a rather
simple catalogue of three basic functions, one of which has two sub-
headings.
In the first place, language serves for the expression of content: it

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 LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND LITERARY STYLE: WILLIAM GOLDING

has a representational, or, as I would prefer to call it, an ideational

function. (This is sometimes referred to as the expression of" cognitive
meaning", though I find the term "cognitive" misleading; there is,
after all, a cognitive element in all linguistic functions.) Two points
need to be emphasized concerning this ideational function oflanguage.
The first is that it is through this function that the speaker or writer
embodies in language his experience of the phenomena of the real
world; and this includes his experience of the internal world of his own
consciousness: his reactions, cognitions, and perceptions, and also his
linguistic acts of speaking and understanding. We shall in no sense
be adopting an extreme pseudo-Whorfian position (I say "pseudo-
Whorfian" because Whorf himself never was extreme) if we add that,
in serving this function, language lends structure to his experience and
helps to determine his way of looking at things. The speaker can see
through and around the settings of his semantic system; but he is aware
that, in doing so, he is seeing reality in a new light, like Alice in
Looking-Glass House. There is, however, and this is the second point,
one component of ideational meaning which, while not unrelatable to
experience, is nevertheless organized in language in a way which marks
it off as distinct: this is the expression of certain fundamental logical
relations such as are encoded in language in the form of co-ordination,
apposition, modification, and the like. The notion of co-ordination,
for example, as in sun, moon, and stars, can be derived from an aspect of
the speaker's experience; but this and other such relations are realized
through the medium of a particular type of structural mechanism (that
of linear recursion) which takes them, linguistically, out of the domain
of experience to form a functionally neutral, "logical" component in
the total spectrum of meanings. Within the ideational function of
language, therefore, we can recognize two sub-functions, the experi-
ential and the logical; and the distinction is a significant one for our
present purpose.
In the second place, language serves what we may call an
interpersonal function. This is quite different from the expression of
content. Here, the speaker is using language as the means of his own
intrusion into the speech event: the expression of his comments, his
attitudes, and evaluations, and also of the relationship that he sets up
between himself and the listener - in particular, the communication
role that he adopts, of informing, questioning, greeting, persuading,
and the like. The interpersonal function thus subsumes. both the
expressive and the conative, which are not in fact distinct in the
linguistic system: to give one example, the meanings 'I do not know'

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(expressive) and 'you tell me' (conative) are combined in a single

semantic feature, that of question, typically expressed in the grammar
by an interrogative; the interrogative is both expressive and conative at
the same time. The set of communication roles is unique among social
relations in that it is brought into being and maintained solely through
language. But the interpersonal element in language extends beyond
what we might think of as its rhetorical functions. In the wider context,
language is required to serve in the establishment and maintenance of
all human relationships; it is the means whereby social groups are
integrated and the individual is identified and reinforced. It is, I think,
significant for certain fonns of literature that, since personality is
dependent on interaction which is in turn mediated through language,
the "interpersonal" function in language is both interactional and
personal: there is, in other words, a component in language which
serves at one and the same time to express both the inner and the outer
surfaces of the individual, as a single undifferentiated area of meaning
potential that is personal in the broadest sense. 2
These two functions, the ideational and the interpersonal, may seem
sufficiently all-embracing; and in the context of an instrumental
approach to language they are. But there is a third function which is in
turn instrumental to these two, whereby language is, as it were, enabled
to meet the demands that are made on it; I shall call this the textual
function, since it is concerned with the creation of text. It is a function
internal to language, and for this reason is not usually taken into account
where the objects of investigation are extrinsic; but it came to be
specifically associated with the term "functional" in the work of the
Prague scholars who developed Buhler' s ideas within the framework of
a linguistic theory (cf. their terms "functional syntax", "functional
sentence perspective"). It is through this function that language makes
links with itself and with the situation; and discourse becomes possible,
because the speaker or writer can produce a text and the listener or
reader can recognize one. A text is an operational unit oflanguage, as a
sentence is a syntactic unit; it may be spoken or written, long or short;
and it includes as a special instance a literary text, whether haiku or
Homeric epic. It is the text and not some super-sentence that is the
relevant unit for stylistic studies; this is a functional-semantic concept
and is not definable by size. And therefore the "textual" function is not
limited to the establishment of relations between sentences; it is con-
cerned just as much with the internal organization of the sentence, with
its meaning as a message both in itself and in relation to the c~mtext.
A tentative categorization of the principal elements of English syntax

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 LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND LITERARY STYLE: WILLIAM GOLDING

in terms of the above functions is given in Table 1. This table is intended

to serve a twofold purpose. In the first place, it will help to make more
concrete the present concept of a functional theory, by showing how
the various functions are realized through the grammatical systems of
the language, all of which are accounted for in this way. Not all the
labels may be self-explanatory, nor is the framework so compartmental
as in this bare outline it is made to seem: there is a high degree of
indeterminacy in the fuller picture, representing the indeterminacy that
is present throughout language, in its categories and its relations, its
types and its tokens. Secondly it will bring out the fact that the syntax
of a language is organized in such a way that it expresses as a whole the
range of linguistic functions, but that the symptoms of functional
diversity are not to be sought in single sentences or sentence types. In
general, that is to say, we shall not find whole sentences or even smaller
structures having just one function. Typically, each sentence embodies
all functions, though one or another may be more prominent; and most
constituents of sentences also embody more than one function, through
their ability to combine two or more syntactic roles.
Let us introduce an example at this point. Here is a well-known
passage from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:
"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!"
"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it
always makes one a little giddy at first -"
"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never
heard of such a thing!"
"- but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works
both ways."
"I'm sure mine only works one way," Alice remarked. "I can't
remember things before they happen."
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen
remarked.
"What sort of things do you remember best?" Alice ventured to ask.
"Oh, things that happened the week after next," the Queen replied
in a careless tone.
To illustrate the last point first, namely that most constituents of
sentences embody more than one function, by combining different
syntactic roles: the constituent what sort of things occupies simultaneously
the syntactic roles of Theme, of Phenomenon (that is, object of
cognition, perception, etc.) and of Interrogation point. The theme
represents a particular status in the message, and is thus an expression
of "textual" function: it is the speaker's point of departure. If the

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Table 1 Functions and ranks in the grammar of Modern English

IDEATIONAL INTERPERSONAL !TEXTUAL

- - - function: EXPERIENTIAL LOGICAL
rank: -------
TRANSITIVITY condition MOOD THEME
types of process addition types of speech types of message
participants and cir- report function (identity as text
CLAUSE cumstances
:,:
modality relation)
(identity clauses) -< (the WH-function) (identificaton,
(things, facts, and ~ predication, reference,
reports) ~ POLARITY substitution)
9n :ii?
TENSE n " PERSON VOICE
Verbal GROUP (verb classes) ~ catenalion ~ ("marked" options) ("contrastive"
~ secondary tense
n
q
nl-----------+=="----------; lootion)

MODIFICATION
r:i -I; %8 ATTITUDE DEIXIS
"' -g a. fl3:
epithet function Sil
classification la· 5· attitudinal modifiersdeterminers
enumeration ~ sub-modification ;;· ~- \:1 intensifiers "phoric" elements
C
Nominal GROUP ( noun classes)
"' " g !:l (qualifiers)
l(adiective classes) ·"'0--------- ~ 1-----------t'(~1d_efi_m_i_te_artt_·_c_le.,_)_ _ _---;
!3
"MINOR PROCESSES" !;; narrowing ,.,.~ COMMENT CONJUNCTION
Adverbial prepositional relations ~ sub-modification ~ (classes of comment (classes of discourse
(incl. prepositional) (classes of circum- 0 adjunct) adjunct)
GROUP stantial adjunct) :E
~--------
WORD LEXICAL "CONTENT" compounding LEXICAL "REGISTER" COLLOCATION
(incl. lexical (taxonomic organi- (expressive words) (collocational
item) zation of vocab- derivation (stylistic organization organization of
ulary) ofvocabularv\ vocabulary)

INFORMATION TONE INFORMATION

UNIT intonation systems distribution & focus
 LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND LITERARY STYLE: WILLIAM GOLDING

speaker is asking a question he usually, in English, takes the request for

information as his theme, expressing this by putting the question phrase
first; here, therefore, the same element is both Theme and Interrogation
point - the latter being an expression of "interpersonal" function since
it defines the specific communication roles the speaker has chosen for
himself and for the listener: the speaker is behaving as questioner. What
sort ef thing is the Phenomenon dependent on the mental process
remember; and this concept of a mental phenomenon, as something that
can be talked about, is an expression of the "ideational" function of
language - of language as content, relatable to the speaker's and the
listener's experience. It should be emphasized that it is not, in fact, the
syntactic role in isolation, but the structure of which it forms a part
that is semantically significant: it is not the theme, for example, but the
total Theme-Rheme structure which contributes to the texture of the
discourse.
Thus the constituents themselves tend to be multivalent; which is
another way of saying that the very notion of a constituent is itself
rather too concrete to be of much help in a functional context. A
constituent is a particular word or phrase in a particular place; but
functionally the choice of an item may have one meaning, its repetition
another, and its location in structure yet another - or many others, as
we have seen. So, in the Queen's remark it's a poor sort ef memory that
only works backwards, the word poor is a Modifier, and thus expresses a
subclass of its head-word memory (ideational); while at the same time it
is an Epithet expressing the Queen's attitude (interpersonal), and the
choice of this word in this environment (as opposed to, say, usefuQ
indicates more specifically that the attitude is one of disapproval. The
words it's ... that have here no reference at all outside the sentence,
but they structure the message in a particular way (textual), which
represents the Queen's opinion as if it was an Attribute (ideational),
and defines one class of memory as exclusively possessing this undesirable
quality (ideational). The lexical repetition in memory that only works
backwards relates the Queen's remark (textual) to mine only works one
way, in which mine refers anaphorically, by ellipsis, to memory in the
preceding sentence (textual) and also to I in Alice's expression of her
own judgement I'm sure (interpersonal). Thus ideational content and
personal interaction are woven together with, and by means of, the
textual structure to form a coherent whole.
Taking a somewhat broader perspective, we again find the same
interplay offunctions. The ideational meaning of the passage is enshrined
in the phrase living backwards; we have a general characterization of the

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nature of experience, in which things that happened the week after next
turns out to be an acceptable sentence. (I am not suggesting it is
serious, or offering a deep literary interpretation; I am merely using it
to illustrate the nature of language.) On the interpersonal level the
language expresses, through a pattern of question (or exclamation) and
response, a basic relationship of seeker and guide, in interplay with
various other paired functions such as yours and mine, for and against,
child and adult, wonderment and judgement. The texture is that of
dialogue in narrative, within which the Queen's complex thematic
structures (e.g. there's one great advantage to it, that . .. ) contrast with the
much simpler (i.e. linguistically unmarked) message patterns used by
Alice.
A functional theory of language is a theory about meanings, not
about words or constructions; we shall not attempt to assign a word or
a construction directly to one function or another. Where then do we
find the functions differentiated in language? They are differentiated
semantically, as different areas of what I called the "meaning potential".
Language is itself a potential: it is the totality of what the speaker can
do. (By "speaker" I mean always the language user, whether as speaker,
listener, writer, or reader: homo grammaticus, in fact.) We are consider-
ing, as it were, the dynamics of the semantic strategies that are available
to him. If we represent the language system in this way, as networks of
interrelated options which define, as a whole, the resources for what
the speaker wants to say, we find empirically that these options fall into
a small number of fairly distinct sets. In the last resort, every option in
language is related to every other; there are no completely independent
choices. But the total network of meaning potential is actually com-
posed of a number of smaller networks, each one highly complex in
itself but related to the others in a way that is relatively simple: rather
like an elaborate piece of circuitry made up of two or three complex
blocks of wiring with fairly simple interconnections. Each of these
blocks corresponds to one of the functions of language.
In Table 1, where the columns represent our linguistic functions,
each column is one "block" of options. These blocks are to be thought
of as wired "in parallel". That is to say, the speaker does not first think
of the content of what he wants to say and then go on to decide what
kind of a message it is and where he himself comes into it - whether it
will be statement or question, what modalities are involved and the
like. 3 All these functions, the ideational, the interpersonal and the
textual, are simultaneously embodied in his planning procedures. (If we
pursue the metaphor, it is the rows of the table that are w1red "in

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 LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND LITERARY STYLE: WILLIAM GOLDING

series": they represent the hierarchy of constituents in the grammar,

where the different functions come together. Each row is one constitu-
ent type, and is a point of intersection of options from the different
columns.)
The linguistic differentiation among the ideational, interpersonal and
textual functions is thus to be found in the way in which choices in
meaning are interrelated to one another. Each function defines a set of
options that is relatively - though only relatively - independent of the
other sets. Dependence here refers to the degree of mutual determina-
tion: one part of the content of what one says tends to exert a
considerable effect on other parts of the content, whereas one's attitudes
and speech roles are relatively undetermined by it: the speaker is, by
and large, free to associate any interpersonal meanings with any content.
What I wish to stress here is that all types of option, from whatever
function they are derived, are meaningful. At every point the speaker
is selecting among a range of possibilities that differ in meaning; and if
we attempt to separate meaning from choice we are turning a valuable
distinction {between linguistic functions) into an arbitrary dichotomy
(between "meaningful" and "meaningless" choices). All options are
embedded in the language system: the system is a network of options,
deriving from all the various functions of language. If we take the
useful functional distinction of "ideational" and "interpersonal" and
rewrite it, under the labels "cognitive" and "expressive", in such a way
as sharply to separate the two, equating cognitive with meaning and
expressive with style, we not only fail to recognize the experiential
basis of many of our own intuitions about works of literature and their
impact - style as the expression of what the thing is about, at some
level4 (my own illustration in this paper is one example of this) - but
we also attach the contrasting status of "non-cognitive" (whatever this
may mean) to precisely these options that seem best to embody our
conception of a work of literature, those whereby the writer gives form
to the discourse and expresses his own individuality. 5 Even if we are
on our guard against the implication that the regions of language in
which style resides are the ones which are linguistically non-significant,
we are still drawing the wrong line. There are no regions of language
in which style does not reside.
We should not in fact be drawing lines at all; the boundaries on our
map consist only in shading and overlapping. Nevertheless they are
there; and provided we are not forced into seeking an unreal distinction
between the "what" and the "how", we can show, by reference to the
generalized notion of linguistic functions, how such real contrasts as

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that of denotation and connotation relate to the functional map of

language as a whole, and thus how they may be incorporated into the
linguistic study of style. It is through this chain of reasoning that we
may hope to establish criteria of relevance, and to demonstrate the
connection between the syntactic observations which we make about
a text and the nature of the impact which that text has upon us. If we
can relate the linguistic patterns (grammatical, lexical, and even phono-
logical) to the underlying functions of language, we have a criterion
for eliminating what is trivial and for distinguishing true foregrounding
from mere prominence of a statistical or an absolute kind.
Foregrounding, as I understand it, is prominence that is motivated.
It is not difficult to find patterns of prominence in a poem or prose
text, regularities in the sounds or words or structures that stand out in
some way, or may be brought out by careful reading; and one may
often be led in this way towards a new insight, through finding that
such prominence contributes to the writer's total meaning. But unless
it does, it will seem to lack motivation; a feature that is brought into
prominence will be "foregrounded" only if it relates to the meaning of
the text as a whole. This relationship is a functional one: if a particular
feature of the language contributes, by its prominence, to the total
meaning of the work, it does so by virtue of and through the medium
of its own value in the language - through the linguistic function from
which its meaning is derived. Where that function is relevant to our
interpretation of the work, the prominence will appear as motivated. I
shall try to illustrate this by reference to The Inheritors. First, however,
a few remarks about some points raised at the 1958 Style in Language
Conference and in subsequent discussions, which I hope will make
slightly more explicit the context within which Golding's work is
being examined.

2 Questions of prominence (from Style in Language, 1960)

There are three questions I should like to touch on: Is prominence to
be regarded as a departure from or as the attainment of a ·norm? To
what extent is prominence a quantitative effect, to be uncovered or at
least stated by means of statistics? How real is the distinction between
prominence that is due to subject-matter and prominence that is due
to something else? All three questions are very familiar, and my
justification for bringing them up once more is not that what I have to
say about them is new but rather that some partial answers are needed
if we are attempting an integrated approach to language and ·style, and

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 LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND LITERARY STYLE: WILLIAM GOLDING

that these answers will be pertinent to a consideration of our main

question, which is that of criteria of relevance.
I have used the term "prominence" as a general name for the phe-
nomenon oflinguistic highlighting, whereby some feature ofthe language
of a text stands out in some way. In choosing this term I hoped to avoid
the assumption that a linguistic feature which is brought under attention
will always be seen as a departure. It is quite natural to characterize such
prominence as departure from a norm, since this explains why it is
remarkable, especially if one is stressing the subjective nature of the
highlighting effect; thus Leech, discussing what he refers to as "schemes"
("foregrounded patterns ... in grammar or phonology"), writes "It is
ultimately a matter of subjective judgement whether ... the regularity
seems remarkable enough to constitute a definite departure from the
normal functions oflanguage" (1965, p. 70). But at the same time it is
often objected, not unreasonably, that the "departure" view puts too
high a value on oddness, and suggests that normal forms are of no interest
in the study of style. Thus W ellek: "The danger of linguistic stylistics is
its focus on deviations from, and distortions of, the linguistic norm. We
get a kind of counter-grammar, a science of discards. Normal stylistics
is abandoned to the grammarian, and deviational stylistics is reserved for
the student of literature. But often the most commonplace, the most
normal, linguistic elements are the constituents of literary structure. " 6
Two kinds of answer have been given to this objection. One is that
there are two types of prominence, only one of which is negative, a
departure from a norm; the other is positive, and is the attainment or
the establishment of a norm. The second is that departure may in any
case be merely statistical: we are concerned not only with deviations,
ungrammatical forms, but also with what we may call "deflections",
departures from some expected pattern of frequency.
The distinction between negative and positive prominence, or
departures and regularities, is drawn by Leech, who contrasts fore-
grounding in the form of "motivated deviation from linguistic, or other
socially accepted norms" with foregrounding applied to "the opposite
circumstance, in which a writer temporarily renounces his permitted
freedom of choice, introducing uniformity where there would normally
be diversity" (1965, p. 69). Strictly speaking this is not an "opposite
circumstance", since if diversity is normal, then uniformity is a devia-
tion. But where there is uniformity there is regularity; and this can be
treated as a positive feature, as the establishment of a norm. Thus, to
quote Hymes, " ... in some sources, especially poets, style may not be
deviation from but achievement of a norm. " 7

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However, this is not a distinction between two types of prominence;

it is a distinction between two ways of looking at prominence,
depending on the standpoint of the observer. There is no single
universally relevant norm, no one set of expectancies to which all
instances may be referred. On the one hand, there are differences of
perspective. The text may be seen as "part" of a larger "whole", such
as the author's complete works, or the tradition to which it belongs, so
that what is globally a departure may be locally a norm. The expectan-
cies may lie in "the language as a whole", in a diatypic variety or
register! characteristic of some situation type (Osgood's "situational
norms" 9), in a genre or literary form, or in some special institution
such as the Queen's Christmas message; we always have the choice of
saying either "this departs from a pattern" or "this forms a pattern".
On the other hand, there are differences of attention. The text may be
seen as "this" in contrast with "that", with another poem or another
novel; stylistic studies are essentially comparative in nature, and either
may be taken as the point of departure. As Hymes says, there are
egalitarian universes, comprising sets of norms, and "it would be
arbitrary to choose one norm as a standard from which the others
depart". 10 It may be more helpful to look at a given instance of
prominence in one way rather than in another, sometimes as departure
from a norm and sometimes as the attainment of a norm; but there is
only one type of phenomenon here, not two.
There is perhaps a limiting case, the presence of one ungrammatical
sentence in an entire poem or novel; presumably this could be viewed
only as a departure. But in itself it would be unlikely to be of any
interest. Deviation, the use of ungrammatical forms, has received a
great deal of attention, and seems to be regarded, at times, as promi-
nence par excellence. This is probably because it is a deterministic
concept. Deviant forms are actually prohibited by the rules of whatever
is taken to be the norm; or, to express it positively, the norm that is
established by a set of deviant forms excludes all texts but the one in
which they occur. But for this very reason deviation is of very limited
interest in stylistics. It is rarely found; and when it is found, it is often
not relevant. On the contrary, if we follow McIntosh (who finds it "a
chastening thought"), " ... quite often ... the impact of an entire
work may be enormous, yet word by word, phrase by phrase, clause
by clause, sentence by sentence, there may seem to be nothing very
unusual or arresting, in grammar or in vocabulary .... " 11
Hence the very reasonable supposition that prominence J1?-ay be of a
probabilistic kind, defined by Bloch as "frequency distributions and

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 LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND LITERARY STYLE: WILLIAM GOLDING

Table 2 Frequency of transitivity clause types

cf

C C
-~
0

ACTION .,
:! g
cl .!3 0 ::I -
·g
B ~ !
J §. e.
intransitive transitive 0
!'.l .&J

A Process:
movement other movement other ~
C. .
·13
0 F,

human {people 9 12 24
tribe 2 I 4
part of body 2 1 3 2 8
inanimate 4 12 3 20
17 3 14 16 s S6

B(i)
!people 4 3• 2 11
human tribe 5 I 2 9
part of bod
inanimate 13 2 5 2 23
22 4 4 9 2
43

B (ii)
h {people 13 2 2 4 22
uman tribe
part of body 3 I 2 6
inanimate 3 I 2 4 6 2 19
19 3 2 2 7 4 8 2 47

C
I 1 2 4 8
human ~=le 3 2 s II 3 II 3 2 40
part of bod 2 I 5 8
inanimate 2 I 3 4 II
8 4 6 13 6 IS 12 3 67
• including two passives, which are also negative and in which the actor is not explicit: The tree
would not be cajoled or persuaded.

transitional probabilities [which] differ from those ... in the language

as a whole". 12 This is what we have referred to above as "deflection".
It too may be viewed either as departure from a norm or as its
attainment. If, for example, we meet seven occurrences of a rather
specific grammatical pattern, such as that cited by Leech "my + noun
+ you + verb" (1965, p. 70), a norm has been set up and there is, or
may be, a strong local expectancy that an eighth will follow; the
probability of finding this pattern repeated in eight successive clauses
is infinitesimally small, so that the same phenomenon constitutes a
departure. It is fairly easy to see that the one always implies the other;
the contravention of one expectation is, at the same time, the fulfill-
ment of a different one. Either way, whether the prominence is said to
consist in law-breaking or in law-making, we are dealing with a type

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of phenomenon that is expressible in quantitative terms, to which

statistical concepts may be applied.
In the context of stylistic investigations, the term "statistical" may
refer to anything from a highly detailed measurement of the reactions
of subjects to sets of linguistic variables, to the parenthetical insertion
of figures of occurrences designed to explain why a particular feature is
being singled out for discussion. What is common to all these is the
assumption that numerical data on language may be stylistically signifi-
cant; whatever subsequent operations are performed, there has nearly
always been some counting of linguistic elements in the text, whether
of phonological units or words or grammatical patterns, and the figures
obtained are potentially an indication of prominence. The notion that
prominence may be defined statistically is still not always accepted;
there seem to be two main counterarguments, but whatever substance
these may have as stated they are not, I think, valid objections to the
point at issue. The first is essentially that, since style is a manifestation
of the individual, it cannot be reduced to counting. This is true, but,
as has often been said before, it misses the point. If there is such a thing
as a recognizable style, whether of a work, an author, or an entire
period or literary tradition, its distinctive quality can in the last analysis
be stated in terms of relative frequencies, although the linguistic features
that show significant variation may be simple and obvious or extremely
subtle and complex. An example of how period styles may be revealed
in this way will be found in Josephine Miles' "Eras in English poetry"
in which she shows that different periods are characterized by a
distinction in the dominant type of sentence structure, that between
"the sort which emphasizes substantial elements - the phrasal and co-
ordinative modifications of subject and object - and the sort which
emphasizes clausal co-ordination and complication of the predicate" .13
The second objection is that numbers of occurrences must be
irrelevant to style because we are not aware of frequency in language
and therefore cannot respond to it. This is almost certainly not true. We
are probably rather sensitive to the relative frequency of different
grammatical and lexical patterns, which is an aspect of "meaning
potential"; and our expectancies, as readers, are in part based on our
awareness of the probabilities inherent in the language. This is what
enables us to grasp the new probabilities of the text as local norm; our
ability to perceive a statistical departure and restructure it as a norm is
itself evidence of the essentially probabilistic nature of the language
system. Our concern here, in any case, is not with psy~hological
problems of the response to literature but with the linguistic options

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selected by the writer and their relation to the total meaning of the
work. If in the selections he has made there is an unexpected pattern of
frequency distributions, and this turns out to be motivated, it seems
pointless to argue that such a phenomenon could not possibly be
significant.
What cannot be expressed statistically is foregrounding: figures do
not tell us whether a particular pattern has or has not "value in the
game". 14 For this we need to know the rules. A distinctive frequency
distribution is in itself no guarantee of stylistic relevance, as can be seen
from authorship studies, where the diagnostic features are often, from a
literary stand point, very trivial ones. 15 Conversely, a linguistic feature
that is stylistically very relevant may display a much less striking
frequency pattern. But there is likely to be some quantitative turbu-
lence, if a particular feature is felt to be prominent; and a few figures
may be very suggestive. Counting, as Miller remarked, has many
positive virtues. Ullmann offers a balanced view of these when he
writes "Yet even those who feel that detailed statistics are both
unnecessary and unreliable [in a sphere where quality and context,
aesthetic effects and suggestive overtones are of supreme importance]
would probably agree that a rough indication of frequencies would
often be helpful" (1965, p. 22). A rough indication of frequencies is
often just what is needed: enough to suggest why we should accept the
analyst's assertion that some feature is prominent in the text, and to
allow us to check his statements. The figures, obviously, do not alone
constitute an analysis, interpretation, or evaluation of the style.
But this is not, be it noted, a limitation on quantitative patterns as
such; it is a limitation on the significance of prominence of any kind.
Deviation is no more fundamental a phenomenon than statistical
deflection: in fact there is no very clear line between the two, and in
any given instance the most qualitatively deviant items may be among
the least relevant. Thus if style cannot be reduced to counting, this is
because it cannot be reduced to a simple question of prominence. An
adequate characterization of an author's style is much more than an
inventory of linguistic highlights. This is why linguists were so often
reluctant to take up questions of criticism and evaluation, and tended
to disclaim any contribution to the appraisal of what they were
describing: they were very aware that statements about linguistic
prominence by themselves offer no criterion of literary value. Never-
theless some values, or some aspects of value, must be expressed in
linguistic terms. This is true, for example, of metrical patterns, which
linguists have always considered their proper concern. The question is

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how far it is also true of patterns that are more directly related to
meaning: what factors govern the relevance of "effects" in grammar
and vocabulary? The significance of rhythmic regularity has to be
formulated linguistically, since it is a phonological phenomenon,
although the ultimate value to which it relates is not "given" by the
language - that the sonnet is a highly valued pattern is not a linguistic
fact, but the sonnet itself is (Levin 1971). The sonnet form defines the
relevance of certain types of phonological pattern. There may likewise
be some linguistic factor involved in determining whether a syntactic
or a lexical pattern is stylistically relevant or not.
Certainly there is no magic in unexpectedness; and one line of
approach has been to attempt to state conditions under which the
unexpected is not relevant - namely when it is not really unexpected.
Prominence, in this view, is not significant if the linguistically unpre-
dicted configuration is predictable on other grounds; specifically, by
reference to subject-matter, the implication being that it would have
been predicted if we had known beforehand what the passage was
about. So, for example, Ullmann warns of the danger in the search for
statistically defined key-words: "One must carefully avoid what have
been called contextual words whose frequency is due to the subject-
matter rather than to any deep-seated stylistic or psychological tend-
ency" (1965, p. 27). Ullmann's concern here is with words that serve
as indices of a particular author, and he goes on to discuss the
significance of recurrent imagery for style and personality, citing as an
example the prominence of insect vocabulary in the writings of Sartre
(Ullmann 1965, p. 29; see also 1964, pp. 186-8); in this context we
can see that, by contrast, the prevalence of such words in a treatise on
entomology would be irrelevant. But it is less easy to see how this can
be generalized, even in the realm of vocabulary; is lexical foregrounding
entirely dependent on imagery?
Can we in fact dismiss, as irrelevant, prominence that is due to
subject-matter? Can we even claim to identify it? This was the third
and final question I asked earlier, and it is one which relates very
closely to an interpretation of the style of The Inheritors. In The Inheritors,
the features that come to our attention are largely syntactic, and we are
in the realm of syntactic imagery, where the syntax, in Ohmann's
words, "serves [a] vision of things .... since there are innumerable
kinds of deviance, we should expect that the ones elected by a poem
or poet spring from particular semantic impulses, particular ways of
looking at experience" (1967, p. 237). Ohmann is concern~d primarily
with "syntactic irregularities", but syntax need not be deviant in order

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to serve a vision of things; a foregrounded selection of everyday

syntactic options may be just as visionary, and perhaps more effective.
The vision provides the motivation for their prominence; it makes
them relevant, however ordinary they may be. The style of The
Inheritors rests very much on foregrounding of this kind.
The prominence, in other words, is often due to the vision. But
"vision" and "subject-matter" are merely the different levels of meaning
which we expect to find in a literary work; and each of these, the inner
as well as the outer, and any as it were intermediate layers, finds
expression in the syntax. In Ruqaiya Hasan's words, "Each utterance
has a thesis: what it is talking about uniquely and instantially; and in
addition to this, each utterance has a function in the internal organization
of the text: in combination with other utterances of the text it realizes
the theme, structure and other aspects .... " (1967, pp. 109-10; 1971).
Patterns of syntactic prominence may reflect thesis or theme or "other
aspects" of the meaning of the work; every level is a potential source
of motivation, a kind of semantic "situational norm". And since the
role of syntax in language is to weave into a single fabric the different
threads of meaning that derive from the variety of linguistic functions,
one and the same syntactic feature is very likely to have at once both a
deeper and a more immediate significance, like the participial structures
in Milton as Chatman has interpreted them (1968, pp. 1386-99).
Thus we cannot really discount "prominence due to subject-matter",
at least as far as syntactic prominence is concerned; especially where
vision and subject-matter are themselves as closely interwoven as they
are in The Inheritors. Rather, perhaps, we might think of the choice of
subject-matter as being itself a stylistic choice, in the sense that the
subject-matter may be more or less relevant to the underlying themes
of the work. To the extent that the subject-matter is an integral
element in the total meaning - in the artistic unity, if you will - to
that extent, prominence that is felt to be partly or wholly "due to" the
subject-matter, far from being irrelevant to the style, will turn out to
be very clearly foregrounded.
To cite a small example that I have used elsewhere, the prominence
of finite verbs in simple past tense in the well-known "Return of
Excalibur" lines in Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur relates immediately to
the subject-matter: the passage is a direct narrative. But the choice of a
story as subject-matter is itself related to the deeper preoccupations of
the work - with heroism and, beyond that, with the res gestae, with
deeds as the realization of the true spirit of a people, and with history
and historicalism; the narrative register is an appropriate form of

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expression, one that is congruent with the total meaning, and so the
verb forms that are characteristically associated with it are motivated at
every level. Similarly, it is not irrelevant to the style of an entomolog-
ical monograph (although we may not be very interested in its style)
that it contains a lot of words for insects, if in fact it does. In stylistics
we are concerned with language in relation to all the various levels of
meaning that a work may have.
But while a given instance of syntactic or lexical prominence may be
said to be "motivated" either by the subject-matter or by some other
level of the meaning, in the sense of deriving its relevance therefrom, it
cannot really be said to be "due to" it. Neither thesis nor theme imposes
linguistic patterns. They may set up local expectancies, but these are by
no means always fulfilled; there might actually be very few insect words
in the work on entomology - and there are very few in Kafka. 16 There
is always choice. In The Inheritors, Golding is offering a "particular way
of looking at experience", a vision of things which he ascribes to
Neanderthal man; and he conveys this by syntactic prominence, by the
frequency with which he selects certain key syntactic options. It is their
frequency which establishes the clause types in question as prominent;
but, as Ullmann has remarked, in stylistics we have both to count things
and to look at them, one by one, and when we do this we find that
the foregrounding effect is the product of two apparently opposed
conditions of use. The foregrounded elements are certain clause types
which display particular patterns of transitivity, as described in the next
section; and in some instances the syntactic pattern is "expected" in that
it is the typical form of expression for the subject-matter - for the
process, participants, and circumstances that make up the thesis of the
clause. Elsewhere, however, the same syntactic elements are found
precisely where they would not be expected, there being other, more
likely ways of "saying the same thing".
Here we might be inclined to talk of semantic choice and syntactic
choice: what the author chooses to say, and how he chooses to say it.
But this is a misleading distinction; not only because it is unrealistic in
application (most distinctions in language leave indeterminate instances,
although here there would be suspiciously many) but more because the
combined effect is cumulative: the one does not weaken or cut across
the other but reinforces it. We have to do here with an interaction,
not of meaning and form, but of two levels of meaning, both of which
find expression in form, and through the same syntactic features. The
immediate thesis and the underlying theme come toget~er in the
syntax; the choice of subject-matter is motivated by the deeper mean-

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ing, and the transitivity patterns realize both. This is the explanation of
their powerful impact.
The foregrounding of certain patterns in syntax as the expression of
an underlying theme is what we understand by "syntactic imagery",
and we assume that its effect will be striking. But in The Inheritors these
same syntactic patterns also figure prominently in their "literal" sense,
as the expression of subject-matter; and their prominence here is doubly
relevant, since the literal use not only is motivated in itself but also
provides a context for the metaphorical - we accept the syntactic vision
of things more readily because we can see that it coincides with, and is
an extension of, the reality. The Inheritors provides a remarkable
illustration of how grammar can convey levels of meaning in literature;
and this relates closely to the notion of linguistic functions which I
discussed at the beginning. The foregrounded patterns, in this instance,
are ideational ones, whose meaning resides in the representation of
experience; as such they express not only the content of the narrative
but also the abstract structure of the reality through which that content
is interpreted. Sometimes the interpretation matches our own, and at
other times, as in the drawing of the bow in Passage A below, it
conflicts with it; these are the "opposed conditions of use" referred to
earlier. Yet each tells a part of the story. Language, because of the
multiplicity of its functions, has a fugue-like quality in which a number
of themes unfold simultaneously; each of these themes is apprehended
in various settings, or perspectives, and each melodic line in the
syntactic sequence has more than one value in the whole.

3 Some features of the grammar of The Inheritors

The Inheritors 17 is prefaced by a quotation from H. G. Wells' Outline of
History:
We know very little of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this
. . . seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive
strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetle
brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature .... Says Sir Harry Johnston,
in a survey of the rise of modern man in his Views and Reviews: "The
dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning
brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibal-
istic tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore."

The book is, in my opinion, a highly successful piece of imaginative

prose writing; in the words of Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor (1967), in

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their penetrating critical study, it is a "reaching out through the

imagination into the unknown". The persons of the story are a small
band of Neanderthal people, initially eight strong, who refer to
themselves as "the people"; their world is then invaded by a group of
more advanced stock, a fragment of a tribe, whom they call at first
"others" and later "the new people". This casual impact - casual, that
is, from the tribe's point of view - proves to be the end of the people's
world, and of the people themselves. At first, and for more than nine-
tenths of the book (pp. 1-216), we share the life of the people and
their view of the world, and also their view of the tribe: for a long
passage (pp. 137-80) the principal character, Lok, is hidden in a tree
watching the tribe in their work, their ritual and their play, and the
account of their doings is confined within the limits of Lok's under-
standing, requiring at times a considerable effort of "interpretation". At
the very end (pp. 216-38) the stand point shifts to that of the tribe,
the inheritors, and the world becomes recognizable as our own, or
something very like it. I propose to examine an aspect of the linguistic
resources as they are used first to characterize the people's world and
then to effect the shift of world-view.
For this purpose I shall look closely at three passages taken from
different parts of the book; these are reproduced below (pp. 121-4).
Passage A is representative of the first, and longest, section, the narrative
of the people; it is taken from the long account of Lok's vigil in the
tree. Passage C is taken from the short final section, concerned with
the tribe; while Passage B spans the transition, the shift of stand point
occurring at the paragraph division within this passage. Linguistically,
A and C differ in rather significant ways, while B is in certain respects
transitional between them.
The clauses of Passage A [56) 18 are mainly clauses of action [21],
location (including possession) [14], or mental process [16); the remain-
der [5] are attributive. 19 Usually the process is expressed by a finite verb
in simple past tense [46). Almost all of the action clauses [19] describe
simple movements (turn, rise, hold, reach, throw forward, etc.); and of
these the majority [15] are intransitive; the exceptions are the man was
holding the stick, as though someone had clapped a hand over her mouth, he
threw himself forward, and the echo of Liku's voice in his head sent him
trembling at this perilous way of bushes towards the island. The typical
pattern is exemplified by the first two clauses, the bushes twitched again
and Lok steadied by the tree, and there is no clear line, here, between
action and location: both types have some reference in space, and both
have one participant only. The clauses of movement usually ·[16] also

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specify location, e.g. the man turned sideways in the bushes, he rushed to
the edge of the water; and on the other hand, in addition to what is
clearly movement, as in a stick rose upright, and what is clearly location,
as in there were hooks in the bone, there is an intermediate type
exemplified by [the bushes] waded out, where the verb is of the
movement type but the subject is immobile.
The picture is one in which people act, but they do not act on
things; they move, but they move only themselves, not other objects.
Even such normally transitive verbs as grab occur intransitively: he
grabbed at the branches is just another clause of movement (c( he smelled
along the shaft of the twig). Moreover a high proportion [exactly half] of
the subjects are not people; they are either parts of the body [8] or
inanimate objects [20], and of the human subjects half again [14] are
found in clauses which are not clauses of action. Even among the four
transitive action clauses, cited above, one has an inanimate subject and
one is reflexive. There is a stress set up, a kind of syntactic counter-
point, between verbs of movement in their most active and dynamic
form, that of finite verb in independent clause, 20 in the simple past
tense characteristic of the direct narrative of events in a time sequence,
on the one hand, and on the other hand the preference for non-human
subjects and the almost total absence of transitive clauses. It is particu-
larly the lack of transitive clauses of action with human subjects (there
are only two clauses in which a person acts on an external object) that
creates an atmosphere of ineffectual activity: the scene is one of constant
movement, but movement which is as much inanimate as human and
in which only the mover is affected - nothing else changes. The
syntactic tension expresses this combination of ae:tivity and helplessness.
No doubt this is a fair summary of the life of Neanderthal man. But
Passage A is not a description of the people. The section from which it
is taken is one in which Lok is observing and, to a certain extent,
interacting with the tribe; they have captured one of the people, and it
is for the most part their doings that are being described. And the tribe
are not helpless. The transitivity patterns are not imposed by the
subject-matter; they are the reflection of the underlying theme, or
rather of one of the underlying themes - the inherent limitations of
understanding, whether cultural or biological, of Lok and his people,
and their consequent inability to survive when confronted with beings
at a higher stage of development. In terms of the processes and events
as we would interpret them, and encode them in our grammar, there
is no immediate justification for the predominance of intransitives; this
is the result of their being expressed through the medium of the

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semantic structure of Lok's universe. In our interpretation, a goal-

directed process (or, as I shall suggest below, an externally caused
process) took place: someone held up a bow and drew it. In Lok's
interpretation, the process was undirected (or, again, self-caused): a stick
rose upright and began to grow shorter at both ends. (I would differ slightly
here from Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor, who suggest, I think, that the
form of Lok's vision is perception and no more. There may be very
little processing, but there surely is some; Lok has a theory - as he must
have, because he has language.)
Thus it is the syntax as such, rather than the syntactic reflection of
the subject-matter, to which we are responding. This would not
emerge if we had no account of the activities of the tribe, since
elsewhere-in the description of the people's own doings, or of natural
phenomena - the intransitiveness of the syntax would have been no
more than a feature of the events themselves, and of the people's
ineffectual manipulation of their environment. For this reason the vigil
of Lok is a central element in the novel. We find, in its syntax, both
levels of meaning side by side: Lok is now actor, now interpreter, and
it is his potential in both these roles that is realized by the overall
patterns of prominence that we have observed, the intransitives, the
non-human subjects, and the like. This is the dominant mode of
expression. At the same time, in Passage A, among the clauses that
have human subjects, there are just two in which the subject is acting
on something external to himself, and in both these the subject is a
member of the tribe; it is not Lok. There is no instance in which Lok's
own actions extend beyond himself; but there is a brief hint that such
extension is conceivable. The syntactic foregrounding, of which this
passage provides a typical example, thus has a complex significance: the
predominance of intransitives reflects, first, the limitations of the
people's own actions; second, the people's world-view, which in
general cannot transcend these limitations - but within which there
may arise, thirdly, a dim apprehension of the superior powers of the
"others", represented by the rare intrusion of a transitive clause such as
the man was holding the stick out to him. Here the syntax leads us into a
third level of meaning, Golding's concern with the nature of humanity;
the intellectual and spiritual developments that contribute to the present
human condition, and the conflicts that arise within it, are realized in
the form of conflicts between the stages of that development - and,
syntactically, between the types of transitivity.
Passage A is both text and sample. It is not only thes~ particular
sentences and their meanings that determine our response, but the fact

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that they are part of a general syntactic and semantic scheme. That this
passage is representative in its transitivity patterns can be seen from
comparison with other extracts. 21 It also exemplifies certain other
relevant features of the language of this part of the book. We have seen
that there is a strong preference for processes having only one partici-
pant: in general there is only one nominal element in the structure of
the clause, which is therefore the Subject. But while there are very few
Complements, 22 there is an abundance of Adjuncts [44]; and most of
these [40] have some spatial reference. Specifically, they are (a) static
[25], of which most [21] are place adjuncts consisting of preposition
plus noun, the noun being either an inanimate object of the immediate
natural environment (e.g. bush) or a part of the body, the remainder [4]
being localizers (at their farthest, at the end, etc.); and (b) dynamic [15],
of which the majority [10] are of direction or non-terminal motion
(sideways, [rose] upright, at the branches, towards the island, etc.) and the
remainder [5] perception, or at least circumstantial to some process that
is not a physical one (e.g. [looked at Lok] along his shoulder, [shouted] at
the green drifts). Thus with the dynamic type, either the movement is
purely perceptual or, if physical, it never reaches a goal: the nearest
thing to terminal motion is he rushed to the edge ef the water (which is
followed by and came back!).
The restriction to a single participant also applies to mental process
clauses [16]. This category includes perception, cognition, and reaction,
as well as the rather distinct sub-category of verbalization; and such
clauses in English typically contain a Phenomenon, that which is seen,
understood, liked, etc. Here, however, the Phenomenon is often [8]
either not expressed at all (e.g. [Lok] gazed) or expressed indirectly
through a preposition, as in he smelled along the shaft ef the twig; and
sometimes [3] the subject is not a human being but a sense organ (his
nose examined this stuff and did not like it). There is the same reluctance
to envisage the "whole man" (as distinct from a part of his body)
participating in a process in which other entities are involved.
There is very little modification of nouns [10, out of about 100]; and
all modifiers are non-defining (e.g. green drifts, glittering water) except
where [2] the Modifier is the only semantically significant element in
the nominal, the Head noun being a mere carrier demanded by the rules
of English grammar (white bone things, sticky brown stuff). In terms of the
immediate situation, things have defining attributes only if these attributes
are their sole properties; at the more abstract level, in Lok's understanding
the complex taxonomic ordering of natural phenomena that is implied
by the use of defining modifiers is lacking, or is only rudimentary.

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We can now formulate a description of a typical clause of what we

may call "Language A", the language in which the major part of the
book is written and of which Passage A is a sample, in terms of its
process, participants and circumstances:
(1) There is one participant only, which is therefore subject; this is
(a) actor in a non-directed action (action clauses are intransit-
ive), or participant in a mental process (the one who
perceives etc.), or simply the bearer of some attribute or
some spatial property;
(b) a person (Lok, the man, he, etc.), or a part of the body, or an
inanimate object of the immediate and tangible natural
environment (bush, water, twig, etc.);
(c) unmodified, other than by a determiner which is either an
anaphoric demonstrative (this, that) or, with parts of the
body, a personal possessive (his etc.).
(2) The process is
(a) action (which is always movement in space), or location-
possession (including, e.g. the man had white bone things above
his eyes = "above the man's eyes there were ... "), or mental
process (thinking and talking as well as seeing and feeling -
a "cunning brain"! - but often with a part of the body as
subject);
(b) active, non-modalized, finite, in simple past tense (one of a
linear sequence of mutually independent processes).
(3) There are often other elements which are adjuncts, i.e. treated
as circumstances attendant on the process, not as participants in
it; these are
(a) static expressions of place (in the form of prepositional
phrases), or, if dynamic, expressions of direction (adverbs
only) or of non-terminal motion, or of directionality of
perception (e.g. peered at the stick);
(b) often obligatory, occurring in clauses which are purely
locational (e.g. there were hooks in the bone).
A grammar of Language A would tell us not merely what clauses
occurred in the text but also what clauses could occur in that
language. 23 For example, as far as I know the clause a branch curved
downwards over the water does not occur in the book; neither does his
hands felt along the base of the rock. But both of them could have done.
On the other hand, he had very quickly broken qff the lowest branches breaks
four rules: it has a human actor with a transitive verb, a tense other

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than simple past, a defining modifier, and a non-spatial adjunct. This is

not to say that it could not occur. Each of these features is improbable,
and their combination is very improbable; but they are not impossible.
They are improbable in that they occur with significantly lower
frequency than in other varieties of English (such as, for example, the
final section of The Inheritors).
Before leaving this passage, let us briefly reconsider the transitivity
features in the light of a somewhat different analysis of transitivity in
English. I have suggested elsewhere that the most generalized pattern
of transitivity in Modem English, extending beyond action clauses to
clauses of all types, those of mental process and those expressing
attributive and other relations, is one that is based not on the notions
of actor and goal but on those of cause and effect. 24 In any clause, there
is one central and obligatory participant - let us call it the "affected"
participant - which is inherently involved in the process. This corre-
sponds to the actor in an intransitive clause of action, to the goal in a
transitive clause of action, and to the one who perceives etc., in a
clause of mental process; Lok has this function in all the following
examples: Lok turned away, Fa drew Lok away, Lok looked up at Fa, Lok
was frightened, curiosity overcame Lok. There may then be a second,
optional participant, which is present only if the process is being
regarded as brought about by some agency other than the participant
affected by it: let us call this the "agent". This is the actor in a transitive
clause of action and the initiator in the various types of causative; the
function of Tuami in Tuami waggled the paddle in the water and Tuami let
the ivory drop from his hands. As far as action clauses are concerned, an
intransitive clause is one in which the roles of "affected" and "agent"
are combined in the one participant; a transitive clause is one in which
they are separated, the process being treated as one having an external
cause.
In these terms, the entire transitivity structure of Language A can be
summed up by saying that there is no cause and effect. More specifi-
cally: in this language, processes are seldom represented as resulting
from an external cause; in those instances where they are, the "agent"
is seldom a human being; and where it is a human being, it is seldom
one of the people. Whatever the type of process, there tends to be
only one participant; any other entities are involved only indirectly, as
circumstantial elements (syntactically, through the mediation of a
preposition). It is as if doing was as passive as seeing and things no
more affected by actions than by perceptions: their role is as in clauses
of mental process, where the object of perception is not in any sense

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"acted on" - it is in fact the perceiver that is the "affected" participant,

not the thing perceived - and likewise tends to be expressed circum-
stantially (e.g. Lok peered at the stick). There is no effective relation
between persons and objects: people do not bring about events in
which anything other than they themselves, or parts of their bodies,
are implicated.
There are, moreover, a great many, an excessive number, of these
circumstantial elements; they are the objects in the natural environ-
ment, which as it were take the place of participants, and act as curbs
and limitations on the process. People do not act on the things around
them; they act within the limitations imposed by the things. The
frustration of the struggle with the environment, of a life "poised ...
between the future and the past" (Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor 1967,
p. 81), is embodied in the syntax: many of the intransitive clauses have
potentially transitive verbs in them, but instead of a direct object there
is a prepositional phrase. The feeling of frustration is perhaps further
reinforced by the constant reference to complex mental activities of
cognition and verbalization. Although there are very few abstract
nouns, there are very many clauses of speaking, knowing and under-
standing (e.g. Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him);
and a recurrent theme, an obsession almost, is the difficulty of com-
municating memories and images (J cannot see this picture) - of transmit-
ting experience through language, the vital step towards that social
learning which would be a precondition of their further advance.
Such are some of the characteristics of Language A, the language
which tells the story of the people. There is no such thing as a
"Language B". Passage B is simply the point of transition between the
two parts of the book. There is a "Language C": this is the language of
the last 16 pages of the novel, and it is exemplified by the extract
shown as Passage C below. But Passage B is of interest because
linguistically it is also to some extent transitional. There is no doubt
that the first paragraph is basically in Language A and the second in
Language C; moreover the switch is extremely sudden, being estab-
lished in the first three words of B (ii), when Lok, with whom we
have become closely identified, suddenly becomes the red creature.
Nevertheless B (i) does provide some hints of the change to come.
There are a few instances [4] of a human "agent" (actor in a
transitive clause); not many, but one of them is Lok, in Lok ... picked
up Tanakil. Here is Lok acting on his environment, and the object
"affected" is a human being, and one of the tribe! There are some
non-spatial adjuncts, such as with an agonized squealing, like the legs of a

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giant. There are abstract nominals: demoniac activity, its weight of branches.
And there are perhaps more modifiers and complex verb forms than
usual. None of these features is occurring for the first time; we have
had forward-looking flashes throughout, e.g. (p. 191) He had a picture of
Liku looking up with soft and adoring eyes at Tanakil, guessed how Ha had
gone with a kind of eager fearfulness to meet his sudden death and
(pp. 212-13) "Why did you not snatch the new one?" and "We will take
Tanakil. Then they will give back the new one", both spoken by the more
intelligent Fa (when transitive action clauses do occur in Language A,
they are often in the dialogue). But there is a greater concentration of
them in B (i), a linguistic complexity that is also in harmony with the
increased complexity of the events, which has been being built up ever
since the tribe first impinged on the people with the mysterious
disappearance of Ha (p. 65). The syntax expresses the climax of the
gradual overwhelming of Lok's understanding by new things and
events; and this coincides with the climax in the events themselves as,
with the remainder of the people all killed or captured, Lok's last
companion, Fa, is carried over the edge of the waterfall. Lok is alone;
there are no more people, and the last trace of his humanity, his
membership of a society, has gone. In that moment he belongs to the
past.
Lok does not speak again, because there is no one to speak to. But
for a while we follow him, as the tribe might have followed him,
although they did not - or rather we follow it; there can be no him
where there is no you and me. The language is now Language C, and
the story is that of homo sapiens; but for a few paragraphs, beginning at
B (ii), as we remain with Lok, the syntax harks back to the world of
the people, just as in B (i) it was beginning to look forward. The
transition has taken place; it was a strange creature, smallish, and bowed
that we had come to know so well. But it is still the final, darkening
traces of this creature's world that we are seeing, fleetingly as if in an
escaping dream.
A brief sketch of B (ii): There are very few transitive clauses of
action [4]; in only one of these is Lok the agent - and here the
"affected" entity is a part of his own body: it put up a hand. The others
have the water and the river as agent. Yet nearly half [22] the total
number of clauses [47] have Lok as subject; here, apart from a few [4]
mental process clauses, the verb is again one of simple movement or
posture, and intransitive (turn, move, crouch, etc.; but including for the
first time some with a connotation of attitude like sidle and trot; c£
broke into a queer, loping run). The remaining subjects are inanimate

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objects [19] and parts of the body [6]. But there are differences in these
subjects. The horizons have widened; in addition to water and river we
now have sun and green sky - a reminder that the new people walk
upright; c£ (p. 143) they did not look at the earth but straight ahead; and
there are now also human evidences and artifacts: path, rollers, ropes.
And the parts of the body no longer see or feel; they are subjects only
of intransitive verbs of movement (e.g. its long arms swinging), and
mainly in non-finite clauses, expressing the dependent nature of the
processes in which they participate. A majority [32] of the finite verbs
are still in simple past tense; but there is more variation in the
remainder, as well as more non-finite verbs [8], reflecting a slightly
increased proportion of dependent clauses that is also a characteristic of
Language C. And while in many clauses [21) we still find spatial
adjuncts, these tend to be more varied and more complex (e.g. down
the rocks beyond the terracefrom the melting ice in the mountains).
This is the world of the tribe; but it is still inhabited, for a brief
moment of time, by Lok. Once again the theme is enunciated by the
syntax. Nature is no longer totally impenetrable; yet Lok remains
powerless, master of nothing but his own body. In Passages A and B
taken together, there are more than 50 clauses in which the subject is
Lok; but only one of these has Lok as an agent acting on something
external to himself, one that has already been mentioned: Lok picked up
Tanakil. There is a double irony here. Of all the positive actions on his
environment that Lok might have taken, the one he does take is the
utterly improbable one of capturing a girl of the tribe - improbable in
the event, at the level of subject-matter (let us call this "level one"),
and improbable also in the deeper context ("level two"), since Lok's
newly awakened power manifests itself as power over the one element
in the environment that is "superior" to himself. It is at a still deeper
"level three" that the meaning becomes clear. The action gets him
nowhere; but it is a syntactic hint that his people have played their part'
in the long trek towards the human condition.
By the time we reach Passage C, the transition is complete. Here,
for the first time, the majority of the clauses [48 out of 67] have a
human subject; of these, more than half [25] are clauses of action, and
most of these [19] are transitive. Leaving aside two in which the thing
'affected' is a part of the body, there is still a significant increase in the
number of instances [17, contrasting with 5 in the whole of A and B
together] in which a human agent is acting on an external object. The
world of the inheritors is organized as ours is; or at least ~n a way that
we can recognize. Among these are two clauses in which the subject is

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they, referring to the people ("the devils": e.g. they have given me back a
changeling); in the tribe's scheme of things, the people are by no means
powerless. There is a parallel here with the earlier part. In Passage A
the actions of the tribe are encoded in terms of the world-view of the
people, so that the predominance of intransitive clauses is interpreted
at what we called "level two", although there is a partial reflection of
"level one" in the fact that they are marginally less predominant when
the subject-matter concerns the tribe. Similarly, in Passage C references
to the people are encoded in terms of the world-view of the tribe, and
transitive structures predominate; yet the only member of the people
who is present - the only one to survive - is the captured baby, whose
infant behaviour is described in largely intransitive terms (pp. 230-31).
And the references to the people, in the dialogue, include such
formulations as "They cannot follow us, I tell you. They cannot pass over
water", which is a "level-one" reassurance that, in a "level-two" world
of cause and effect whose causes are often unseen and unknown, there
are at least limits to the devils' power.
We can now see the full complementarity between the two
"languages", but it is not easy to state. In Language A there is a level-
two theme, that of powerlessness. The momentary hints of potency
that we are given at level one represent an antithetic variation which,
however, has a significance at level three: the power is ascribed to the
tribe but signifies Lok's own incipient awareness, the people's nascent
understanding of the human potential. This has become a level-two
theme in Language C; and in like fashion the level-two theme of
Language A becomes in Language C a level-one variation, but again
with a level-three significance. The people may be powerless, but the
tribe's demand for explanations of things, born of their own more
advanced state, leads them, while still fearfully insisting on the people's
weakness in action, to ascribe to them supernatural powers.
While there are still inanimate subjects in the clause [11], as there
always are in English, there is no single instance in Passage C of an
inanimate agent. In A and B we had the echo ef Liku 's voice in his head
sent him trembling . . ., the branches took her, the water had scooped a bowl
out ef the rock; in C we have only the sail glowed, the sun was sitting in
it, the hills grow less. Likewise all clauses with parts of the body as sub-
ject [8] are now intransitive, and none of them is a clause of mental
process. Parts of the body no longer feel or perceive; they have
attributes ascribed to them (e.g. his teeth were wolf's teeth) or they move
(the lips parted, the mouth was opening and shutting). The limbs may
move and posture, but only the whole man perceives and reacts to his

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environment. Now, he also shapes his environment: his actions have

become more varied - no longer simply movements; we find here save,
obey, and kiss - and they produce results. Something, or someone, is
affected by them.
Just as man's relation to his environment has altered, so his
perception of it has changed; the environment has become enlarged.
The objects in it are no longer the twig, stick, bush, branch of Language A,
nor even the larger but still tangible river, water, scars in the earth. In
Passage B (ii) we already had air and sun and sky and wind; in C we have
the mountain ... full efgolden light, the sun was blazing, the sand was swirling
(the last metaphorically); and also human artifacts: the sail, the mast.
Nature is not tamed: the features of the natural environment may no
longer be agents in the transitivity patterns, but neither are they direct
objects. What has happened is that the horizons have broadened. Where
the people were bounded by tree and river and rock, the tribe are
bounded by sky and sea and mountain. Although they are not yet
conquered, the features that surround them no longer circumscribe all
action and all contemplation. Whereas Lok rushed to the edge ef the water
and came back, the new people steer in towards the shore, and look across the
water at the green hills.

4 Final remarks on stylistic "relevance"

The Inheritors has provided a perspective for a linguistic inquiry of a
kind whose relevance and significance is notoriously difficult to assess:
an inquiry into the language of a full-length prose work. In this
situation syntactic analysis is unlikely to offer anything in the way of
new interpretations of particular sentences in terms of their sub-
jectmatter; the language as a whole is not deviant, and the difficulties of
understanding are at the level of interpretation - or rather perhaps, in
the present instance, re-interpretation, as when we insist on translating
the stick began to grow shorter at both ends as "the man drew the bow". I
have not, in this study, emphasized the use oflinguistic analysis as a key;
I doubt whether it has this function. What it can do is to establish
certain regular patterns, on a comparative basis, in the form of
differences which appear significant over a broad canvas. In The
Inheritors these appear as differences within the text itself, between what
we have called "Language A" and "Language C". In terms of this novel,
if either of these is to be regarded as a departure, it will be Language C,
which appears only briefly at the very end; but in the context of
Modem English as a whole it is Language A which constitutes the

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departure and Language C the norm. There is thus a double shift of

stand point in the move from global to local norm, but one which
brings us back to more or less where we started.
The focus of attention has been on language in general, on the
language system and its relation to the meanings of a literary work. In
the study of the text, we have examined instances where particular
syntactic options have been selected with a greater than expected
frequency, a selection that is partly but not wholly explained by
reference to the subject-matter; and have suggested that, by considering
how the meaning of these options, taken in the context of the
ideational function of language as a whole, relates to an interpretation
of the meaning of the work, one can show that they are relevant both
as subject-matter and as underlying theme. Each sentence in the
passages that were observed in detail is thus potentially of interest both
in itself and as an instance of a general trend; and we have been able to
ignore other differences, such as that between dialogue and narrative,
although a study of these as subvarieties would almost certainly yield
further points of interest. Within the present context, the prominence
that we have observed can be said to be "motivated"; it is reasonable
to talk of foregrounding, here, as an explanation of stylistic impact.
The establishment of a syntactic norm (for this is what it is) is thus
a way of expressing one of the levels of meaning of the work: the
fact that a particular pattern constitutes a norm is the meaning.
The linguistic function of the pattern is therefore of some importance.
The features that we have seen to be foregrounded in The Inheritors
derive from the ideational component in the language system; hence
they represent, at the level at which they constitute a norm, a world-
view, a structuring of experience that is significant because there is no
a priori reason why the experience should have been structured in this
way rather than in another. More particularly, the foregrounded
features were selections in transitivity. Transitivity is the set of options
whereby the speaker encodes his experience of the processes of the
external world, and of the internal world of his own consciousness,
together with the participants in these processes and their attendant
circumstances; and it embodies a very basic distinction of processes
into two types, those that are regarded as due to an external cause, an
agency other than the person or object involved, and those that are
not. There are, in addition, many further categories and subtypes.
Transitivity is really the cornerstone of the semantic organization of
experience; and it is at one level what The Inheritors is about. The
theme of the entire novel, in a sense, is transitivity: man's interpretation

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of his experience of the world, his understanding of its processes and of

his own participation in them. This is the motivation for Golding's
syntactic originality; it is because of this that the syntax is effective as a
"mode of meaning". 25 The particular transitivity patterns that stand out
in the text contribute to the artistic whole through the functional
significance, in the language system, of the semantic options which
they express.
This is what we understand by "relevance" - the notion that a
linguistic feature "belongs" in some way as part of the whole. The
pursuit of prominence is not without significance for the understand-
ing and evaluation of a literary work; but neither is it sufficient to
be a rewarding activity in itsel£26 It has been said of phonological
foregrounding that "there must be appropriateness to the nexus of
sound and meaning"; 27 and this is no less true of the syntactic and
semantic levels, where, however, the relationship is not one of sound
and meaning but one of meaning and meaning. Here "relevance"
implies a congruence with our interpretation of what the work is
about, and hence the criteria of belonging are semantic ones. We
might be tempted to express the relevance of syntactic patterns, such
as we find in The Inheritors, as a "unity of form and meaning", parallel
to the "sound and meaning" formulation above; but this would, I
think, be a false parallel. The syntactic categories are per se the reali-
zations of semantic options, and the relevance is the relevance of one
set of meanings to another - a relationship among the levels of
meaning of the work itself.
In The Inheritors, the syntax is part of the story. As readers, we are
reacting to the whole of the writer's creative use of "meaning poten-
tial"; and the nature of language is such that he can convey, in a line
of print, a complex of simultaneous themes, reflecting the variety of
functions that language is required to serve. And because the elements
of the language, the words and phrases and syntactic structures, tend to
have multiple values, any one theme may have more than one
interpretation: in expressing some content, for example, the writer may
invite us at the same time to interpret it in quite a different functional
context - as a cry of despair, perhaps. It is the same property of
language that enables us to react to hints, to take offence and do all the
other things that display the rhetoric of everyday verbal interaction. A
theme that is strongly foregrounded is especially likely to be interpreted
at more than one level. In The Inheritors it is the linguistic representation
of experience, through the syntactic resources of transitivity, that is
especially brought into relief, although there may be other themes not

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mentioned here that stand out in the same way. Every work achieves a
unique balance among the types and components of meaning, and
embodies the writer's individual exploration of the functional diversity
of language.

APPENDIX
Extracts from The Inheritors
A. (pp. 106-7)
The bushes twitched again. Lok steadied by the tree and gazed. A head
and a chest faced him, half-hidden. There were white bone things
behind the leaves and hair. The man had white bone things above his
eyes and under the mouth so that his face was longer than a face should
be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along
his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the
middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small
eyes in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Lok understood that
the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could
reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the
echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at
both ends. Then it shot out to full length again.
The dead tree by Lok's ear acquired a voice.
"Clop!"
His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had
grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the
bitter berries that Lok' s stomach told him he must not eat. This twig
had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky
brown stuff hung in the crooks. His nose examined this stuff and did
not like it. He smelled along the shaft of the twig. The leaves on the
twig were red feathers and reminded him of goose. He was lost in a
generalized astonishment and excitement. He shouted at the green
drifts across the glittering water and heard Liku crying out in answer
but could not catch the words. They were cut off suddenly as though
someone had clapped a hand over her mouth. He rushed to the edge
of the water and came back. On either side of the open bank the
bushes grew thickly in the flood; they waded out until at their farthest
some of the leaves were opening under water; and these bushes leaned
over.
The echo of Liku's voice in his head sent him trembling at this
perilous way of bushes towards the island. He dashed at them where

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normally they would have been rooted on dry land and his feet
splashed. He threw himself forward and grabbed at the branches with
hands and feet. He shouted:
"I am coming!"

B. (pp. 215-17)
(i) Lok staggered to his feet, picked up Tanakil and ran after Fa along
the terrace. There came a screaming from the figures by the hollow
log and a loud bang from the jam. The tree began to move forward
and the logs were lumbering about like the legs of a giant. The
crumplefaced woman was struggling with Tuami on the rock by the
hollow log; she burst free and came running towards Lok. There was
movement everywhere, screaming, demoniac activity; the old man was
coming across the tumbling logs. He threw something at Fa. Hunters
were holding the hollow log against the terrace and the head of the
tree with all its weight of branches and wet leaves was drawing along
them. The fat woman was lying in the log, the crumpled woman was
in it with Tanakil, the old man was tumbling into the back. The
boughs crashed and drew along the rock with an agonized squealing.
Fa was sitting by the water holding her head. The branches took her.
She was moving with them out into the water and the hollow log was
free of the rock and drawing away. The tree swung into the current
with Fa sitting limply among the branches. Lok began to gibber again.
He ran up and down on the terrace. The tree would not be cajoled or
persuaded. It moved to the edge of the fall, it swung until it was lying
along the lip. The water reared up over the trunk, pushing, the roots
were over. The tree hung for a while with the head facing upstream.
Slowly the root end sank and the head rose. Then it slid forward
soundlessly and dropped over the fall.

(ii) The red creature stood on the edge of the terrace and did nothing.
The hollow log was a dark spot on the water towards the place where
the sun had gone down. The air in the gap was clear and blue and
calm. There was no noise at all now except for the fall, for there was
no wind and the green sky was clear. The red creature turned to the
right and trotted slowly towards the far end of the terrace. Water was
cascading down the rocks beyond the terrace from the melting ice in
the mountains. The river was high and flat and drowned the edge of
the terrace. There were long scars in the earth and rock 'Yhere the
branches of a tree had been dragged past by the water. The red creature

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came trotting back to a dark hollow in the side of the cliff where there
was evidence of occupation. It looked at the other figure, dark now,
that grinned down at it from the back of the hollow. Then it turned
away and ran through the little passage that joined the terrace to the
slope. It halted, peering down at the scars, the abandoned rollers and
broken ropes. It turned again, sidled round a shoulder of rock and
stood on an almost imperceptible path that ran along the sheer rocks.
It began to sidle along the path, crouch, its long arms swinging,
touching, almost as firm a support as the legs. It was peering down into
the thunderous waters but there was nothing to be seen but the
columns of glimmering haze where the water had scooped a bowl out
of the rock. It moved faster, broke into a queer loping run that made
the head bob up and down and the forearms alternate like the legs of a
horse. It stopped at the end of the path and looked down at the long
streamers of weed that were moving backwards and forwards under the
water. It put up a hand and scratched under its chinless mouth.

C. (pp. 228-9)
The sail glowed red-brown. Tuami glanced back at the gap through
the mountain and saw that it was full of golden light and the sun was
sitting in it. As if they were obeying some signal the people began to
stir, to sit up and look across the water at the green hills. Twal bent
over Tanakil and kissed her and murmured to her. Tanakil's lips parted.
Her voice was harsh and came from far away in the night.
"Liku!"
Tuami heard Marian whisper to him from by the mast.
"That is the devil's name. Only she may speak it."
Now Vivani was really waking. They heard her huge, luxurious
yawn and the bear skin was thrown off. She sat up, shook back her
loose hair and looked first at Madan then at Tuami. At once he was
filled again with lust and hate. If she had been what she was, if Marian,
if her man, if she had saved her baby in the storm on the salt water -
"My breasts are paining me."
If she had not wanted the child as a plaything, if I had not saved the
other as a joke -
He began to talk high and fast.
"There are plains beyond those hills, Marian, for they grow less; and
there will be herds for hunting. Let us steer in towards the shore. Have
we water - but of course we have water! Did the women bring the
food? Did you bring the food, Twal?''

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Twal lifted her face towards him and it was twisted with grief and
hate.
"What have I to do with food, master? You and he gave my child
to the devils and they have given me back a changeling who does not
see or speak."
The sand was swirling in Tuami's brain. He thought in panic: they
have given me back a changed Tuami; what shall I do? Only Madan is
the same - smaller, weaker but the same. He peered forward to find
the changeless one as something he could hold on to. The sun was
blazing on the red sail and Madan was red. His arms and legs were
contracted, his hair stood out and his beard, his teeth were wolfs teeth
and his eyes like blind stones. The mouth was opening and shutting.
"They cannot follow us, I tell you. They cannot pass over water."

Notes
1. The results were presented in a paper read to the Conference of
University Teachers ofEnglish, London (Bedford College), April 1965.
2. Paul Zumthor suggests (private communication) that a particular literary
tradition may be characterized by the emphasis and value placed on one
particular function, a shift in emphasis being associated with a major break
in the tradition. Cf. Zumthor (1971).
3. Nor the other way round, at least in the typical instances. There are
certain linguistic activities in which one or other function is prescribed
and the speaker required to supply the remainder: "language exercises"
such as "Now ask your neighbour a question" (in foreign language
classes) and "Write a sonnet" (in school).
4. Cf. the discussion by Tzvetan Todorov (1971).
5. Including those which specify types of communication role, or illocution-
ary force, which Richard Ohmann proposes to use in a definition of
literature. See Ohmann (1971).
6. Rene W ellek, "Closing statement (retrospects and prospects from the
viewpoint ofliterary criticism)", in T. A. Sebeok (1960, pp. 417-18).
7. Dell H. Hymes, "Phonological aspects of style: some English sonnets", in
Seymour Chatman and Samuel Levin (1967, pp. 33-53, see pp. 33-4).
8. On diatypic variation see Michael Gregory (1967, pp. 177-98).
9. Charles E. Osgood, "Some effects of motivation on style of encoding",
in Sebeok (1960, p. 293).
10. As n. 7.
11. Angus McIntosh, "Saying", Review of English Literature, 6 (April 1965),
19. It is worth quoting further from the same paragraph: "It is at least
clear that any approach to this kind of problem which looks _at anything
less than the whole text as the ultimate unit has very little to contribute.

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 LINGUISTIC FUNCTION AND LITERARY STYLE: WILLIAM GOLDING

Whatever it may be in linguistic analysis, the sentence is not the proper

unit here. If there are any possibilities of progress, they must, I think, be
on the lines of the old recognition, e.g. by the rhetoricians, of elements
or strands of something or other which permeate long stretches of text
and produce a gradual build-up of effect."
12. Bernard Bloch, "Linguistic structure and linguistic analysis", in A. A. Hill
(1953, pp. 40-44).
13. Josephine Miles, "Eras in English poetry", in S. Chatman and S. Levin
(1967, pp. 175-6).
14. C£ George A. Miller, "Closing statement (retrospects and prospects from
the viewpoint of psychology)", in Sebeok (1960, p. 394).
15. See the paper by Louis Milic (1971), in which he suggests that the
diagnostic features of an author's style are generally to be found among
the "unconscious" elements.
16. "Metamorphosis" has, I believe, only two occurrences of an insect name,
although crawl is frequent.
17. William Golding, The Inheritors (London, 1955; paperback edition, 1961).
The pagination is the same in both editions.
18. Figures in square brackets show numbers of occurrences. The most
important of these are summarized in Table 2.
19. For a discussion of clause types see M. A. K. Halliday, "Language
structure and language function", in John Lyons (1970, pp. 140-65).
Reprinted in Halliday (2002), pp. 173-95.
20. C( M. A. K. Halliday, "Descriptive linguistics in literary studies", in
A. Duthie (1964, p. 29). Reprinted as part of Chapter 1 of this volume.
21. The other extracts examined for comparison were three passages of similar
length: p. 61 from He remembered the old woman; pp. 102-3 from Then
there was nothing more; p. 166 from At that the old man rushed forward.
22. By "complement" is understood all nominal elements other than the
subject: direct object, indirect object, cognate object, and adjectival and
nominal complement. "Adjuncts" are non-nominal elements (adverbs and
prepositional phrases).
23. C£James Peter Thorne (1965, pp. 49-59).
24. For discussions of transitivity see Charles J. Fillmore, "The case for case",
in Emmon Bach and Robert T. Harms (1968, pp. 1-88); M. A. K.
Halliday, Grammar, Society and the Noun (1967a); M. A. K. Halliday,
"Notes on transitivity and theme in English" (Parts I and 11), (19676,
pp. 37-81; 1968, pp. 179-215).
25. See J. R. Firth, "Modes of meaning", Essays and Studies (English Associ-
ation, 1951). Reprinted inJ. R. Firth (1957, pp. 190-215).
26. C( Roger Fowler, "Linguistic theory and the study of literature", in
Roger Fowler (1966, pp. 1-28).
27. As n. 7 (p. 53).

125
 Chapter Four

THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION
OF GRAMMAR: FROM PRIESTLEY'S
AN INSPECTOR CALLS
(1982)

In evaluations of J. B. Priestley's work a number of themes stand out.

It is said that he is an entertainer and a craftsman, one who values
technique above content; hence as a playwright his achievements are
theatrical rather than dramatic. He has a leaning towards the happy
ending, a suspicious optimism ill-suited to an age that prides itself on
its message of doom and gloom. He has little concern for the individual
psyche, and cares more for the group than for the personalities of its
members; hence he is out of step with the march of western individu-
alism. His philosophy is too straightforward for intellectuals but too
thought-demanding for the mentally lazy, occupying an unfashionable
middle ground between the academic and the pop. And perhaps, as
John Braine has remarked in a recent study (1979), he has simply been
too successful, so that his very success has prevented his work from
being taken more seriously.
Probably the most sustained criticism of Priestley's dramatic writing,
however, concerns the language he gives to his characters. Gareth Lloyd
Evans (1964) describes it as "flat naturalistic prose"; and while he
sometimes treats this as a deliberate, if misguided, decision on Priestley's
part, referring to his "wayward refusal to tax the imaginations of his
audiences with language that matches the themes of the plays" (p. 43),
at other times he sees it as a straightforward inability to rise up to the
demands of the occasion. He cites David Hughes' (1958) remark that
"once again Priestley is confronted with a language he cannot persuade
to leave the ground", and refers to "his failure to discover a language

First published in LAnguage Form and Linguistic Variation: Papers Dedicated to A,wus McIntosh,
edited by John M. Anderson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 129-59.

126
 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

which was flexible enough to withstand the sharp fluctuations of the

play's movement and meaning" (p. 145). Priestley himself, as Evans
points out, has explicitly defended his own choice of language on the
grounds that he was working "within the tradition of English realism.
Too much enrichment of speech would have destroyed this realism."
If Priestley's dramatic writing is so devoid of special effects that it
even "does not give the effect of being attached to character" (p. 145)
then presumably we should not expect to find in his plays any of the
foregrounding of particular linguistic features that is often associated
with a literary text and with the differences between one text and
another. The implication is that we may not be able to characterize his
language at all: it will be just a specimen, a kind of random sample of
English, with its grammar and vocabulary fully "automatized". The
words and structures will be functioning simply as the most neutral, or
unmarked, expression of the meanings that lie behind them.
In line with the (European) structuralist approach to a text, described
by Gerard Genette (1975-76) as a "recourse against the danger of [its]
destruction", we treat the text as an object, having social value. This
can lead to a separation between text and author, as if there was no
particular connection between them; and this is something we may
have to be on our guard against, because we cannot begin to interpret
a text until we can say "I know what this text means", and knowing
what a text means is achieved in the first place not by coming to it as
a linguist, but rather by bringing to bear on it the whole of one's
antecedent experience. To take an extreme case: in watching Priestley
I cannot discount the fact that my family home was in Bradford, which
is Priestley's home town; this community of origins means that I
understand him more roundedly than I could expect to understand an
author from Manchester, London, Scotland or the United States. In
other words, to treat the text as an object does not imply that we
detach it from its context of situation and culture. On the contrary;
once so detached, it ceases to be accessible to objective interpretation.
If we follow the same line of thought as Michael Gregory (1978) in
his "interpretative stylistics", by the fact of our knowing what the text
means we are driven to ask of it two very general questions. The first
one is: Why does the text mean what it does? The second, more
ambitious one, is: Why is the text valued as it is? These two questions
are what stylistics is largely about: the source of the meanings that
inhere in the text, and of the value it is accorded in the culture.
Naturally, having once begun to interpret the text in this way, we may
find it means something more than, or other than, what we first

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thought - but not something totally different. The interpretative

experience is likely to deepen the impact the text has on us; but the
impact has already been felt, otherwise we should probably not have
bothered to examine this particular text in the first place.
The stylistic interpretation of the text is not, however, a "dose
reading" or "explication de texte", because these undertakings, admir-
able though they are, fail to relate the text to the linguistic system.
Without this perspective, in which the system and the text are in focus
at the same time (as they are with Hjelmslev, almost alone among
theoretical linguists), interpretation may become either another "new
criticism", under the guise of pragmatics, or a new formalism on a
more macroscopic scale. For the linguist, of course, any text is a
window on to the system; but to adopt this angle is to treat the text
just as an instrument, not as an object. A literary text by definition is
one that we are not treating simply as an instrument, but one of which
we are impelled to ask the question posed by Foucault: "How is it that
this utterance appeared and not another in its place?" But there is no
way of answering such a question unless it is recognized that the text
would not be a text if it was not a product - an "instantiation" - of
the linguistic system.
Priestley is at once novelist, dramatist, essayist, autobiographer, critic,
and social historian. His self-image is that of an entertainer, a craftsman,
a man of letters; and his output of text has been prodigious. There is
no difficulty in finding dominant themes in his work. He is almost
never obscure; he prefers straight talk, and we are not inveigled into
massive debates about his underlying values or the nature of his
symbolism. The themes that concern us here will be two that are
clearly among the predominant ones in his work. One is interdepend-
ence and social responsibility: "no man is an island". The other is time:
"time is not ticking our lives away". Beyond both of these, linking
them with each other and with other Priestleian motifs (such as that of
the illusion of the separate self), is Priestley's concern with the nature
of reality, and with the relation of reality to its manifestation on the
surface of things.
It has often been pointed out, in a somewhat disparaging vein, that
Priestley now and again as it were walks out on to the stage and
enunciates his theme for us. The most obvious instance in An Inspector
Calls is the Inspector's final speech:

We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are r~sponsible

for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if

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 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and
blood and anguish.
Moreover this "lesson" is further thrown into relief by repeated
references to the "every man for himself" burden of Mr. Birling's self-
important sermonizing. Compare the various lines in I Have Been Here
Before which are explicitly concerned with time, e.g. the following
spoken by Dr. Gorder in Act III:
We do not go round in a circle. That is an illusion, just as the circling
of the planets and stars is an illusion. We move along a spiral track.
Characters such as Dr. Gorder and Inspector Goole, in their different
roles as guru, the 'Great Detective', and the like, serve as natural
spokesmen for the issues that are being raised.
But the themes are by no means always treated in this declarative
way. The time theme in An Inspector Calls, while clearly present, is
subdued and largely implicit. In this connection it seems worth stressing
once again that it is wrong to treat Priestley's dramatic time theme as if
it was some kind of a scientific theory. Priestley used to be criticized
for a naive acceptance of currently popular time theories such as those
ofJ. W. Dunne (1934) and P. D. Ouspensky (1931), and especially for
the "recurrence and intervention" concept that he used in I Have Been
Here Before, with its obvious contradictions if taken literally. But this
was never meant by him to be held up as a theory and evaluated as
true or false. It is, first, something to be explored for its dramatic
potential (and many of his plays make use of it in one form or another);
and secondly, something that gives a new dimension to human
relationships. Hence it is significant not for its intellectual content, as
something to be presented in the text, but as a motif that permeates
the interaction of the participants, and is more or less covertly woven
in to the dialogue. Thus in An Inspector Calls (Act III):
(1) We hardly ever told him anything he didn't know; did you notice
that?
(2) I didn't notice you told him that it's every man for himsel£ - Is that
when the Inspector came, just after Father had said that?
- and of course the very last lines of the play. Such manifestations are
"more or less" covert; they are hardly buried deep, but they do not
constitute a direct presentation of the theme, and unlike the examples
cited earlier they are likely to be taken in by the audience subcon-
sciously rather than consciously.
It is a general assumption of structuralism that the meanings of a

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work of literature are dispersed throughout the text not just at different
places in the syntagm but also, and more significantly, at different levels
within the code. This dispersal into what Firth called the various
"modes of meaning", for which he used the analogy of the dispersal of
light throughout the spectrum, is typically an unconscious feature of
the writing process (cf Mukafovsky's (1977) observation that "aesthetic
intentionality does not necessarily presuppose a conscious intent"), and
is hidden from the reader/listener unless he digs for it. Eco (1976)
compares a work of art to a language, saying that "there must be an
underlying system of mutual correlations, and thus a semiotic design
which cunningly gives the impression of non-semiosis". It is this that
accounts for the paradox of "poetic language": there is no such thing,
but we can all recognize it when we see it. To quote Mukafovsky
again: "poetic language is permanently characterized only by its func-
tion: however, function is not a property but a mode of utilizing the
properties of a given phenomenon" (pp. 3-4). How much the more is
this true of the language of prose works, where we do not even pretend
there is such a thing as "prosaic language" (as is clear from the meaning
this expression has acquired). McIntosh (1965) observed of prose fiction
that
... quite often where the impact of an entire work may be enormous,
yet word by word, phrase by phrase, clause by clause, sentence by
sentence, there may seem to be nothing very unusual or arresting, in
grammar or in vocabulary ...

The dramatist has to create a world of meaning, and his resource

for doing so is dialogue. He depends on what Berger and Luckmann
(1966) call the "reality-generating power of conversation", a power
that is covert and implicit in its effects: "most conversation does not
in so many words define the nature of the world . . . [it) implies a
world within which ... simple propositions make sense, [and so) con-
firms the subjective reality of this world". But whereas outside the
theatre this conversational magic has a lifetime in which to work, the
dramatist has three to four hours. He therefore stipulates that we are
to bring with us from outside the theatre all those aspects of everyday
subjective reality that his play does not force us to repudiate; and he
will supply the rest. In order to do this, if the reality he is constructing
is a rather different one, and differs in ways that are not obvious on
the surface, he may have to resort from time to time to "defining the
nature of the world"; and when the reality is being thus presented to
us, the language is likely to be fully automatized, with the words and

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 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

structures and sounds being there in their automatic function of real-

izing the semantic selections in an unmarked way - getting on with
expressing the meanings, without parading themselves in patterns of
their own. But for the rest, he will draw on the casualness of conver-
sation, implying his world rather than presenting it; and it is here that
the language is likely to become "de-automatized" (to use
Mukafovsky's term).
To create a partially differing reality by conversational means within
the space-time of a dramatic performance is almost bound to demand
some de-automatization of the language, whereby the patterning of
words and structures enables them to make their own distinct contri-
bution to the meaning. Mukafovsky's formulations are still relevant:
"the choice of vocabulary in a literary work ... necessarily becomes
part of the artistic organization of the work", and "a grammatical
category can acquire aesthetic effect by the accumulation of words
belonging to it" (pp. 37, 35). Hence "even a theme is connected to
language bilaterally: not only is linguistic expression governed by its
theme, but the theme is also governed by its linguistic expression ...
Not even theme, therefore, eludes linguistic analysis" (p. 55). The term
"de-automatization", though cumbersome, is more apt than "fore-
grounding", since what is in question is not simply prominence but
rather the partial freeing of the lower-level systems from the control of
the semantics so that they become domains of choice in their own
right. In terms of systemic theory the de-automatization of the grammar
means that grammatical choices are not simply determined from above:
there is selection as well as pre-selection. Hence the wording becomes
a quasi-independent semiotic mode through which the meanings of
the work can be projected.
The question that is being raised here, therefore, is whether a
language that is "flat and naturalistic", that "never leaves the earth"
and "fails to match the themes of his plays", as has been so often said
of Priestley's, can ever become "de-automatized". Is there enough
"play" in it to allow for the dispersal and flow of meaning along the
different channels of the linguistic system? Or does the commitment
to "realism" in language debar a writer from the "code-like regularity
in the selection of language categories" that Ruqaiya Hasan (1975)
regards as necessary to the effective "symbolic articulation" of his
underlying themes?
The following extract (Passage A) is taken from Act II of An Inspector
Calls. (Italics have been added to highlight wordings singled out for
discussion.)

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

MRS BIRLING: I think we've just about come to an end of this wretched
business - (1)
GERALD: I don't think so (2). Excuse me (3).
(He goes out. They watch him go in silence. We hear
the front door slam.)
SHEILA: (to Inspector) You know, you never showed him that
photograph of her (4).
INSPECTOR: No (5). It wasn't necessary (6). And I thought it better not to
(7).
MRS BIRLING: You have a photograph of this girl (8)?
INSPECTOR: Yes (9). I think you'd better look at it (10).
MRS BIRLING: I don't see any particular reason why I should - (11).
INSPECTOR: Probably not (12). But you'd betterlook at it (13).
MRS BIRLING: Very well (14).
(He produces the photograph and she looks hard at it.)
INSPECTOR: (taking back the photograph) You recognize her (15)?
MRS BIRLING; No (16). Why should I (17)?
INSPECTOR: Of course she might have changed lately, but I can't believe
she could have changed so much (18).
MRS BIRLING: I don't understand you, Inspector (19).
INSPECTOR: You mean you don't choose to do, Mrs Biding (20).
MRS BIRLING: (angrily) I meant what I said (21).
INSPECTOR: You're not telling me the truth (22).
MRS BIRLING: I beg your pardon (23)!
BIRLING: (angrily, to Inspector) Look here, I'm not going to have this,
Inspector (24). You'll apologize at once (25).
INSPECTOR: Apologize for what - doing my duty (26)?
BIRLING: No, for being so cffensive about it (27). I'm a public man
- (28).
INSPECTOR: (massively) Public men, Mr Biding, have responsibilities as
well as privileges (29).
BIRLING: Possibly (30). But you weren't asked to come here to talk
to me about my responsibilities (31).
SHEILA: Let's hope not (32). Though I'm beginning to wonder (33).
MRS BIRLING: Does that mean anything, Sheila (34)?
SHEILA: It means that we've no excuse now for putting on airs and

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 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

that if we've any sense we won't try (35). Father threw this
girl out because she asked for decent wages (36). I went
and pushed her further out, right into the street, just
because I was angry and she was pretty (37). Gerald set her
up as his mistress and then dropped her when it suited him
(38). And now you're pretending you don't recognize her
from that photograph (39). I admit I don't know why you
should, but I know jolly well you did in fact recognize her,
from the way you looked (40). And if you're not telling the
truth, why should the Inspector apologize (41)? And can't you
see, both of you, you're making it worse (42)?
(She turns away. We hear the front door slam again.)

This exchange, which occurs at what is more or less the middle point
of the play, constitutes a small, self-contained enactment that revolves
around a photograph. In the simplest terms it has a structure as shown
in Figure 1:
'you look at it'

[Inspector]

'I don't know her'

---
'you're lying' [Birlings senior]

~
'you're insulting'

'he',j"•tified; you're not'

(Sheila]

Figure 1 Dialogic progression in Passage A

Let us attempt to identify some of the linguistic features through

which this structure is realized. In the first twelve speeches (sentences
1-18) we find the following expressions:

I think
I don't think } 'this business has ended'
I thought
I think
I don't see
probably not
might have
l 'the photograph should be looked at'

can't believe
could have l 'has she changed?'

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

These are expressions of modality; they represent the speaker's opinion

- his judgement regarding the probabilities of the case. They cluster in
this passage around three issues: the state of the inquiry (a transition
from what has gone before), the examination of the photograph and
the identification of the subject. The passage is also characterized by
expressions of modulation, representing the speaker's assertion of the
obligations inherent in the case; these relate to the second of the three
issues just mentioned:

it wasn't necessary
it was better not to
you'd better
'(to) look at the photograph'
[any ... reason why] I should
you'd better
[why] should I?

The second group of modalities are thus modalities on these

modulations:

I thought it better
I think you'd better
I don't see ... why I should

At this point we must anticipate a part of the discussion which really

belongs later on, when we come to consider the place of these elements
in the system of the language. In English these two systems, modality
and modulation, come together in the grammar: although the two can
be expressed in different ways (probably, I think, etc. for modalities; had
better, are obliged to, etc. for modulations), they also share a common
means of expression in the form of the finite modal auxiliary verb:

Modality I Modulation Modality Modulation

high must (need, ought to) certain required
middle will (would, shall, should) probable supposed
low may (might, can, could) possible allowed

This overlap in expression reflects the fact that there is an overlap in

the meanings. The semantic common ground between t_he two is to
be seen in their orientation towards the speaker: modality is the

134
 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

speaker's judgement of probability, modulation is the speaker's assess-

ment of obligation. When expressed by a modal verb, the meaning
is subjective; when it is expressed in other ways, the meaning is
objectified - the speaker is claiming that the probabilities are inherent
in the situation, or that the source of the obligations is elsewhere, as
shown in Figure 2:

'objective' probability:

it's possible she

has changed

Modulation

you are required to

look at it

Objectified Subjective

Figure 2 Orientation of probability and obligation

When the modality is expressed by a first person mental process clause,

most typically 'I think', the meaning is likewise subjective; the differ-
ence is that now it is explicitly so. The Inspector uses the subjective
mode in the expression of modality, not claiming for his opinions that
they are anything other than just his opinions; and he stays in the
middle range, where things are probable not certain. In expressing
obligations, he uses the objective mode - but qualifies it by a subjective
modality as he shifts the focus of attention (appropriately mediated
through a photograph) from the last victim, Gerald, on to the next,
Mrs. Biding (Figure 3):

it wasn't necessary
I thou t it better not to Gerald
I think you'd better MrsBirling
you'd better

Modulation:
( i ) objectified ( ii ) qualified by subjective
modality

Figure 3 Orientation in Inspector's statements of obligation

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

There is then a little hinge passage (19-22), keyed in by expressions

of cognition:

understand
mean
mean
tell the truth

and this is followed by a new confrontation (23-35) in which the three

themes of probability, obligation and cognition are taken up again.
They are now bonded together by a further element, that of interper-
sonal rights and their infringement - offence, apology and excuse; and
the theme of obligation is now represented lexically instead of
grammatically:

probability obligation cognition offence

possibly duty mean not ... have this
let's hope not responsibilities mean apologize
I ... wonder privileges [if we've any] sense apologize
responsibilities offensive
weren't asked to
excuse

Finally the dialogue is summarized by Sheila, who has re-entered it

with a modality (I wonder), in the form of a narrative of what has been
revealed so far (36-8) followed by a restatement of the earlier themes
(39-42):

obligation cognition offence

should don't know apologize
should know
tell the truth
see

By now the probabilities have been replaced by categoricalities:

[you] don't [recognize her]

[I] don't [know] / [do know jolly well]
[you] did [... recognize her]
[you] aren't [telling the truth]
[you] are [making it worse]

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 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

(There is an important distinction between 'certainty', which is a high

degree of probability as in you must recognize her, and 'categoricality'
which admits no degree of probability at all, as in you (do) recognize her.)
The thematic pattern of this sequence, which forms a microdrama set
between two slammings of the door, may be summarized as follows
(Figure 4):

1-18

19-22

23-35

probabilities obligations

36-38 narrative

39 - 42 categoricalities

Figure 4 Thematic pattern in Passage A

When the grammar is interpreted in its purely "automatic" function

as has been being done up to this point, we see how it realizes the
semantic structure and in so doing engenders the movement of the
text. The details of this movement, in the passage in question, could
be tabulated schematically as follows:

[setting]
0) Mrs. Biding and Gerald: uncertainty building up (about ongoing
process)

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

SLAM (i)
[challenge]
1) Inspector: obligations (a) Gerald need not see photograph (he will
confess anyway)
(b) Mrs. Biding must see photograph
(she is a tougher nut: modalized, then
demodalized)
2) Mrs. Birling: rejects obligations (a) to look
(b) to recognize
3) Inspector: rejects her rejection, by rejecting probability of
consequences
(conflict]
4) Mrs. Biding: presents as conflict of understanding
5) Inspector: rejects her interpretation ('you are lying')
[confrontation]
6) Bidings: take offence ('you are not discharging your obligation to
our status')
7) Inspector: rejects (a) ('I am discharging my obligation to society')
(b) ('you are not discharging your obligation to
society')
8) Biding: rejects ('it is not your obligation to tell me my obligations')
9) Sheila: questions categoricality of this and affirms her
understanding
[explanation]
10) Sheila: narrates events revealed so far
(summation]
11) Sheila: evaluates (a) ('you are categorical')
(b) ('I am uncertain')
(c) ('I am categorical that you are wrong')
(d) ('your understanding is at fault')

SLAM (ii)

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 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

Now let us "de-automatize", and try to interpret the grammar in

terms that go beyond its direct realizational function. To do this is to
distance the text, and respond to the language: to focus out the
background, and let the words and structures speak for themselves. The
photograph, which serves as a channel for the interactive events,
disappears from view, leaving the concept of obligation foregrounded
as a major theme of the play.
In the text, obligation is tied to judgements of probability: there
are opinions relating to duties, and, as a minor motif, duties relating
to opinions. The two themes are closely interwoven. We have already
seen that this is a projection into the text of a relation that exists
between them in the system. The scales of 'possible-certain' and
'allowed-required' both typically combine with a common semantic
feature, that of 'subjective', in the sense of representing the speaker's
judgement; and this is symbolized by the use of modal verbs as one
form of the realization of both. We have referred to these as systems
of modality and modulation. This particular semantic configuration is
an essential element in the impact of the passage we have been
considering. But to explain this more fully we need to take the
interpretation of these systems one stage further, relating them to the
very general semantic systems of mood and polarity. In the context of
the language as a whole, 'possible-certain' and 'allowed-required' rep-
resent different scales of polarity, different forms of the indeterminacy
of yes and no.
There are two scales of polarity in English, the indicative and the
imperative. Indicative polarity is the scale from 'it is' to 'it isn't'; and
the intermediate degrees are degrees of probability, 'it must be', 'it will
be', 'it may be'. Imperative polarity is the scale from 'do!' to 'don't!';
the intermediate degrees are degrees of obligation, 'you must do', 'you
should do', 'you may do'. The orientation towards the speaker that is
· characteristic of modality and modulation is thus a consequence of the
speech function. The basic form of dialogue is that of exchange, which
inay be either exchange of information or exchange of goods-&-
services; and this distinction is what lies behind the mood system,
where indicative has evolved as the typical mode for the exchange of
information and imperative for the exchange of goods-&-services.
If what is being exchanged is information, the speaker's subjective
judgement relates to the likelihood or otherwise of the information
being valid; hence the subjective scale of polarity is that of 'yes - maybe
- no', where 'maybe' represents the indeterminacy of 'either yes or no'
and encompasses various degrees of probability. If what is being

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

exchanged is goods-&-services, the speaker's judgement relates to the

desirability or otherwise of the goods-&-services being provided; hence
the subjective scale of polarity is that of 'do! - you may do - don't!',
where 'you may do' represents the indeterminacy of'either do or don't'
and encompasses various degrees of obligation. We. can summarize this
as in Figure 5:

Indicative Imperative
positive

CATEGORICAL

HIGH it must be you must do

(certain) (required)

MEDIAN it will be you shou Id do

(probable) (supposed)

LOW it maybe you may do

(possible) (allowed)

CATEGORICAL
negative

Figure 5 Degrees of modality and modulation

It is clear that the passage we have been considering encapsulates the

theme of social responsibility not just as a topic but as an issue: as
something that has to be accepted, but that also is associated with
opinions, interpretations and conflicts. But what is foregrounded in
this passage is not simply the issue of obligations and their central role
as the focus of negotiation and dispute. It is also the nature of dialogue
itself, the interactive process whereby such obligations are acted out
and defined. They are not and cannot be functions of the individual,
but come into being only in the course of, and as a necessary con-
comitant of, the exchange of symbols; because the symbols themselves
have a dual semiotic role, functioning both as instrument (mediating
in the exchange of goods-&-services) and as object (constituting the
exchange of information), the speaker's commitment to his part in the
exchange is at the same time a commitment to the modes of validity
enshrined in the social semiotic, the kinds of yes and no. on which
the social order ultimately rests.

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 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

The significance of the lexicogrammatical selections in the text can

only be fully revealed by a consideration of their value in the semantic
system. Textually, the passage under discussion centres around the
scrutiny and recognition of a photograph. The words and structures
which, in their automatic function as the "output" of semantic choices,
carry forward the movement of the text, also become de-automatized
and so take on a life of their own as engenderers of meaning. It is in
this sense that "de-automatization" is more than prominence: promi-
nence is achieved through an untypical distribution of symbols in their
typical function in the text, whereas here we are referring to their
appearance in a transcendent function, whereby a grammatical system
as a whole directly encodes some higher-level semiotic, bypassing the
semantic organization of the text.
This may be expected to be a feature of what are felt to be "key"
passages; and although it would be a mistake to assume that every
aspect of the meaning of a work will always be distinctively recogniz-
able in some delimitable fragment or other - any given effect may
be dispersed throughout the text - it is interesting to see whether
we can find a similar display of any other underlying theme in the
present play of Priestley's. Let us examine from this point of view
another passage which immediately precedes the one we have just
been considering.
An Inspector Calls, Act II: Passage B
INSPECTOR: I think she went away - to be alone, to be quiet, to
remember all that had happened between you (1).
GERALD: How do you know that (2)?
INSPECTOR: She kept a rough sort of diary (3). And she said there that
she had to go away and be quiet and remember "just to
make it last longer" (4). She felt there'd never be anything
as good again for her - so she had to make it last longer (5).
GERALD I see (6). Well, I never saw her again, and that's all I can
(gravely): tell you (7).
INSPECTOR: It's all I want to know from you (8).
GERALD: In that case - as I'm rather more - upset - by this business
than I probably appear to be - and - well, I'd like to be
alone for a little while - I'd be glad if you'd let me go (9).
INSPECTOR: Go where (10)? Home (11)?
GERALD: No (12). I'll just go out - walk about - for a while, if you
don't mind (13). I'll come back (14).

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

INSPECTOR: All right, Mr Croft (15).

SHEILA: But just in case you forget - or decide not to come back,
Gerald, I think you'd better take this with you (16). (She
hands him the ring.)
GERALD: I see (17). Well, I was expecting this (18).
SHEILA: I don't dislike you as I did half an hour ago, Gerald (19).
In fact, in some odd way, I rather respect you more than
I've ever done before (20). I knew anyhow you were lying
about those months last year when you hardly came near me
(21). I knew there was something fishy about that time
(22). And now at least you've been honest (23). And I
believe what you told us about the way you helped her
at first (24). Just out of pity (25). And it was my fault
really that she was so desperate when you first met her
(26). But this has made a difference (27). You and I aren't
the same people who sat down to dinner here (28). We'd
have to start all over again, getting to know each other -
(29)
BIRLING: Now, Sheila, I'm not defending him (30). But you must
understand that a lot of young men - (31)
SHEILA: Don't interfere, please, Father (32). Gerald knows what I
mean, and you apparently don't (33).
GERALD: Yes, I know what you mean (34). But I'm coming back - if
I may (35).
SHEILA: All right (36).
MRS BIRLING: Well, really, I don't know. I think we've just about come
to an end of this wretched business -
GERALD: I don't think so. Excuse me.
(He goes out. They watch him go in silence. We hear
the front door slam.)

This piece of dialogue does not seem as thematically saturated as the

last one. Nevertheless we can recognize in it a clearly marked semantic
organization, related not in this instance to obligation and probability
but to time. In general the 'time' theme, although strongly fore-
grounded in some of Priestley's plays (I Have Been Here Before is an
obvious example), is more diffuse in An Inspector Calls; but it does
emerge at least in this passage as a rather strongly foregrounded moti(
Again we will look at the words and structures first in their "auto-
matic" function, as the grammatical realization of ongoing semantic
choices. ·

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 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

We can identify four elements in the semantics of time:

(1) time passing:
those months for a while
last year for a while
half an hour ago that time
(2) overcoming the passage of time:
to remember
to remember
to make it last
to make it last
[in case you] forget
(3) sometimes, never.
never ... agam
never ... agam
more than ever
hardly came near me
(4) then and now:
at first [not ... as ... half an hour] ago
now [more than ... ] before
"You and I aren't the same people who sat down to dinner
here. We'd have to start all over again."
These are accompanied by a repetition of the themes of 'going away'
and 'coming back'. Tracking them through the text we can summarize
as follows:
(1) Eva Smith: remembers (a) makes time last
(b) feels it will never recur
(2) Gerald: distances past from present
(a) 'that event did never recur'
(b) 'I need a little while'
(c) 'I will come back'
(3) Sheila: distances 'us-then' from 'us-now'
(a) 'you will forget to come back'
(b) pastl hour 'I never respected
you: you hardly
mont h ,
came near
year

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

(c) present: now 'I respect you:

you ... ?'
(d) past 'you and Eva'
(e) 'present you and I ¥- past you and I'
(4) Gerald: tries to reconcile then and now: 'I'm coming back - ifl
may'
But in building up this pattern we have had to take account of
another grammatical variable, tha:t of tense. Here is the pattern of tense
variation in Sheila's main speech (19-29) (Figure 6):

past
=====present present
past in
present
past
present
in past
past (3)

present---========-
-----------------------present
past (5) ~ .
past m
present~
------------------------~present
past
-=========
Figure 6
(sequent future)
Movement of tense in Sheila's longest tum

ending up with "We'd have to start all over again" - perhaps hardly
surprising in view of this somewhat disorientating oscillation of tem-
poral focus.
Once again let us try and distance ourselves from the immediate
textual environment in order to see the extent to which the expression
of time has been de-automatized. To do this we need to refer to the

144
 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

organization of time in the linguistic system; this is a potentially endless

task, but we can perhaps isolate from the intricacies of the total picture,
almost all of which would ultimately be relevant, two specific features
that can be briefly characterized and displayed.
(1) Shifting time reference in the verb. The English verb incorpo-
rates primary tense, expressing deictic time (time relative to the 'now'
of the act of meaning, e.g. is, was, will be), and secondary tense
expressing serial time (time relative to the time referred to in the
primary tense, e.g. present in past was doing, past in present has done).
We see the interplay of these systems in the text in sequences such as
the following (Figure 7):

Deictic time Serial time

past:

'I disliked you' present in past: -

'you were lying'

present:

'I respect you'

past in present:

'you have been honest'

Figure 7 Deictic and serial time in English tenses

(2) Finiteness. What brings the process "down to earth", relating it

to the here-&-now and so turning it into a proposition, into some-
thing that can be argued about, is the category of finiteness; and
finiteness in English has two essential properties: (i) it is fused with
polarity (positive/negative), and (ii) it is mediated through either pri-
mary tense (past/present/future) or modality/modulation (certain/
probable/possible; required/supposed/allowed). We referred above to
the fact that these two systems, which represent aspects of the
speaker's judgement, constitute intermediate degrees of polarity lying
between the positive and negative poles; and that in the indicative
this indeterminacy takes the form of modality, the dimension of more
or less probable. There is another dimension of polarity in the indic-
ative mood: besides probability, which means 'either yes or no', there
is the meaning 'both yes and no' which is the dimension of temporal-
ity. On the temporal dimension the middle term corresponding to
'probable' is 'usual', and the scale runs from 'sometimes' through

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

'usually' to 'always'. We can thus expand the left-hand side of Figure

5 to read as follows (Figure 8):

Indicative

categorical

PROBABILITY

high certain must always

median will
I
usually

low may
I
categorical it isn't

Figure 8 Degrees of probability and temporality

The system of temporality is not itself foregrounded in the text; it is

present fa this passage only in the forms never, ever and hardly, which
are the realizations of the outer value (always/sometimes) fused with
negative polarity. The aspect of time that is foregrounded is that of past
and present, 'then' and 'now'. The temporality system is of interest
because it provides another link between the themes of time and
obligation, representing the speaker's judgement as a temporal indeter-
minacy ('at one time it is, at another time it is not'); and this is bound
up, in the text, with the theme of then and now.
Thus the two themes of time and social obligation, which are so
often associated in Priestley's plays, and are juxtaposed in the two
passages we have been considering, turn out to be closely associated
also in the linguistic system. The complex interplay between the two is
a feature of the English language; it appears in its most highly coded
form in the category of finiteness, realized through the auxiliary verbs
that are sometimes aptly called "anomalous finites". It permeates these
sequences of the text through the de-automatization of the words and
structures that in their automatic function may express any one of the
component elements involved.
The time theme as foregrounded here takes the form of an oscillation
between past and present through the act of memory - remembering,
'making it last' - and, subsidiarily, through alternations ill; temporality
in the sense described above. The mapping of these on to the axis of

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 THE DE-AUTOMATIZATION OF GRAMMAR: J. B. PRIESTLEY

then and now creates a characteristic Priestleian universe in which past

and present co-exist. The author of these plays is entirely at home in
the world in which today's children are growing up, reading accounts
such as the following:

Scientists once put a very accurate clock inside a space ship. Then they
fired it into space. When the ship came back to earth they looked at the
clock and gasped. For the clock on the space ship was showing a
different time to the clocks on earth. The clock on the space ship had
somehow lost time while it was out in space! But how can you lose
time?

Scientists say that when a space ship travels very fast, close to the
speed of light, then time slows down in the space ship. It seems
unbelievable, but it's true. Maybe it is a bit like reading a book. If you
were one of the people in the book then time would be the same for
everyone in the book. But if you were outside the book it would be
different. You would be just someone reading that hook. Then your
time would be different. You could read about someone's whole lifetime
in just a few hours. That's one way oflooking at it Maybe we are like
characters in a book, trapped on earth. (Mark Oakey 1978)

In place of a linear progression through time, Priestley's drama calls

rather for his own concept of "actualization", "the business of bringing
events which already have their being in what I believe to be the more
enduring and fundamental worlds of our feeling, imagination and will,
into the world of material form". The theatre is thus being required to
destroy the illusion on which it depends for its own success. Mukafov-
sky points out that while the narrative mode is characterized by flow
but no present, and the lyric by present but no flow, the essence of
drama is that it has both: a temporal flow, the past-future axis, and a
timeless present, the speaker-hearer axis. The finiteness of the dramatic
mode is the same as the finiteness of the linguistic system, in which a
syntagm becomes a speech event through having a "location" in time
or a "validity" in the speaker's judgement; and the reference point of
both of these is 'I-now'. But in Priestley's reality both the 'I' and the
'now' are illusory (his own comment on Music at Night is " ... I was
trying to show that personality, the separate self, is an illusion - a
hopeless task in the theatre"). Each becomes real only through being
projected outwards in some encompassing context: the self in family,
social group, nation and human race, the present in another present
where this one will be a moment in a book. The individual's social
responsibilities are the actualization of the timeless fabric of existence

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which guarantees us and gives the 'I-now' such contingent reality as it

has.
The "automatic" organization of lexicogrammatical patterns can
present all this as theory or encapsulate it in the dramatic dialogue. But
it is the de-automatization of the words and the grammatical structures
that projects such ideological constructs into the microsemiotic
encounters of the protagonists on the stage. In the present instance, this
is achieved through the foregrounding of those elements of the
linguistic system in which the complex interrelationships of obligation,
personality and time are built in to the everyday give-and-take of
dialogue, and so become part of what Berger and Luckmann refer to
as the "ordinary, taken-for-granted world".

148
 Chapter Five

POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE:

THE NUCLEAR SECTIONS OF
TENNYSON'S IN MEMORIAM
(1987)

1 Background
Linguists concerned with the study of texts, and particularly the study
of highly-valued texts, the central domain of linguistic stylistics, have
had to contend with two opposing traditions in the study of meaning.
According to one persuasion, the meaning of a text is its referential
content; meaning is displayed in the words and their construction; and
if two texts have the same truth value they are held to be synonymous.
According to the other, the meaning of a text is everything the
particular critic can think of to say about it; meaning lurks in the void
that is set "between the lines"; and no text is ever synonymous even
with itself. The task for a linguistics of style has been to develop the
positive features of both these images of language, both the leaner,
classical one and the more fleshy, romantic one; to demonstrate that
the meaning of a text is accessible - it is not some private figment of
the critic's psychic powers - but that it encompasses a great deal more
than the manifest propositional content.
Significant contributions to this task came from some of the great
figures of the middle years of this century. Mukafovsky made it clear
that if a text was highly valued this was not because it was written in
any special language evolved for the purpose (there is no such thing as
a "literary register"), but because of the functions to which the language
was addressed (1977). Mukafovsky offered a rich multifunctional view
of language, and from this he derived both a general theory ~f literary

First published in Functions of Style, edited by David Birch and Michael O'Toole. London:
Pinter, 1987, pp. 31-44.

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

genres and an explanation for the semiotic efficacy of any particular

text.
Firth's stylistic studies added another dimension to the rich interpre-
tation of meaning: that of levels. Each level of linguistic organization,
phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, contributed
its own "mode of meaning" to the text (1951). At a further level the
text itself was contextualized: brought into relation with other, preced-
ing texts, and with (the rest of) its context of situation - a context
which might extend and modify through time, where a text had an
extended history of its own.
Both these interpretations depended on explicit textual analysis of a
"public" kind, for which the linguist could be called to account; and
the basis for this was provided in Firth's own system-structure theory
and in the functionalist theory of the Prague school. Two further
essentials for the linguistic study of style came from the work of
Hjelmslev and of Whorf. Hjelmslev clarified the theoretical status of a
text, defining its relationship to the system of the language of which it
is an instance (in Saussure this relationship of "instantiation" appears to
be confused with that of "realization", the relationship among the levels
of the system). Whorf introduced the notion of the "cryptotype", the
semantic patterns that are submerged below the surface of the grammar
but are accessible through a complex series of "reactances" and carry
the main ideational and interpersonal motifs that inform the text.

2 General considerations
In the 1960s some important pioneering work was done in the
linguistic study of literary texts based on this stratal-functional model of
language (e.g. Gregory 1967, 1974; Hasan 1964, 1967; Leech 1965,
1969; McIntosh 1963, 1966; Sinclair, 1966). At the same time we were
working towards an interpretation of the grammar of English that
would serve the needs (inter alia) of stylistic research: that was itself
multifunctional, multistratal, and abstract or "cryptotypic" in the
Whorfian sense. Systemic grammar with its framework of levels and its
metafunctional hypothesis was an attempt to meet this need (Halliday
1985a; cf. Kennedy 1982). The Hjelmslevian perspective has been
sharpened by Martin's (1985) complementarity of synoptic and
dynamic, and Lemke's work (1985) has greatly strengthened the
theoretical foundations.
In the past five to seven years the field has been immensely enriched
by combining the linguistic interpretation of texts in terms o(grammar

150
 POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: ALFRED TENNYSON

and discourse with the multiplicity of literary, sociopolitical and ideo-

logical perspectives that are loosely integrated under the name of
semiotics. Some of the work which seems to me to have particularly
broadened our horizons during the past ten years would include Kress
on language and ideology - how grammar creates political realities;
Fowler on the literary text in its social-historical context; Gregory's
communication linguistics and the "phases" of a literary text; Hasan's
perception of verbal art and the levels of literary semiosis; O'Toole's
narrative analysis and his metafunctional interpretation of other semiotic
systems; Carter on a literary text as a learning experience; Sinclair's
perception of the intersection of the literary and the linguistic; Thi-
bault's problematizing of the text as intersubjective process, and the
subject as intertextual construct; Threadgold's multitextual interpreta-
tions drawing on all the discourses of semiotics; Butt on grammar in
the construction of reality and the text in its place in the history of
ideas (Butt 1984, 1988; Carter 1982; Fowler 1981; Gregory 1985;
Hasan 1975, 1985; Kress and Hodge 1979; O'Toole 1982, 1994;
Sinclair 1982; Thibault 1984, 1986; Threadgold 1986).
It seems to me that studies such as these have fashioned what starts
out as a reasonably coherent account of language as system and process
into a powerful tool for the interpretation of texts in their cultural or
macrosemiotic environment. What I hope will emerge is a sense of the
interdependence of all the parts. Let me try to express this in a series of
interpretative steps; not implying by this an ordered methodological
proc~dure, although I shall follow more or less this line of approach in
the brief illustration that comes next.
We recognize that patterns in the grammar are ideational (either
experiential, like transitivity; or logical, like expansion and projection),
interpersonal (like mood and modality), or textual (like theme and
information structure); and that any one of these metafunctions may be
foregrounded in a given work, or part of a work. What we are
establishing, however, is the metafunctional profile, or progression
across the discourse; it is the intersection of these patterns in a unique
combination that gives a text its characteristic flavour. Having separated
the metafunctional components in order to understand why the text
means what it does, we put them together again to explain why the
text is valued as it is.
At the same time, secondly, we relate these patterns to patterns at
other levels: both to the independently established lower-level patterns
of phonology and so on, and also to the semantic patterns. These last
are not, of course, established independently of the lexicogrammar -

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they are interpretations of the lexicogrammar, especially the crypto-

grammar - but they are related to it by more than one route: the
grammar either functioning as realization, or "de-automatized" and so
creating meanings of its own. This same dimension of realization
enables us to enter the context of situation, the contextual configura-
tion in tenns of field, tenor and mode; and this in turn leads in to the
context of culture, the socio-historical and ideological environment
engendering, and engendered by, the text.
The relationship of "situation" to "culture" is one of instantiation;
and this adds the third dimension to the analysis. At each level, the text
instantiates the system; and this is also (like realization) a two-way
process, since each instance disturbs the probabilities of the system and
hence destroys and recreates it - almost identically, but not quite. One
property of a highly valued text is its capacity to disturb the system
beyond its simple quantitative function: the writer - or speaker - that
we call innovative is one whose text causes perturbations greater than
those associated with a single instance. Such texts often accumulate a
layering of Firthian contexts. Our interpretation has to extend beyond
the text to the system that creates and is created by it: otherwise, the
text remains an island, something that no speaker could ever have
constructed and no listener could ever have construed if they had.
But, fourthly, our own interpretative text so constituted is not a
separate construction either. The interpretation is a complex semiotic
act in which we as interpreters impinge on the meaning of the text we
are interpreting: both by adding to its value and, usually, in more
specific ways as well. A text brought into attention in this way becomes
more than just another text; the discourse formed by its conjunction
with other texts, including the analytic metatext, is something that is
essentially new.
All this is obviously more than I can pretend to illustrate in one
short essay. But to try and make some of these points more concrete I
propose to discuss briefly one highly valued text fragment: one that in
fact holds an important place in English semohistory, in the struggle to
come to terms with the scientific ideology of the century following
Newton. This is the central passage from Tennyson's In Memoriam:
three sections (17 stanzas in all) falling more or less in the middle of
the poem:
LIii.
OH yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,

152
POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: ALFRED TENNYSON

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy' d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a wonn is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last - far off - at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

LIV.
THE wish, that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave;
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear;
I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope thro' darkness up to God;
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.

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 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

LV.
"SO careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries "a thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more." And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law -
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed -
Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?
No more? A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him.
0 life as futile, then, as frail!
0 for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.
The remainder of the paper will be on the interpretation of this text.

3 Some metafunctional patterns in the lexicogrammar

(i) Logical: the clause complex
More than half of this passage is taken up by three very long clause
complexes. The first (stanzas 1-3 of section 53) is controlled by a
projection: we trnst that ... , and is of the form

IX 'JH p+2 P+31 p3+2cx p+4 13+51 . 1}5+2

154
 POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: ALFRED TENNYSON

This is followed, after the intervening Behold, we know not anything; by

a shorter projection introduced by I can but trust that ... , with just
three clauses

a 'PI P+2

Alan Sinfield, in his excellent study of the language of In Memoriam,

pointed out this "analogical syntax", the "repeated constructions" that
he found to be characteristic of the poem - these are the paratactic
extensions shown up as +2, +3, +4, +5 in the analysis, and I shall
return to these below. In the second of the long clause complexes
(section 54, stanza 2 line 3 to the end of the section), the controlling
logical structure is now expansion:

al a+2 'PClla «P'PI pp2a PP2'P.» pa•p

PC1+2'PCI pa2al pa2a+2 pa2a+3

Pa2a+4 (3a2a+S

This is a complicated one, with more hypotaxis than parataxis, but

with another long paratactic sequence at the end, of the same extending
type. In section 55, after a shorter clause complex based on paratactic
projection (she {Nature) cries), there is a third long one, beginning with
an expansion of the elaborating kind ("non-defining relative") and
again containing one of Sinfield's "analogical" sequences:

al p+3 114«'PI
134•pa f34P=P p+S 11+6 p+7» a+2

Note that in all three instances this sequence occurs in a dependent

environment: reported (we trust that . .. ), enhancing (so careless that . .. )
or elaborating (man, her last work, who ...); (see further Section 5
below).

(ii) Interpersonal: mood

, Throughout these three sections, the mood oscillates between declara-
tive and non-declarative, the non-declaratives being interrogative or
moodless. The pattern emerges as in Table 1. Rhetorically this alterna-
tion ·carries a pattern of assertion and challenge, terminating· in an
apostrophic coda where the clauses are exclamatory in function.

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Table 1 Patterns of mood in the 17 stanzas

Inter- Mood Passage Clause nuclei
personal
phase
phase 1 declarative § 53 st.1, we trust
1.1 - st. 5, we know not
1.1. I can but trust
so runs my dream
phase 2 interrogative/ § 53 st. 5, what am I? - an
moodless 1.1 - § 54 st. 2, infant
1.2. the wish: derives
it not?
are God and Nature
at strife?
phase 3 declarative § 54 st. 2, 1.3 she seems
- § 55 st. 2, she cries
1.4.
phase 4 interrogative/ § 55 st. 2, 1.4 shall man be blown
moodless - st. 6. about or seal'd?
no more?
a monster
a discord
phase 5 moodless § 55 st. 7 o life! o for thy
voice!
what hope of answer?
behind the veil!

(iii) Experiential: transitivity

In§ 53, and the first stanza of§ 54, the process types are predominantly
material: creative: destructive (with one constructive and one
transfonnative): destroy, cast, cleave, shrivel, fail; make (complete); change,
derive. The Medium in the destructive (mainly Goal, since they are
largely passive) is a living creature - but always negated: nothing, not one
life, not a moth, not one worm, no life. The next motif to emerge clearly is
that of material: dispositive: motive, in § 54, stanzas 4 and 5: falter, fall,
stretch, grope, with Medium (here Actor, since these are middle) I.
There is a negative element in the Process (falter etc.; even gather dust
and chqff is superventive (involuntary)). The third motif is. found in §
55, stanzas 3-5, where the processes are semiotic ones, mental or

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 POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: ALFRED TENNYSON

verbal: love, trust, suffer, the Medium being man; elsewhere the Process
is material but there is a semiotic Range or circumstance: roll the psalm,
build Janes cf prayer, battle for the True. There is a minor motif of
attribution: be careful/careless, with Medium Nature; be at strife, Medium
God and Nature; and the contrasting pair man seemed fair [but] dragons
were mellow music match'd with him. The transitivity patterns are in phase
with the logical ones, so we can identify a second dimension of
structure having an ideationally based phasal organization:
Table 2 Patterns of transitivity in the 17 stanzas
Ideational Transitivity Clause Passage Medium
phase complex
phase A material: projection: § 53- I, we
destructive report/ § 54 st. 1.
idea
phase B material: expansion: § 54 sts. [Nature-,i.)
dispositive enhancing 2-5. I
phase C mental; projection: § 55 st. 1 Nature
verbal quote/ - st. 2,
locution 1.4.
phase D mental; expansion; § 55 st. man
verbal elaborating 2, 1.4 -
st. 5.
phase E (relational: § 55 sts.
attributive) 6, 7.

A comparison of the two will show that this is slightly, but not
randomly, out of phase with the pattern set up by the interpersonal
structure.
It may be helpful to note the major lexical chains deriving from the
transitivity selections:
know faith trust doubt hope wish dream
goal purpose final fruitless vam rubbish futile
good ill evil careful careless
soul spirit breath life death grave
falter fall lame grope secret veil
In addition to the foregrounded antonymies we may notice the range
. of certainty to uncertainty traversed by the first set, from know to dream.

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4 Combination and interpretation

Let us put these together and interpret them in semantic terms. The
overlapping Phase I/ A is declarative in mood, projecting (we trust), with
the projections either in future tense (will be the final goal, shall be
destroyed, shall fall, shall change) or present with a Manner circumstantial
of a teleological kind (walks with aimless feet, is cloven in vain, is shrivelled
in a fruitless fire, etc.). Our trust is in ultimate goals: either good will
happen, or if evil then for a good reason. The projection is a
proposition: 'we believe' - or is it? trust is ambiguous, and the
alternative interpretation 'we hope', with the projection as a proposal
(as in I trust you are not angry with me), is gradually made to supersede:
first by we know not anything, and finally when it becomes a wish. A
wish is very far from a belief; it sends us back to reinterpret trust as
'(vain) hope' (see below on the negatives), and this then explains the
somehow - we i:eally cannot see how all this could be. The wish,
moreover, is in Phase 2, the challenge: 'look closely, and you will see
where these vain hopes arise from'.
The challenge then sets off the dialogue with Nature: 'if the hopes
are vain, here is the explanation'. We now pass to Phase B, where the
assertion (Phase 3) is again declarative; but now enhancing (so careless
. . . that . . .) , with the expansions in present tense. We have moved
from the unreal (projected future) to the real (non-projected present):
abandoning the original hope, and clinging tenuously to the larger one
(faintly trust). This is immediately dashed, in Phase C, by Nature's
uncompromising assertion all shall go: no indirect idea, but a direct
locution, and written in stone - the rockhard evidence of the fossils.
And there is no appeal, because the "soul" is itself an illusion (I return
to this below).
There is then a coincidence of Phase D with Phase 4: the controlling
clause is now interrogative, the logical relation is elaborating (man ... ,
who . . .) and the expansions are in past tense: 'who did all these
things'. But these who ... clauses are in this context concessive; and
the 'doings' were largely acts of faith. What begins as 'trust in' the
future is destroyed by present revelations, so that the trust itself is now
a thing of the past; yet despite this faith-full past we ourselves have no
future - there is no soul in a fossil.
This pattern of movement in the text is carried along by the two
interlocking phasal structures. We could summarize it as in Table 3.

158
Table 3 Text movement shown by dominant selections in interpersonal
and ideational systems
PHASES l-5: PHASESA-E:
INTERPERSONAL IDEATIONAL

1 1 A

2 ( 1) declarative (a) material : destructive

Medium = we (I)
53 3 (2) future

4 (l )interrogative; 2 (b) projection: report/idea

moodless
5 (2) present

2 Transitional

54 3 (l ) declarative 3 B
(a) material: dispositive
Medium==I
4 (2) present (b) expansion : enhancing

1 (a)
mental ; verbal C
Medium = Nature
2 (b) projection :
auote/locution
3 ( 1)interrogative; 4 (a) mental ; verbal D
moodless Medium= man
55 4 (2) past (b) expansion: elaborating

6 (a) relational : attributive E

7 ( 1) moodless s (b) none

I< 2)tenseless

( 1) = mood ( a ) transitivity
(2) primary (deictic) ( b) clause complex
tense
 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

5 The dynamics of the clause complex

The grammar of this passage is that of spoken rather than of written
language. This is seen most clearly in the clause complexes; also in the
transitivity patterns, where there is little nominalization or other
grammatical metaphor and much of the lexical content is in the verbs.
There is an excellent discussion of this in a little paper by Walker
Gibson, written in 1958 (in the course of which he remarks "I submit,
then, that Tennyson's 'poetic imagination' can sometimes be examined
in terms of his grammar").
The significant feature of the clause complexes is not simply their
great length, nor their combination of parataxis and hypotaxis, but their
dynamic, choreographic nature: you cannot foresee the ending from
the beginning, nor recover the beginning by looking at the end. They
are not constructions, as are the clause complexes of written discourse.
So, for example, if we chart the passage from So careful of the type she
seems to and (I) faintly trust the larger hope, we see how many and various
are the steps that have been taken in between, each moving off from
the point where the last one landed. We have already noted the
occurrence in them of long paratactic chains, an "accumulation of
clauses with the same function" as Sinfield expresses it (1971, p. 99).
But each of the dominant clause complexes in this passage has an
identical structure (one also found elsewhere in the poem) whereby the
paratactic sequence is launched by an initial hypotaxis; and in each case
the hypotaxis undermines the whole effect, giving the entire sequence
the status of a lost cause. 'We trust that (all this will happen - but we
know it won't)'; 'Nature seems such that (I lose faith)'; 'shall man
(though he trusted) end up as dust and fossil?' And this 'lost cause'
effect is heightened by the transitivity patterns: the contrasts of affection
plus positive ('we hope for everything') with cognition plus negative
('we know nothing'), of nature's acting with my faltering, and of man's
past of 'doing' with his future of 'being done to' (blown about the desert
dust).
This admission of defeat is plainly signalled by the grammar of the
groups and phrases in Phase A. In its automated function, as realization
of the semantics, the grammar here is positive: in nothing walks with
aimless feet, not a worm is cloven in vain the negatives cancel out;
everything has a purpose (so we trust). But in the de-automatized
grammar, the meanings that are created by the grammar outside the
control of the semantics, the negatives pile up, and the e(fect (not a
worm, aimless, nothing, in vain, no life, etc.) is one of total defeat.

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 POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: ALFRED TENNYSON

So while Sinfield is right in seeing the parataxis as the repeated piling

up of the argument ("the most promising way (for Tennyson] of
seeking truth" (1971: 102)), in these critical passages the argument is
admitted to have failed. The lexicogrammatical context is one in which
the cause is already lost. This effect is perhaps further heightened by
the 'unconvincing' motif which introduces all three of these clause
complexes:
somehow good will be the final goal of ill
so careful of the type she seems
man her last work who seemed so fair.

6 Tennyson and the scientific imagination

There is no place here to discuss Sinfield's interpretation in further
detail; Tennyson's belief in progress, his faith in mankind, and the
meaningfulness to him of current developments in science are all
closely examined through the study of the language (passim; and see
Chapter XI for his conclusions). $infield remarks that science "forced
itself upon" Tennyson, who "was just able to absorb the discoveries of
the geologists" (1971, pp. 116, 206). Let us explore this point a little
further.
Tennyson may be fighting a rearguard action in these lines; but he
is aware that this is what he is doing, and he is not distressed by it.
Both the rhetorical and the logical dynamic of the passage, as revealed
by the interpersonal and ideational analyses, suggest this very strongly;
and it is inescapable when the two are put together. Mankind may still
be an infant, with no language but a cry (or only a protolanguage!);
but he has now, it seems, once again found a place in nature. One of
Nature's lines, in her part of the dialogue, tells how:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.

In other words: the soul is dead; you have no more need of that
hypothesis.
Nature, interpreted by science, has shown how man arose from the
rest of creation. At first sight, this seems threatening; we are no longer
protected by being uniquely the children of God. Individuals perish;
and Tennyson's personal grief at the loss of a loved friend provokes
what at level one is a rage against nature's indifference: her carelessness
of the single life, casually abandoned and destroyed. But at level two

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the scientific enquiry takes over and the interest is in the type. Species
perish too; many are there in the fossil library, that no longer exist.
And the human species will also become extinct: mankind is not
privileged - there is no immortality, even of the soul.
You appeal to me, says Nature, and your soul goes puffi This
"spirit", the fiction of ancient Greek and Hebrew philosophy, is simply
a puff of breath: a dressed-up pneuma and psyche - the breathing in
and out, the painted deities of Heng and Ha that guard a Taoist temple.
This is how the whole fancy started: - I know no more. McKellar (1985)
provides an illuminating, fully documented account of the history of
the concept of psycho-physical duality in western thinking.
It is clearly threatening to find one is no longer immortal. But, while
what we know from science may be disturbing, the fact that we
have come to know it is exhilarating; and it is the liberating power
of knowledge that Tennyson is celebrating here. As Gibson points out
(1958, p. 67), despite the protestation of ignorance in the final stanza
of§ 55 (Behind the veil, behind the vei0, "[Tennyson's] dramatic stance
has actually taken him a long way from any such humble position". He
has read Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology; and while there is no
suggestion that he had read any work of Darwin (and he could not
have read The Origin of Species, which appeared nearly ten years after In
Memoriam), he was clearly and indeed explicitly aware of the current of
evolutionary theory that was gathering momentum in biology. The
entire dynamic of the text - the rhetorical structure (Phases 1-5), the
dialogue with Nature, the movement created by the clause complexes
(§ 4 above), the grammar's construction of blind trust as a lost cause -
is both a presentation of what Gibson calls "the disquieting new
world of science" and a celebration of it as something that increases
rather than diminishes the stature of mankind.
These stanzas thus fall within the tradition of the scientific imagin-
ation: the works of the great poet-scientists from Lucretius onwards
whose poetic text displays in a unique form the grammatical construc-
tion of reality. And this leads to one final question: what is the role of
texts of this kind in the long-term dialogue with Nature, that which
Prigogine and Stengers refer to (and use as sub-title) in their book
Order out of Chaos? (Prigogine and Stengers 1985: esp. the Preface,
pp. xxvii-xxxi). Is there a wider context, a further level of the social
semiotic, in which this passage has to be interpreted?

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 POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: ALFRED TENNYSON

7 Poetry in the dialogue with nature

Here is an extract from The Origin of Species:

As natural selection acts only by the accumulation of slight modifica-

tions of structure or instinct, each profitable to the individual under its
conditions of life, it may reasonably be asked, how a long and gradu-
ated succession of modified architectural instincts, all tending towards
the present perfect plan of construction, could have profited the pro-
genitors of the hive-bee? I think the answer is not difficult: it is known
that bees are often hard pressed to get sufficient nectar; and I am
informed by Mr. Tegetmeier that it has been experimentally found that
no less than from twelve to fifteen pounds of dry sugar are consumed
by a hive of bees for the secretion of each pound of wax: so that a
prodigious quantity of fluid nectar must be collected and consumed by
the bees in a hive for the secretion of the wax necessary for the con-
struction of their combs. Moreover, many bees have to remain idle for
many days during the process of secretion. A large store of honey is
indispensable to support a large stock of bees during the winter; and the
security of the hive is known mainly to depend on a large number of
bees being supported. Hence the saving of wax by largely saving honey
must be a most important element of success in any family of bees. Of
course the success of any species of bee may be dependent on the
number of its parasites or other enemies, or on quite distinct causes, and
so be altogether independent of the quantity of honey which the bees
could collect. But let us suppose that this latter circumstance determined,
as it probably often does determine, the numbers of a humble-bee
which could exist in a country; and let us further suppose that the
community lived throughout the winter, and consequently required a
store of honey: there can in this case be no doubt that it would be an
advantage to our humble-bee, if a slight modification of her instinct led
her to make her waxen cells near together, so as to intersect a little; for
a wall in common even to two adjoining cells, would save some little
wax. Hence it would continually be more and more advantageous to
our humble-bee, if she were to make her cells more and more regular,
nearer together, and aggregated into a mass, like the cells of the
Melipona; for in this case a large part of the bounding surface of each
cell would serve to bound other cells, and much wax would be saved.
Again, from the same cause, it would be advantageous to the Melipona,
if she were to make her cells closer together, and more regular in every
way than at present; for then, as we have seen, the spherical surfaces
would wholly disappear, and would all be replaced by plane surfaces;
and the Melipona would make a comb as perfect as that of the hive-
bee. Beyond this stage of perfection in architecture, natural selection

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could not lead; for the comb of the hive-bee, as far as we can see, is
absolutely perfect in economising wax.
Thus, as I believe, the most wonderful of all known instincts, that of
the hive-bee, can be explained by natural selection having taken
advantage of numerous, successive, slight modifications of simpler
instincts; natural selection having by slow degrees, more and more
perfectly, led the bees to sweep equal spheres at a given distance from
each other in a double layer, and to build up and excavate the wax
along the planes of intersection. The bees, of course, no more knowing
that they swept their spheres at one particular distance from each other,
than they know what are the several angles of the hexagonal prisms and
of the basal rhombic plates. The motive power of the process of natural
selection having been economy of wax; that individual swarm which
wasted least honey in the secretion of wax, having succeeded best, and
having transmitted by inheritance its newly acquired economical instinct
to new swarms, which in their turn will have had the best chance of
succeeding in the struggle for existence.

Darwin is writing in the language of science. Behind this lie some four
centuries of scientific English, from Chaucer onwards; and 150 years of
continuous development from the English texts of Isaac Newton's works.
It is, obviously, very different from the language of Tennyson.
Darwin's text is characterized by very simple clause complexes: the
favoured structural pattern is one of embedding rather than taxis
(hypotaxis or parataxis). There is a higher lexical density (lexical words
per ranking clause), much more nominalization and a greater use of
grammatical metaphor. (For these concepts, see Halliday 1985a; for
these features as characteristic of written English, see Halliday 1987; for
the relation between lexical density and grammatical metaphor, see
Ravelli 1985.)
Where did this language evolve? It evolved as the language of
physics - physicists led the way in creating the discourse of science.
The model for
Hence the saving of wax by largely saving honey must be a most
important element of success in any family of bees.

(which exemplifies all the features enumerated above) may be found in

texts such as
Hence increase of temperature, at the same time as on one account it
increases the absolute quantity of heat in an elastic fluid, diminishes the
quantity on another account by an increase of pressure ...

from Dalton's A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1827, p. 287).

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 POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: ALFRED TENNYSON

But already in the eighteenth century the discourse of physics had

come to be seen as alienating. Prigogine and Stengers observe (1985,
p. 77):
for nearly two centuries Laplace's demon has plagued our imagination,
bringing a nightmare in which all things are insignificant. If it were
really true that the world is such that a demon - a being that is, after all,
like us, possessing the same science, but endowed with sharper senses
and greater powers of calculation - could, starting from the observation
of an instantaneous state, calculate its future and past, if nothing
qualitatively differentiates the simple systems we can describe from the
more complex ones for which a demon is needed, then the world is
nothing but an immense tautology.
Where is the place of man in such a scheme of things? He is there only
as an outsider:
... in the mechanistic world view, the scientific description of nature
will have its counterpart in man as an automaton endowed with a soul
and thereby alien to nature.

(Prigogine and Stengers 1985, p. 83). This was the major preoccupation
of the French Enlightenment; McKellar has described (1985: Chapter
VII, esp. pp. 542 ff.) the rejection of this psycho-physical dualism,
especially La Mettrie's attempt to demystify the psyche through the
concept of the semiotic man-machine. Somehow, mankind had to re-
enter the world of nature.
This was the significance of the new evolutionary theories, first in
geology and then in the biological sciences: man once again became
part of nature. But there was a price: he had to give up his godhead.
Evolution could restore the "vital principle" - but only if man was first
dethroned. Darwin finds it necessary to defend his theory by urging
"that there is grandeur in this view oflife" (459) (cf. Chapter 6 below):
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants
of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian
system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. (458)

In using this value-laden discourse Darwin was of course arming himself

against the aggression and the ridicule he knew he was going to receive.
But in ennobling man - and his fellow-creatures - in this way, Darwin
was also re-ennobling science: bringing back the arrow of time, the
sense of irreversible development towards increasingly complex forms of
organization for which there was no place in the established physics of
the period (Prigogine and Stengers 1985, pp. 128-9).

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It is easy to scoff at Tennyson's acceptance of these ideas as being

simply another manifestation of facile Victorian optimism. But that is
surely to miss the point - which is that of the role of the poet-scientist
in the semiotic processes of the culture. Tennyson was not bound by
the tradition of scientific discourse; he was free to use the syntactically
intricate, dynamic, non-metaphorical lexicogrammar of the everyday
spoken language, and to create within it a form of discourse that could
realize his own poetic imagination. In doing this he lessened the
distance between scientific knowledge and everyday knowledge, so
making science human once again - for the dehumanization of science
had been a function of scientific discourse, whose grammar increas-
ingly turned all happening into things and then set up abstruse relations
between these things that only the initiate could comprehend.
When we reach this level of interpretation, we can see that the
gra1mnar, in these few sections of In Memoriam, has created an intricate
semiotic helix, which we could gloss - in deplorably crude parody - as
in Figure 1:

the concept of evolut10

rehumanizes science

the knowledge is made

accessible (through poetic
discourse)

this understanding
raises man still
higher

man's place in
nature is restored

man has lost

his 'soul'

nature destroys
species - including man

nature destroys
individuals -
including humans

my loved friend
has perished

Figure 1 Spiralling progression in the 17 stanzas, as suggested by the

grammar

166
 POETRY AS SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE: ALFRED TENNYSON

In the last analysis it is the meaning of Tennyson's choice of this way

of meaning that has to be taken into account: the "function of the
structure of functions", in the old Pragensian terminology. What this is
telling us is that the knowledge that is made accessible through this
poetic, non-technical discourse - the poeticization of science - is the
very knowledge that is bringing science back into humanity. We are
not alien to nature - because nature will turn out to be, essentially, like
ourselves.
In putting it this way we have of course recontextualized the poem
in the context of our own times. To quote Prigogine and Stengers
again (1985, pp. xxviii; 208):
Science is rediscovering time [their italics] .... history began by concentrat-
ing mainly on human societies, after which attention was given to the
temporal dimensions oflife and of geology. The incorporation of time
into physics thus appears as the last stage of a progressive reinsertion of
history into the natural and social sciences.

Obviously Tennyson was not describing, and could not describe, issues
that were not yet formulated or apprehended by the scientists them-
selves. But that is irrelevant; in any case he was not describing anything
- that is not how the grammar was being put into service. What he
was doing with the grammar was something considerably more com-
plex: constructing a semiotic universe at the intersection of science and
poetry. The point is that he was doing this with the grammar (as
always, in its systemic sense of "lexicogrammar"); so it is reasonable
that we should use the study of grammar (our "grammatics", so to
speak) as a means of trying to understand it.

167
 Chapter Six

THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE

AND VALUE IN THE GRAMMAR OF
SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE:
WITH REFERENCE TO CHARLES DARWIN'S
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
(1990)

1 Theme and information in scientific discourse

The first part of this chapter will be a general discussion of certain
features of the grammar of scientific English; in the second part I shall
focus on one particular text, the final two paragraphs of Darwin's The
Origin ef Species. I shall assume the concept of register, or functional
(diatypic) variation in language. It is convenient to talk of "a register",
in the same way that one talks of "a dialect": in reality, of course,
dialectal variation is typically continuous, along many dimensions (that
is, with many features varying simultaneously), and what we call "a
dialect" is a syndrome of variants that tend to co-occur. Those feature
combinations that actually do occur - what we recognize as "the
dialects of English", for example, or "the dialects ofltalian" - are only
a tiny fraction of the combinations that would be theoretically possible
within the given language. Similarly, "a register" is a syndrome, or
cluster of associated variants; and again only a small fraction of the
theoretically possible combinations will actually be found to occur. 1
What is the essential difference between dialectal variation and
diatypic or register variation?2 Prototypically, dialects differ in
expression; our notion of them is that they are "different ways of saying
the same thing". Of course, this is not without exception; dialectal
variation arises from either geographical conditions (distance and physi-
cal barriers) or social-historical conditions (political, e.g. national

First published in I.A rappresentazione verba/e e iconica: valori estetid e funziona/i. Atti de/ XI
Congresso Nazionale de/l'Assodazzione ltaliana di Anglistica, Bergamo, 24 e 25 Ottobre 1988,
edited by Clotilde de Stasio, Maurizio Gotti and Rossana Bonadei. Milan: ,Guerini Studio,
1990, pp 57-80.

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 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

boundaries; or hierarchical, e.g. class, caste, age, generation and sex),

and as Hasan has shown3 dialects that are primarily social in origin can
and do differ also semantically. This is in fact what makes it possible
for dialect variation to play such an important part in creating and
maintaining (and also in transforming) these hierarchical structures.
Nevertheless dialectal variation is primarily variation in expression: in
phonology, and in the morphological formations of the grammar.
Registers, on the other hand, are not different ways of saying the
same thing; they are ways of saying different things. Prototypically,
therefore, they differ in content. The features that go together in a
register go together for semantic reasons; they are meanings that
typically co-occur. For this reason, we can translate different registers
into a foreign language. We cannot translate different dialects; we can
only mimic dialect variation.
Like dialects, registers are treated as realities by the members of the
culture. We recognize "British English", "American English", "Aus-
tralian English", "Yorkshire dialect", "Cockney", etc.; and likewise
'1oumalese", "fairy tales", "business English", "scientific English" and
so on. These are best thought of as spaces within which the speakers
and writers are moving; spaces that may be defined with varying depth
of focus (the dialect of a particular village versus the dialect of an entire
region or nation; the register of high school physics textbooks versus
the register of natural science), and whose boundaries are in any case
permeable, hence constantly changing and evolving. A register persists
through time because it achieves a contingent equilibrium, being held
together by tension among different forces whose conflicting demands
have to be met. 4 To give a brief example, grossly oversimplified but
also highly typical: what we call "scientific English" has to reconcile
the need to create new knowledge with the need to restrict access to
that knowledge (that is, make access to it conditional on participating
in the power structures and value systems within which it is located
and defined).
In a recent short paper on the language of physical science I set out
to identify, describe and explain a typical syndrome of grammatical
features in the register of scientific English. 5 I cited a short paragraph
from the Sdentific American and focused particularly on the pattern
represented in the following two clauses:

The rate of crack growth depends ... on the chemical environment.

The development of a ... model ... requires an understanding of how
stress accelerates the bond rupture reaction.

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In their most general form, these clauses represent the two related
motifs of 'a causes/is caused by x', 'b proves/is proved by y'. Let me
cite another pair of examples taken from a different text:
These results cannot be handled by purely structural models oflaterality
effects . . . [b + prove + y]
(if ... ) both word recognition and concurrent verbal memory produce
more left than right hemisphere activation. [a + cause + x)

Taken together: 'b cannot be explained by y if a causes x'. At the level

of the syntagm (sequence of classes), each of these consists of two
nominal groups linked by a verbal group whose lexical verb is of the
"relational" class, in this case handle, produce. Their analysis in systemic-
functional grammar, taking account of just those features that are
relevant to the present discussion, is as set out in Figure 1. 6
In that paper I tried to show how and why this pattern evolved to
become the dominant grammatical motif in modern scientific English.
Historically the process is one of dialectic engagement between the
nominal group and the clause. It is a continuous process, moving across
the boundary between different languages: it began in ancient Greek,
was continued in classical and then in medieval Latin, and then
transmitted to Italian, English and the other languages of modern
Europe. Table 1 is a summary of the relevant grammatical features that
led up to this dominant motif, as they appear in two influential early
scientific texts: Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe (c. 1390) and New-
ton's Opticks from 300 years later.
What is not found in Chaucer's text, but is found in Newton, is this
particular syndrome of clausal and nominal features: a clause of the type
analysed in Figure 1, in which the nominal elements functioning as
Token and Value are nominalizations of processes or properties; for
example,
The unusual Refraction is therefore perform' d by an original property
of the Rays. [ Opticks, p. 358]

This is still very much a minority type in Newton's writing; but it is

available when the context demands. In order to see when the context
does demand it, let me cite the immediately preceding text:
... there is an original Difference in the Rays of Light, by means of
which some Rays are . . . constantly refracted after the usual manner,
and others constantly after the unusual manner. For if the difference be
not original, but arises from new Modifications impress'd on the Rays
at their first Refraction, it would be alter' d by new Modifications in the

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 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

three following Refractions; whereas it suffers no alteration, but is

constant, ... The unusual Refraction is therefore perform'd by an
original property of the Rays.

Note in particular the sequence [are] constantly [refracted] efter the unusual
manner ... The unusual Refraction is therefore pe,form'd by ... Fonnulai-
cally: "a happens . . . The happening of a is caused by ... ". The

these results cannot be handled by purely structural models

of laterality effects

transi ti vi ty Value/ Process: relational Token/

Identified / circumstantial: Identifier
cause (internal)

mood Mood Residue

Subject j Finite I
Predicator Adjunct

::~ationl l
r :-~.-e~_n_e____~_h_e_m_e_ _ _ _ _ _ _N_e_w--------~

both word recognition produce more left than

and concurrent right hemisphere
verbal memory activation

transi ti vi ty Token/ Process: relational Value/

Identified / circumstantial: Identifier
cause (external)

mood Mood Residue

Subject IFinite Predicator Complement

::;:tion l
lr:-~.-e~_n_e____~_h_e_m_e_ _ _ _ _ _ _N_e_w
________ ~
Figure 1 Transitivity (ideational), mood (interpersonal), and theme and
information (textual) structures in the "favourite" clause type

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nominalization the unusual refraction refers back to the earlier formulation

are refracted after the unusua( manner, in such a way as to make it the
starting point for a new piece of information explaining how it is
brought about.

Table 1 Some grammatical features in the scientific writings of Chaucer

and Newton
Grammatical features Typical contexts
Chaucer: Treatise on the Astrolabe
1: nominal nouns: technical terms:
noun roots technological (parts of
instrument)
nouns derived from astronomical and
verbs and adjectives mathematical
nominal groups (with mathematical expressions
prepositional phrase
and clause Qualifiers)
2: clausal material and mental; instructions ('do this',
imperative 'observe/reckon that')
relational ('be', 'be observations; names and
called'); indicative their explanations
Newton: Opticks
1: nominal nouns: technical terms:
noun roots general concepts;
experimental apparatus
nouns derived from physical and
verbs and adjectives mathematical
nominal groups (with mathematical expressions
prepositional phrase
and clause Qualifiers)
*nominalizations of logical argumentation;
processes & properties explanations and
conclusions
2: clausal material and mental; description of experiments
indicative ('I did this', 'I saw/
reasoned that')
relational ('cause', logical argumentation;
'prove'); indicative explanations and
conclusions
* = not found in Chaucer's text

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 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

This grammatical pattern exploits the universal metafunctional prin-

ciple of clause structure: that the clause, in every language, is a mapping
of three distinct kinds of meaning - interpersonal, ideational and textual
(clause as action, clause as reflection, clause as information). The
structural mechanism for this mapping, as it is worked out in English,
was shown in Figure 1. What concerns us here first and foremost is the
textual component. In English the clause is organized textually into
two simultaneous message lines, one of Theme + Rheme, and one of
Given + New. The former presents the information from the speaker's
angle: the Theme is 'what I am starting out from'. The latter presents
the information from the listener's angle - still, of course, as constructed
for him by the speaker: the New is 'what you are to attend to'. The
two prominent functions, Theme and New, are realized in quite
distinct ways: the Theme segmentally, by first position in the clause;
the New prosodically, by greatest pitch movement in the tone group.
Because of the different ways in which the two are constituted, it is
possible for both to be mapped on to the same element. But the typical
pattern is for the two to contrast, with tension set up between them,
so that the clause enacts a dynamic progression from one to the other:
from a speaker-Theme, which is also "given" (intelligence already
shared by the listener), to a listener-New, which is also "rhematic" (a
move away from the speaker's starting point). This pattern obviously
provides a powerful resource for constructing and developing an
argument. 7
We could refer to this in Gestalt terminology as a move from
"ground" to "figure", but that sets up too great a discontinuity between
them and I shall prefer the "backgrounding - foregrounding" form of
the metaphor since it suggests something more relative and continuous.
The type of clause that· is beginning to emerge in the Newtonian
discourse, then, constructs a movement from a backgrounded ele-
ment which summarizes what has gone before to a foregrounded
element which moves on to a new plane. But there has to be a third
component of the pattern, namely the relationship that is set up
between the two; and it is this that provides the key to the potentiality
of the whole, enabling the clause to function effectively in constructing
knowledge and value. We have said that the relationship is typically
one of cause or proof, as in the examples so far considered (depends on,
accelerates, produce, arises from, is peiformed by; requires an understanding ef,
cannot be handled by). That was an oversimplification, and we now need
to consider this relationship a little more closely.
The grammar of natural languages constructs a set oflogical-semantic

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Table 2 Common types oflogical-semantic relation, with typical realization

as conjunction and preposition
Expansion type Category Typical conjunction Typical preposition
1 elaborating expository in other words; i.e. namely
exemplificatory for example; e.g. such as
2 extending additive and besides
alternative or instead of
adversative but despite (in contrast)
3 enhancing temporal then (at that time) after
causal so (for that reason) because of
conditional then (in that case) in the event of
concessive yet despite (contrary to
expectation)
comparative so (in that way) like

relations: relations such as 'i.e.', 'e.g.', 'and', 'or', 'but', 'then', 'thus',
'so'. These are grammaticalized in various ways, typically (in English)
by conjunctions and prepositions. There are many possible ways of
categorizing these relations, depending on the criteria adopted; one
schema that I find useful in applying the model of the grammar to
discourse analysis is that shown in Table 2. 8
In the type of clause that we are considering here, however, these
relationships come to be lexicalized, as verbs; for example, the verbs
produce, arise from, depend on, lead to as expressions of the causal
relationship. Furthermore, this logical-semantic space is then crosscut
along another dimension, according to whether the relationship is
being set up in rebus or in verbis; 9 thus the causal relationship may be
either (in rebus) 'a causes x' or (in verbis) 'b proves (= causes one to
say) y'. Not all the logical-semantic relationships are lexicalized to
the same extent; nor is this last distinction between relations in the
events and relations in the discourse equally applicable to all. But the
general pattern is as shown, with the experiential content entirely
located within the two nominal groups and the verbal group setting
up the relation between them. Table 3 lists some of the common
verbs by which these logical-semantic relations are construed in lexical
form.
Only a handful of these verbs occur in Newton's writings. The
number has noticeably increased half a century later, in Joseph Priest-
ley's History and Present State of Electricity; and by the time of James

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 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

Table 3 Examples oflexicalization oflogical-semantic relations (as verbs)

Category Examples oflexicalization (verbs)
expository be represent constitute comprise signal reflect
exemplificatory be exemplify illustrate
additive accompany complement combine with
alternative replace alternate with supplant
adversative contrast with distinguish
temporal follow precede anticipate co-occur with
causal cause produce arise from lead to result in prove
conditional correlate with be associated with apply to
concessive contradict conflict with preclude
comparative resemble compare with approximate to simulate
Note: Verbs in the same category are not, of course, synonymous, since they embody
other features such as negative, causative. No distinction is shown here between
"external" (in rebus) and "internal" (in verbis).

Clerk Maxwell's An Elementary Treatise on Electricity, after another 100

years, there are some hundreds of them in current use. My guess is that
in modem scientific writing there are somewhere around 2,000,
although in the early twentieth century a countertendency arose
whereby the logical-semantic relationship is relexicalized, this time as a
noun, and the verb is simply be or other lexical lightweight such as
have, bring, need. The pattern is then 'a is the cause of x', 'bis the proof
of y'; thus is the cause ef, is the result ef, is a concomitant ef, has as a
consequence, is a representation ef, is an alternative to; is the proof ef, needs
explanation as, is an illustration ef, serves as evidence for, etc. etc. Figure 2
displays some examples from a text in the Scientific American.
We can appreciate, I think, how such verbal representations are
themselves also iconic. (1) There is a movement from a given Theme
(background) to a rhematic New (foreground); this movement in time
construes iconically the flow of information. (2) New semiotic entities
are created by these nominal packages, like rate of crack growth, left/right
hemisphere activation, unusual refraction, resolution of the experimental diffi-
culties; the nominal expression in the grammar construes iconically an
objectified entity in the real world. (3) The combination of (1) and (2)
construes iconically the total reality in which we now live, a reality
consisting of semiotic entities in a periodic flow of information - a
flow that one might well say has now become a flood. The grammar
constructs this world, as it has constructed (and continues to construct)

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1 Theme nominal group the theoretical programme of

devising models of atomic nuclei
Relation verbal group has of course been lcomplementedl by
(extending:
additive)
New nominal group experimental investigations
(noun: process)
2 Theme nominal group the resulting energy level diagram
Relation be+ nominal is in essence a !representation! of
(elaborating: group (noun: 'b represents y'
expositive) relation)
New nominalization what nature allows the nucleus to do
(rankshifted
clause)
3 Theme nominal group the resolution of the experimental
(noun: process) difficulties~
Relation come + nominal came in the lformj of
(enhancing: group (noun: 'a was resolved by x'
causal) relation)
New nominal group an on-line isotope separation system
Figure 2 Examples showing logical-semantic relations lexicalized (1) as
verb, (2) and (3) as noun (from J. H. Hamilton and J. A. Maruhn, "Exotic
atomic nuclei", Sdentific American.July 1986).

other worlds; and it does so, in this case, by this complex of semogenic
strategies: "packaging" into extended nominal groups, nominalizing
processes and properties, lexicalizing logical-semantic relations first as
verbs and then as nouns, and constructing the whole into the sort of
clause we meet with everywhere - not just in academic writing but in
the newspapers, in the bureaucracy, and in our school textbooks -
typified by the following from a primary school science text: lung cancer
death rates are clearly associated with increased smoking. The grammar of a
natural language is a theory of experience, a metalanguage of daily life;
and the forms of verbal representation that evolved as part of modem
science have penetrated into almost every domain of our semiotic
practice.
*********

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 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

2 The final paragraphs of The Origin of Species

Let me now move to the second part of the paper, which I realize will
appear somewhat detached from the first, although I hope the overall
direction will soon become clear. I am still taking as my "text" the
language of science, but now contextualizing it within a more literary
frame of reference. I said earlier that the concept of register, as
functional variation in language, implies that our domain of inquiry is
a text type rather than an individual text; we are interested in what is
typical of this or that variety. In stylistics, on the other hand, we have
traditionally been interested in the highly valued text as something that
is unique, with the aim of showing precisely that it is not like any
other texts. There are of course more or less codified genres of
literature, text types showing similar text structures such as narrative
fiction or lyric poetry; but there is no such thing as a literary register,
or "literary English" as a functional variety of English.
Does this mean that we cannot have a highly valued text in some
definable register such as the language of science? Clearly it does not.
For one thing, we can treat any text as a unique semiotic object/ event.
If we take a piece of scientific writing and "read" it as a work of
literature, we locate it in two value systems which intersect in a series
of complementarities: (1) between the text as representing a register or
type and the text as something unique; (2) between the traditional
"two cultures", scientific and humanistic, the one privileging ideational
meaning the other privileging interpersonal; (3) within the scientific,
an analogous opposition between (in terms of eighteenth-century
thought) the uniformity of the system and the diversity of natural
processes, or (reinterpreted in modem terms) between order and
chaos. 10
But there are some texts which by their own birthright lie at the
intersection of science and verbal art: which are not merely reconsti-
tuted in this dual mode by us as readers, but are themselves constituted
out of the impact between scientific and poetic forces of meaning. I
have written elsewhere about the crucial stanzas of Tennyson's In
Memoriam, those which seem to me to lie at the epicentre of one such
semiotic impact. 11 That is a text that would be categorized, in tra-
ditional terms, as elegiac poetry but containing certain passages with a
scientific flavour or motif; and by studying its grammar we can get a
sense of what that implies. In the text I am concerned with here, this
relationship of "science" to "literature" is reversed: The Origin of Species
will be classified in the library under "science", whereas in certain

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lights it appears as a highly poetic text. Interestingly, while in the

Tennyson poem this impact is most strongly felt at a point more or less
halfway through the text, here it is most striking at the very end - in
the final two paragraphs, according to my own reading of the book.
Text 1 (see Appendix) reproduces the two paragraphs in question.
Here Darwin not only sums up the position for which he has been
arguing (over some 450 pages, in my edition) 12 but also defends it
against the opposition and ridicule which he knew it was bound to
evoke. The initial clause in the last sentence of all, There is grandeur in
this view of life, presents a defiant, if perhaps rather forlorn, challenge to
those whose only after-image of the text would be (as he foresaw) the
humiliation of finding that they were descended from the apes.
I shall offer a very partial grammatical analysis of these paragraphs,
taking account just of the two features discussed above: the "textual"
organization of the clause in terms (1) of Theme-Rheme and (2) of
Given-New. In embarking on this analysis, I was interested in finding
out what rhetorical or discursive strategies Darwin was using, as he
summed up his case and worked up to the resounding climax of that
final clause: from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. The patterning is not at all
obvious; to me, at least, it did not stand out on the surface of the text.
On the contrary, perhaps; one thing that makes this passage so effective
may be that the reader is not presented with any explicit signal that
'this is the nature of my argument'.
Why then did I think that the clause-by-clause analysis of Theme
and of New would be likely to reveal anything of interest? In general,
these features of the clause grammar play a significant part in construct-
ing the flow of the discourse. We have seen above, first, how they give
texture to a single clause and, secondly, how they construe a pair of
clauses into a coherent logical sequence, interacting with referential
and lexical cohesion. In addition to this, the ongoing selection of
elements functioning as Theme, and elements functioning as New,
throughout a portion of a text is a major source of continuity and
discursive power. In a seminal article written some ten years ago, on
the status of Theme in discourse, Peter Fries showed that it was possible
to relate Theme in the clause to the concepts of "method of develop-
ment" and "main point" in composition theory.-13 Any motif that
figured regularly as clause Theme could be seen to function as "method
of development" in the text, while any motif that figured regularly as
Rheme was likely to be functioning as "main point". Fries was
concerned specifically with the category of Theme and so based h~

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 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

interpretation on the straightforward division of each clause into two

parts, the Theme and the Rheme, treating the Rheme as equal in
prominence with the Theme. This has the advantage with a written
text that one does not need to give it the "implication of utterance",
as is necessary if one wants to identify the element that is New. But
the category of New is more appropriate, since it identifies prominence
that is of a different kind and would therefore be expected to have a
distinct function in the discourse; it is also more constraining, since not
everything that is outside the Theme will fall within the New. 14 Here
therefore I shall take it that what constitutes the "main point" of the
discourse is any motif that figures regularly as New. The third reason
for analysing this aspect of the grammar of the text, then, is that the
analysis reveals a great deal about the organization of the discourse. All
these considerations would of course apply to any text. But in many
texts these patterns are near the surface, and emerge very quickly once
one begins to read them carefully; whereas here they come to light
only when one consciously attends to the grammatical structure.
Text 2 (see Appendix) shows the Theme in each ranking clause
throughout the text. 15
The grouping of these into motifs is set out in diagrammatic form in
Figure 3. The first motif that emerges (numbered I in Figure 3) is very
clearly that of authority, beginning with the Theme of the first clause
authors of the highest eminence. This, when followed by seem to be fully
satisfied, becomes solidary with a passage in the final paragraph of an
earlier chapter where, mentioning a number of authorities who have
(contra Darwin) maintained the immutability of species, he then goes on:
But I have reason to believe that one great authority, Sir Charles Lyell, from
further· reflexion entertains grave doubts on this subject. 16 The motif of
authority is thus already given, constructed out of the morphological
relationship of authors = authorities. Darwin now extends it in a
sequence of clause Themes as follows:
authors of the highest eminence - the Creator [to my mind] - I - we
By this thematic progression Darwin establishes his own claim to
authority, wherewith to dispute and override these authors of the
highest eminence. He first appeals to the Creator - but being careful
to precede this with the interpersonal Theme to my mind, which both
protects him against the arrogance of claiming to know the Creator's
purposes and, by a neat metafunctional slip (from interpersonal "me"
to ideational "me"), 17 leads naturally from his role as interpreter of the
Creator's design to his position as an authority in his own right. This I

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-.., others

~~,
authors of the highest eminence I
I authority:
to my mind it accords bener with what we know of
the laws impressed on matter by the
Creator
'>-
the production and extinction our view
of the past and present opinion -+ inference
inhabitants of the world .... prophecy -+ confidence
[modal metaphors)

(seem tome)
when I they
II
II species, life forms;
differentiation
judging from the past (may safely infer) [static)
not one living species
of the species now living
for the manner in which all organic
beings are grouped
the greater number of species (can so far take a species
of each genus prophetic glance succession
all the species of many genera into filrurity as to groups
we the common & widely-spread species foretell) no cataclysm
belonging 10 the larger and dominant
selection
groups
all the living forms of life
as (may feel certain organic
we the ordinary succession by generation that)
no cataclysm forms oflife
hence We (may look with and idowments
and as natural selection some confidence)
all corporeal and mental endowments

interesting birds/various insects/worms/these instances birdsfmsects/wonns

elaborately cons1n1c1ed forms 0 fforms:
elaborate forms

the world
from New

this planet

thus from the war of nature

from famine and death Ill aources:
and that
whilst c this planet ) simple beginnings

from so simple a begiMing

[Theme of final sentence]

Figure 3 Motifs constructed as theme

is then modulated to we, in we can so far take a prophetic glance into

futurity; preceded by a hypotactic clause (also thematic) judging from the
past, which - without saying who or what is doing the judging (since
it is non-finite and so needs no Subject) - justifies the assumption that
"I" am in fact speaking on behalf of us all. Thus the clause Themes

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 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

each species has been

independently created
A~
creation vs. evolution what we know of laws A
impressed on matter by the Creator

due to secondary causes, cf.

C those detennining birth & death of the individual
B tnnsmiulon:
not special creations
[dyna~ic]
I Ii Ill

progeny distant times ena lcment

descendants past perfection
prevail and future grandeur
transmit likeness to distant flit=
procreate exalted objects
lransmit progeny become
leave no descendants glance into futurity ennobled
become extinct
prevail and procreate ultimately
new and dominant species
lineal descendants future of equally in-
of pre-Silurian appreciable length BW
never once been broken

enWtgled bank by & for the good

plants of many kinds of each being
singing on bushes progress towards
flitting about perfection
crawling on damp earth

'-,lrod around us:

w actmg
growth, inherilance,
variability, increase
----1' most exalted object
production of
higher animals

grandeur
law of gravity
C

few
life beallllful and evolved life originally breathed in to a few
breathed in endless wonderful fonns or one
fonns
fixed laws of gravity
endless fonns most beautiful and
wonderful being evolved
[Now of final sentence]

Figure 4 Motifs constructed as new

have by this point securely underpinned Darwin's own status as an

authority; and this thematic motif is now abandoned.
Meanwhile, it has begun to be overtaken by another motif (num-
bered II), that of species, life forms, and their differentiation; first
introduced as the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants
of the world. Since this is the principal motif of the whole book (as
embodied in the title), it is natural for it to be set up by the grammar
as one of the Themes of these final paragraphs. If we focus on this

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motif in more detail, on the other hand, we find that it is constructed

out of three interlocking sub-motifs:

(i) inhabitants - species - groups

(ii) living - forms of life and their endowments
(iii) production and extinction - succession - selection

These are developed side by side in the form of fairly long nominal
groups which bring out, through their lexicogrammar, the number and
diversity of species, the collocation of 'species' with 'life', and the
steady, irreversible forward progression through time; the three sub-
motifs are then united in a specific reference to birds, various insects and
worms (these elaborately constructed forms), which is the final appearance of
this motif as Theme. The effect is one of a massive and powerful life-
engendering process - which is, however, presented synoptically as an
objectified 'state of affairs', since words representing processes are in
fact nominalized: production, extinction, succession, (no) cataclysm, selection.
This, as we saw earlier, is a feature of the grammar of the most highly
favoured clause type in scientific writing: the nominalization picks up
the preceding argument and presents it in this "objectified" form as
something now to be taken for granted. Here it also contrasts with the
more dynamic presentation of the motifs figuring as New (see B
below).
The third motif (III in Figure 3) is that of the sources leading to
speciation: these laws; from the war of nature, famine and death; .from so
simple a beginning. This comes in almost at the end; and Darwin leads
into it by taking over laws into the Theme from the previous Rheme
(... produced by laws acting around us. These laws . .. ; c[ C below). The
effect is to juxtapose, both within the Theme (and hence, being also
"given", both to be construed as something already established), the
two conflicting principles in nature - its lawfulness, and its lawlessness
- which together by their dialectic interaction account for the origin
of species.
I shall return below to the extraordinary final sentence of the text.
Meanwhile let us consider the motifs that constitute the "main point"
of the argument, as these appear clause by clause with the grammatical
function of the New. 18 These are showi:i in Text 3 (see Appendix) and
set out diagrammatically in Figure 4.
The first such motif (lettered A in Figure 4) is that (?f alternative
explanations: specifically, creation versus evolution. It may be helpful
to set the wordings out in a list:

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 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

has been independently created

due to secondary causes
those [causes] determining the birth and death of the individual
not as special creation (but as ... )
the lineal descendants
long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited

The final one of these is the last appearance of this motif until the very
last words of the text (... have been, and are being, evolved'); meanwhile,
via the two semantic features of generation (lineal descendants) and
antiquity (long before the first bed . .. ), itJeads us in to the second of the
"new" motifs, that of transmission - or better, transmitting, since the
way the grammar constructs it is at least as much clausal as nominal. 19
Like the second of the thematic motifs, this second motif within the
New (B in Figure 4) is also constructed out of three sub-motifs:

(i) progeny: (leave) descendants - (become) extinct - (procreate)

new and dominant species
(ii) time: remote past - distant futurity (a secure future of inappreciable
length)
(iii) ennoblement: (become) ennobled - (progress) towards perfec-
tion - most exalted object - the production of higher animals

The first two of these co-occur; the third is introduced at the

beginning of this motif (become ennobled'), then left aside and taken up
again after the sub-motifs of progeny and time have been established.
The message line is that descendancy across the ages equals ennoble-
ment, and that this process will continue in the future as it has done in
the past. The effect of associating the 'evolutionary' motifs of progeny
and time with this one of ennoblement is to collocate evolution with
positively loaded interpersonal expressions like by and for the good ef each
being, towards peifection and so on; this might serve to make such an
unpalatable concept slightly less threatening and more acceptable.
There is then a short, transitional motif comprised of the environ-
ment in which the diversity of species (the birds, insects, etc. of II
above) can be appreciated: an entangled hank, plants of many kinds,
(singing) on bushes, flitting about, (crawling) through the damp earth. This
could perhaps be seen as an appendage to B above, illustrating the
progress towards pet::fection; but it is also transitional, via the search for
explanation (have all been produced by), to the final motif (lettered C in
Figure 4) which is b'roached as laws acting around us. These laws are
then enumerated, as a long list of nominal groups, all with embedded

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Table 4 Summary of motifs constructing Theme and New of ranking

clauses in final two paragraphs of The Origin of Species
Theme ("method of development") New ("main point")

I authorities A explanation
II the phenomenon of species: B the process of evolution:
(i) inhabitants & groups (i) transmission & procreation
(ii) life form & endowments (ii) time: past - future
(iii) variation (iii) ennoblement
III sources (law/war of nature) C law (natural selection)

phrases and/or clauses in them and all functioning as the final element in
the one ranking clause - a clause which is (anomalousJ;r} non-finite,
despite being the main and only clause in the sentence.2
Up to this point, then (that is, up to the final sentence of the final
paragraph), the clauses are rather clearly organized, through their
textual functions of Theme (in Theme-Rheme) and New (in Given-
New), around a small number of distinct but interlocking motifs. We
could summarize this pattern as in Table 4 above. Then, in the final
sentence, the motifs ofll, III, Band Care all brought together: and in
an extremely complex pattern. The sentence begins with There is
grandeur in this view of life ... Here grandeur, which relates to B(iii), is
unusual in being at the same time both Theme and New; hence it is
doubly prominent. 21 On a first reading, in this view of life seems to
complete the clause; and since it is anaphorically cohesive (by reference
this, and by lexical repetition of life) it is read as not only Rheme but
also Given. It then turns out that Darwin has misled us with a
grammatical pun, and that life actually begins a new clause, life ...
having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one, all of which is a
projected Qualifier to view ('the view that life was originally breathed
.. .'). This makes life thematic, and (since no longer anaphoric) a
continuation of the motif of life forms in II(ii); this motif is then
carried on into the New, in (breathed) into a Jew forms or into one. The
next clause turns out to be another projected Qualifier to view,
paratactically related to the last yet finite where the other was non-
finite; furthermore it is a hypotactic clause complex in which the
dependent clause comes first. The dependent clause has as Theme this
planet, relating cohesively to the world at the very beginning of II(i): and
as New (has gone cycling on) according to the fixed law ofgravity, where law
of gravity derives from motif C (natural laws) but shifts the attention

184
 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

from the temporally organized world of biology to the timeless universe

of physics. The final clause, the culmination of the projected view in
which there is grandeur, has the Theme from III (from so simple a
beginning, with anaphoric so); the Rheme takes up the motifs of II,
endless forms, and B(iii), most beautiful and most wondeiful, leading to the
final New element, the verbal group have been, and are being, evolved.
This resounding lexicogrammatical cadence brings the clause, the
sentence, the paragraph, the chapter and the book to a crashing
conclusion with a momentum to which I can think of no parallel
elsewhere in literature - perhaps only Beethoven has produced com-
parable effects, and that in another medium altogether. Phonologically,
the coordination of have been, and are being, forces a break in the rhythm
(further reinforced by the surrounding commas) that directs maximum
bodyweight on to the final word evolved. Grammatically, the word
evolved has to resolve the expectation set up by the ellipsis in the
uncompleted verbal group have been. Semantically, evolved has to resolve
the conflict between so simple a beginning and endless forms most beautiful
and most wondeiful. All that is only what the word is expected to achieve
within its own clause. In addition, within the projected clause complex,
it has to complete the complex proportion between physical and
biological processes:

whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed

law of gravity

[by the laws of natural [life] forms most beautiful have been and are
selection] and most wonderful being evolved

as well as another one set up with the preceding clause:

life having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one

from so simple a beginning endless forms have been ... evolved

Within the sentence, the word evolved has to carry a culminative

prominence to match the initiating prominence carried by grandeur (as
Theme / New) at the beginning. Within these two paragraphs, it has
to pick up the thematic motif of explanation, and to secure total
commitment to one explanation and rejection of the other. It is here
that the selection of voice becomes important: since the verbal group
is passive, the responsibility for evolution is clearly lodged with the
Creator (there is an external agency at hand; it is not ... have been, and

185
 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

are, evolving). Yet all this load of work is hardly worth mentioning
beside the major responsibility the word evolved has to bear, along with
the verbal group of which it is a part: that of sustaining the climax of
450 pages of intense scientific argument. This is the culmination
towards which the entire text has been building up. It would be hard
to find anywhere in English a sentence, or a clause, or a group, or a
word that has been made to carry such an awesome semiotic'load.
I do not know how long it took Darwin to compose these two
paragraphs, or whether he reflected consciously on their construction
as he was doing it - I imagine not. I certainly had no idea, when
starting the analysis, of what I was going to find. I had the sense of a
remarkable and powerful piece of writing, as the climax to a remarkable
and powerful book; and it struck me that something of the effect of
these two paragraphs might lie in the patterning of the Theme and
of the New - that is, in the textual component within the grammar of
the clause. It is important to stress that that is in fact all that I have
been looking at in this paper; I have said almost nothing about cohesion
or transitivity or mood or the clause complex or any of the other
lexicogrammatical systems / processes that go into the makeup of a
text. Some, at least, of these other features would undoubtedly show
interesting and significant patterns if we were to analyse them with this
or some comparable kind of functional grammatics.
It is pointless to try and classify a text such as this - to ask whether
it 'is' a scientific treatise or a declaration of faith or an entertaining
work of literature. It is a product of the impact between an intellectual
giant and a moment in the space-time continuum of our culture, with
all the complexity of meaning that that implies. With this very partial
analysis - a fragment of the grammar of a fragment of the text - I have
tried to suggest something of how this text takes its place in semo-
history. Some of the thematic patterning here is like that which I
described in the first part of the paper, which evolved primarily (I
think) in the context of scientific endeavour; we can recognize
instances where Darwin is backgrounding some point already covered,
so getting it taken for granted, and moving on from it, by a logical-
semantic "process", to a foregrounded next stage; e.g. from the war ef
nature ... the production ef the higher animals directly follows. (There are
more of this type in the more strictly "scientific" passages; for example
the account of the honeycomb in Chapter 7, pp. 255-6.) But the
pattern has rather a different value here from that which it typically has
in the context in which it evolved; Darwin's strategy i~ that of
accumulating masses of evidence rather than moving forward logically

186
 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

one step at a time. And particularly at critical moments he moves into

a more monumental mode, that of a writer producing a text which he
knows is unique and will have a unique place in the history of ideas.
What is important is that we should be able to use the same theory and
method of linguistic analysis - the same "grammatics" - whatever kind
of text (or subtext) we are trying to interpret, whether Tennyson or
Darwin, Mother Goose or the Scientific American. Otherwise, if we
simply approach each text with an ad hoc do-it-yourself kit of private
commentary, we have no way of explaining their similarities and their
differences - the aesthetic and functional values that differentiate one
text from another, or one voice from another within the frontiers of
the same text.

Notes
1. That is, there are many "disjunctions"; see J. L. Lemke, Semiotics and
Education, (1984) Toronto: Victoria University (Toronto Semiotic Circle,
Monographs, Working Papers and Prepublications), 1984; especially
pp. 132 ff. Dialectal disjunctions are mainly phonetic; cf. the Prague
School's concept of functional equilibrium in phonology.
2. The term "diatypic" is taken from Michael Gregory, "Aspects of varieties
differentiation", Journal ef Linguistics 3, 1967. The term "register" was first
used in this sense by T. B. W. Reid in "Linguistics, structuralism,
philology", Archivum Linguisticum 8, 1956; cf. M. A. K. Halliday,
Angus McIntosh and Peter Strevens, 1964.
3. See Ruqaiya Hasan, "Semantic variation and sociolinguistics", Australian
Journal of Linguistics (1989).
4. The concept ofregister should therefore be defined so as to make explicit
the dimension of power, as pointed out by Gunther Kress, "Textual
matters: the social effectiveness of style", and Norman Fairclough, "Reg-
ister, power and socio-semantic change", both in David Birch and
Michael O'Toole (1988).
5. See M. A. K. Halliday, "On the language of physical science", in Mohsen
Ghadessy (1999).
6. For this and other aspects of the systemic-functional grammar referred to
throughout this paper see M. A. K. Halliday (1985a).
7. The Given + New structure is not, in fact, a structure of the clause; it
constructs a separate unit (the "information unit") realized by intonation
as a tone group. In spoken English the typical (unmarked) discourse
pattern is that where one information unit is mapped on to one clause;
further semantic contrasts are then created by departure from this
unmarked mapping. In written English there are of course no direct
signals of the information unit; while the unmarked mapping may be

187
 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

taken as the typical pattern, a great deal of systematic variation.will show

uprfth~ text. is.i:~ad alqµd.' . .. . . . ... ·--····
8. This is, obviously, a very sketchy and selective account. See Halliday
(1985a, Chapters 7 and 9; and Table 9(3), pp. 306-7).
9. For this distinction see M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (1976,
Chapter 5, "Conjunction", especially pp. 240-44). Here we refer to
"external" (in rebus) and "internal" (in verbis) conjunctive relations.
10. We do not of course transcend these oppositions; the nearest we get to a
position of neutrality, in the sense of being able to accommodate the
complementarities on a higher stratum, is in the discourse of mathematics
and oflinguistics - as thematic rather than disciplinary discourses (perhaps
now computer science and semiotics).
11. "Poetry as scientific discourse: the nuclear sections of Tennyson's In
Memoriam", in David Birch and Michael O'Toole (1988). [See also
Chapter 5, this volume.]
12. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, with a
new foreword by Patricia Horan, New York: Avenel Books, 1979.
13. See Peter H. Fries, "On the status of Theme in English: arguments from
discourse", Forum Linguisticum 6, 1981. For more recent discussions by
the same author see Peter H. Fries (1994, 1995, 1996, 1997).
14. The boundary between Given and New is in any case fairly indetermi-
nate. What is clearly marked by the intonation contour is the information
focus: that is, the culmination of the New (signalled by tonic promi-
nence). There is some prosodic indication where the New element
begins, but it: is much less clear (hence the move from Given to New is
often regarded as continuous). See also note 19 below.
15. Ranking clauses are those which are not embedded (rankshifted); they
enter as clauses (either alone, or in paratactic or hypotactic relation with
others) into clause complexes (sentences). Embedded clauses are not
considered, because they do not enter into clause complexes but function
inside the structure of a nominal group, and present little choice of textual
(thematic or informational) organization; thus their Theme-Rheme and
Given-New structure has no significance for the overall patterning of the
discourse. ·
16. Chapter 9, "Imperfection of the geological record".
'-
17. In to my mind the "me" has no role in the transitivity structure (no
ideational function). In when I view ... , the same "me" has been
transformed into a thinker, with a highly significant role in transitivity-
as Senser in a mental process; note here also the lexical slip from view ==
"observe", suggested by when I view all beings, to view = "opine", a
reinterpretation forced on the reader by the subsequent as.
18. Based on my own reading of the text: on the construction into infor-
mation units and location of information focus. ·
19. Tnisoption is not available to a motif functioning as Theme, since

188
 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

(almost) all thematic elements are nominals (any clause functioning as

Theme has first to be nominalized). Instances such as transmit likeness,
transmit progeny, have left no descendants, etc., illustrate the point made in
note 14 above; in my reading the New could be heard as beginning with
the verb in each case. I have used the more cautious interpretation,
restricting it in most instances to the final (culminative) element.
20. I have treated all these as falling within the New, rather than attempting
to analyse them further; a list tends to have special rhythmic and tonal
properties of its own.
21. That is, it clearly represents a "marked" mapping of information structure
on to thematic structure, characteristic of such existential clauses.

APPENDIX
Text 1
From Charles Darwin, The Origin ef Species by Means ef Natural Selection,
London:J. Murray, 1859
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the
view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it
accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by
the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present
inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like
those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view
all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some
few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system
was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from
the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its
unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living
very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for
the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the
greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many
genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We
can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to fortell that it will
be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and
dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and
dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descend-
ants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel
certain. that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been
broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence
we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally
inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for

189
 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend
to progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with
many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with
various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the
damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so
different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex
a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These
laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction;
Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from
the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and
from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle
for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Diver-
gence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus,
from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object
which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the
higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life,
with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few
forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are
being, evolved.

Text2
The text showing Theme-Rheme structure (Theme underlined)
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the
view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it
accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by
the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present
inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like
those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view
all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some
few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system
was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from
the past, ~ may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its
unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living
very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for
the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, sho~s that the
greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many

190
 THE CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE: CHARLES DARWIN

genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We

can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to fortell that it will
be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and
dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and
dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descend-
ants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, ~ may feel
certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been
broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence
~ may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally
inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for
the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend
to progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many
plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various
insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from
each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have
all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the
largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is
almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct
action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a
Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a
consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character
and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of
nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals,
directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed
law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful
and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Text3
The text showing Given-New structure (New underlined)

Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the

view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it
accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by
the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present
inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like

191
 HIGHLY VALUED TEXTS

those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view
all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some
few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system
was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from
the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its
unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living
very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for
the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the
greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many
genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We
can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to fortell that it will
be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and
dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and
dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descend-
ants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel
certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been
broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence
we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally
inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for
the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend
to progress towards perfection.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with
many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with
various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the
damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so
different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex
a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These
laws, taken in the largest sense, being IGrowth with Reproduction;
Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from
the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and
from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle
for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Diver-
gence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.j Thus,
from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object
which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the
higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life,
with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few
forms or into one, and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have be.en, and are
being, evolved.

192
------1l PART T H R E E ! - - - -
EVERYDAY TEXTS
(WRITTEN, SPOKEN)
 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

Presented here are the analyses of t\vo examples of what may be

referred to as 'everyday texts'. The first is a written text, the ZPG
(Zero Population Growth) text; the second is a spoken text, taken
from the culminative phase of a dissertation defence. Halliday
approaches both as a grammarian, bringing them under grammatical
scrutiny, attempting to show 'the grammar at work creating meaning'.
Not only are the analyses interesting for what they reveal about the
texts under investigation, but also instructive in the practice and
methods of systemic grammar analysis. In both cases, Halliday stresses
the fact that the analysis is by no means complete. As he points out, 'a
rich interpretation of the grammar of any text would itself constitute a
text of vastly greater length than the original.' Rather, he focuses on
those systems that relate clearly to the functions of the text in its
particular context of culture.
'Some lexicogrammatical features of the Zero Population Growth text'
first appeared in 1991 in a collection of papers showing different
analytical approaches applied by various authors to the same text, the
ZPG text, which is an instance of a fund-raising letter. Halliday refers
to his analysis as a 'partial interpretation', covering theme; information
structure; mood and modality; transitivity; clause complexes; lexical
cohesion; nominalization and grammatical metaphor. In terms of
theme, Halliday notes how The thematic movement of the text clearly
bears out Fries' interpretation of clause Theme in tcnns of the rhetorical
concept of "method of development" (Fries 1981).' Based on the
tonics of the text arrived at through reading the text aloud, Halliday
attempts to establish the information structure emerging from the text.
Looking next at mood and modality, including the writer's use of

195
 EVERYDAY TEXTS

tense, and mood type - whether declarative or imperative, Halliday

notes the single modalization occurring in the text, i.e. may be, and
observes how this expression of probability 'has added a feature of
tentativeness to the argument that your support now is critical (this
may be our best opportunity, but it is important not to be too definite
about that because we may want to ask for your support again later
on.)' While for the most part, Halliday steers away from making
evaluative comments about the text, still occasionally his findings
prompt him to do so. As when, for example, doing the transitivity
analysis, Halliday observed no clear pattern of movement from one
kind of process to another, leading him to conclude 'that the text
lacked direction in its chosen field; it seemed not to be "going
anywhere", not even round in a circle.' Halliday's strategy for exploring
the writer's use of grammatical metaphor is particularly noteworthy.
To arrive at a more congruent form of the text, he reworded the text
along the lines of 'how would I say this to a 12-year-old?' Halliday
describes it as 'an intuitive venture at making the text more accessible'.
The rewording of the text brings to the fore the following three
features of the original text: cliches, ambiguities, and grammatical
metaphors, each of which Halliday examines in tum.
In 'So you say "pass" ... thank you three muchly' (1994) Halliday
analyses the designated "core" passage from a dissertation defence. The
subtext being investigated amounts to approximately 12.5 minutes of
spoken text, and begins with one of the speakers saying, "So you say
'pass'", and ends with the same speaker's closing, "thank you three
muchly". Halliday presents 'a clause-by-clause analysis of the subtext in
respect of the systems of theme, information, transitivity, mood,
modality and key; and an analysis of each clause complex by interde-
pendency and expansion/projection.' His focus is 'on the wording: on
patterns of selection at the lexicogrammatical level.' The dissertation
defence is described as 'a lexicogrammatical event', one which exem-
plifies 'the power of discourse to change the environment that engen-
dered it'. Explaining, Halliday states, 'We might want to think of the
entire text as a kind of expanded performative: "We dub thee PhD."
But this would obscure a more fundamental point, which is that every
text is performative in this sense. There can be no semiotic act that
leaves the world exactly as it was before.'

196
 Chapter Seven

SOME LEXICOGRAMMATICAL
FEATURES OF THE
ZERO POPUIA TION GROWI'H TEXT
(1992)

Introduction
This paper presents a partial interpretation of the ZPG text (see
Appendix 3, p. 287) using systemic grammar. It consists of seven
sections: (1) Theme; (2) Information structure; (3) Mood and modality;
(4) Transitivity; (5) Clause complexes; (6) Lexical cohesion; (7) Nom-
inalization and grammatical metaphor. 1
I have used the suggested numbering of the portions of the text, in
30 segments. Of these 30, Segments 1-3 and 24-28 (a total of 8),
while they have distinct functions in the structure and format of a
letter, have almost none of the features of a clause; they are '.'claus-
ettes" in the terminology of the Nigel grammar (Matthiessen 1985,
pp. 1_02-3).

(1-3) Title • Date • Address;

(24-28) Vale,diction •Signature• Signatory• Status• Coda-signal

Four of them (24-27) could be regarded as forming a clausette

complex, of structure xp, ext, cx=21, cx2=2 (see Figure 1; for analysis and
notation see Halliday 1985a, pp. 193-202). 2 Apart from occasional
references to § 3, I have ignored these segments in the present
treatment.

First published in Discourse Description: Diverse Linguistic Analyses of a Fund-raising Text,

edited by William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
1992, pp. 327-58.

197
 EVERYDAY TEXTS

xj3 a

1r----~-------~=2

1~~-~=2

xj3 al a=21 a2=2

Figure 1 Segments 24-27 as "clausette complex"

This leaves 22 segments of the discourse. Of these, 13 consist of a

single clause ("clause simplex"); the remainder are clause complexes, 4
with two and 5 with three clauses, as follows:
1 clause: §§ 4 5 8 9 10 12 13 16 17 18 20 22 29 = 13
2 clauses: §§ 11 14 15 23 (2X4) = 8
3 clauses: §§ 6 7 19 21 30 (3X5) = 15
Total = 36
giving a total of 36 clauses in all. Note that these are ranking clauses;
embedded clauses, which are rankshifted to become constituents of
nominal groups (there are 19 of these), do not participate in the clause-
complex structure of the text. Where there is more than one ranking
clause within a segment these will be indicated with capital letters A,
B, C in the order in which they occur. In § 11, clause B is enclosed
inside clause A; in § 14, for simplicity, the initial but is assigned to the
clause but to use it well, which therefore becomes clause A. The analysis
of the clause complexes is presented in Section 5; embedded clauses
are also listed in that section.
As always in text grammar, alternative interpretations are possible at
numerous points. Ideally, all should be offered and discussed; but this
takes too long. Instead, one or two instances have been referred to, so
as to suggest the kinds of consideration that apply.

1 Theme
Table 1 shows the Theme of each ranking clause, including textual,
interpersonal and topical (experiential) Theme. Whatever is not shown

198
 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

Table 1 Themes of ranking clauses

Clause Theme: Inter- Topical marked/

no. textual personal unmarked

4 at 7 a.m. on October 25 marked

5 calls unmarked
6A staffers unmarked
B
C unmarked
7A when we unmarked
B we unmarked
C we unmarked
8 media and public reaction unmarked
9 at first the deluge of calls unmarked
10 now we unmarked
11A ZPG's· 1985 Urban Stress Test unmarked
B
12 it unmarked
13 the Urban Stress Test unmarked
14A but
B we unmarked
15A our small staff unmarked
B and our modest resources unmarked
16 your support now unmarked
17 ZPG's 1985 Urban Stress Test unmarked
18 with your contribution marked
19A even though our national government unmarked
B we unmarked
C
20 every day marked
21A
B
C both elected officials and the unmarked
American public
22 please make unmarked
23A whatever you give - $25 or as unmarked
much as you can
B
29 the results of ZPG's 1985 unmarked
Urban Stress Test
30A unmarked
B you unmarked
C

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

as Theme is the Rheme; clauses where no Theme is shown consist

entirely of Rheme.
For Theme see Halliday 1985a, Chapter 3 passim. The Theme is
realized by initial position in the clause; it includes the first element
that has a function in transitivity (the "topical" Theme), together with
any other elements that precede it; for example well + then + surely +
that in well then surely that's the end C?.f the affair.
As will be noted, almost all topical Themes are unmarked; that is,
the Theme is conflated with Subject in declarative and with Predicator
in imperative. 3 Hence the three that are marked stand out, and two of
them have a significant function in the construction of the text. One
of these is the Theme of the text-initiating clause (§ 4), at 7 a.m. on
October 25, which sets the text plan - deceptively, as it turns out - to
narrative, by looking like an Orientation; the other is with your
contribution (§ 18), which finally disposes of the earlier one and reveals
the nature of the text as a begging letter. The third of the marked
Themes, every day (§ 20), introduces a subroutine of 'constantly',
perhaps contrasting with the initial time-frame at 7 a. m. on October 2 5
but also setting the scene for the intensified imperative Theme please
make ('so do something') in§ 22. So the marked Themes tell their own
rather explicit story: 'here's what happened one day - now about your
contribution - here's what happens every day - so please!'
Let us now consider the Themes of all ranking clauses, unmarked as
well as marked. After the initial time-frame we find eight clauses
(§ 5-10) having as Theme calls, staffers /we, media /calls, we - alternating
between them and us, outsiders and insiders; these are followed by
three clauses having the Urban Stress Test as Theme (§ 11-13). In other
words, having first constructed the theme of 'our relations with the
media and the public', the writer then goes on to thematize 'what
we did (that brought this about)'. The Theme now returns to 'us'
(§ 14-15); but now it is 'poor us' (our small staff, our modest resources), so
that when it shifts over to 'you' (your support now, and the marked with
your contribution, in § 16-18) it is clear in what role 'you' are being
expected to take part.
There is then a brief digression, where the Theme shifts to our
national government and then (after the marked every day) to both elected
officials and the American public; this serves as the context for again
returning to 'you' as Theme, in please make (which has the only
interpersonal Theme in the text), followed by the long embedded
clause thematizing 'your money' (§ 19-23). lntersperst,:d with the
'you' Themes, the Urban Stress Test appears in § 17 immediately

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

before with your contribution, and now in § 29 just before the final
segment. In § 30, for the only time in the letter, the writer uses I; and
the thematic move from 'I' to 'you' in I hope you'll lzelp gives the
required personal flavour to the carefully contrived little postscript.
The thematic movement of the text clearly bears out Fries' interpre-
tation of clause Theme in terms of the rhetorical concept of "method
of development" (Fries 1981, 1994, 1996, 1997). We could diagram
this movement as in Figure 2.

2 Information structure (Given and New; information

focus)
I read the text aloud, to make explicit its "implication of utterance"
(Firth 1968, pp. 30-31). Below is the transcription, in systemic nota-
tion. (See Halliday 1967b. Note that the bold type identifies the
information focus, which is the culmination of the New element - the
part that is presented as "for the listener's attention".)
3 //1 dear/ friend of/ Z P / G //
4 //3 • at / seven a / m on Oc //3 tober twenty / fifth our //1
phones / started to / ring / /
5 //1 calls / jammed our/ switchboard/ all/ day//
6 //1 staffers stayed / late into the / night //3 answering /
questions and //3 talking with re/porters from //3 news-
papers //3 radio stations / /3 wire services and T / / 1 V stations
in / / 1 every / part of the / country / /
7 //4 when we re/leased the re/sults of/ ZPG's / nineteen eighty
five / Urban / Stress / Test we had //1 no i/dea we'd get //1
such an over/ whelming re/sponse //
8 //3 media and / public re/action has been //1 nothing / short
of in/ credible / /
9 //4. at/ first the //4 deluge of/ calls came/ mostly from re/
/1 porters / eager to / tell the / public about / Urban / Stress
Test re/suits //4. and from/ outraged/ public of/ficials who
were //1 furious that we had / blown the / whistle on con//1
ditions in / their/ cities //
10 //4 now we're / hearing from con//4 cemed / citizens in //3
all / parts of the / country who / want to know //3 what they
can/ do to hold //1 local of/ficials ac/countable for/ tackling

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

time
public

us

public

U.S.T.<us us
your help

U.S.T.
your money

national government

us

elected officials

----------public
you (give)

I
your money

U.S.T.
I
~
you
Figure 2 Thematic progression

//3 population re/lated / problems that //1 threaten/ public /

health and / well-being //
11 //4 Z P /G's/ nineteen eighty/ five/ Urban/ Stress Test//
4 • cre/ated after / months of per/sistent and ex/haustive re/
search //3 • is the / nation's / first / survey of how //1
population/ linked/ pressures af/fect / U.S. I cities II

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

12 //3 it ranks a / hundred and / eighty-four/ urban / areas on

&

e//3 !even / different cri/teria ranging from //3 crowding and

/ birth rates to //1 air quality and / toxic / wastes //
13 //4 the I Urban / Stress Test / translates //4 complex I
&

technical / data into an //1 easy to / use / action I tool for

con//3 cerned I citizens e//3 lected of/ficials and o//1 pinion
/ leaders //
14 // 4 & but to / use it / well we // 1 urgently / need your / help
II
15 I I 13 our / small / staff is being / swamped with re/ quests for
&

/ more infor/mation and our //4 modest re/sources are being

//1 stretched to the / limit //
16 //1 your sup/port / now is / critical //
17 //4 Z P I G's / nineteen eighty / five / Urban / Stress Test
may be our //4 best oppor/tunity / ever to //1 get the popu/
lation message / heard //
18 //3 with / your contri/bution //3 Z P I G can / arm our /
&

growing / network of/ local / activists with the ma//3 terials

they I need to //3 warn com/munity / leaders about e//3
merging popu/lation linked / stresses be //1 fore they / reach
/ crisis / stage / /
19 //4 even though our/ national/ government con/tinues to ig/
nore the / consequences of / uncontrolled / popu/lation /
growth // 4 we can / act to take //1 positive / action at the /
local / level //
20 //3 every / day //3 de/cisions are being/ made by //3 local
&

of/ficials in //3 our com/munities that could //1 drastically af/

feet the I quality of our / lives / /
21 //4 to make/ sound/ choices in/ planning for/ people //3
&

& both e/lected of/ficials and the A//3 merican / public //1
need the popu/lation stresses / data re/vealed by our / study //
22 II 3 please make a / special contri/bution to /1 zero popu/
lation growth to/day//
23 //3 what/ever you / give //3 twenty five dollars/ fifty dollars
&

a / hundred dollars or as / much as you / can //1 will be / &

used im/mediately to //1 put the / Urban / Stress Test in the

/ hands of/ those who I need it/ most//

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

29 114 • the relsults of I Z P G's I nineteen eighty-five I Urban I

Stress Test were re 111 ported as a / top / news story by //1
hundreds of I newspapers and I TV and / radio stations from
111 coast to / coast //
30 //4 • I I hope you'll I help us / monitor this re/markable /
media / coverage by com//1 pleting the en/closed re/ply form
II
The text was difficult to read aloud, and this turned out to be
because of its mixed characteristics: presented as a personal letter, and
hence in parts like spoken discourse (e.g. § 7), but in fact deliberately
composed and so often reaching a very high lexical density (e.g. § 13,
with 16 lexical words in one clause). The more spoken parts read
fluently with the tone group mapping generally on to the clause,
whereas the clauses in the more "written" sections were mostly broken
up into tone group sequences, with tones 3 3 3 . . . 1, such as are
typical ofloud reading (for example in news bulletins).
Since obviously many other readings are possible I do not propose
to make too much of this analysis. But it bears importantly on the
previous section, because while (following Fries) the Theme carries the
method of development of the text, the New tends to correspond to
the rhetorical "main point". Fries, who is here treating only written
texts, discusses the issue entirely in thematic tenns and identifies the
main point with the Rheme; and this is justifiable given that, especially
in writing, the information focus typically falls within the Rheme. But
the operative category is probably that of the New, so that we could
summarize Fries' findings as follows:
Theme (typically falling within Given) represents "method of develop-
ment"
New (typically falling within Rheme) represents "main point"

The transcription shows what in one possible reading are the prominent
motifs within the New.
In this reading, most ranking clauses required more than one tone
group; this is predictable, since the text as a whole is clearly more like
writing than like speech. Where this effect was simply due to high
lexical density the pattern was the one mentioned above: a sequence
of tone 3 (low rising) followed by a final tone 1 (falling). Since tone
3, among its other functions, is also the listing tone in speech this
pattern also occurred where the clause incorporated a list. (e.g. § 6).
In other contexts, where a segment consisted of more than one tone

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

group the pre-final tone was usually tone 4 (falling-rising); this is the
characteristic tone where the Theme carries a separate tone group (as
it often does, especially when a marked Theme), and also where there
is a rising dependency in the clause complex (that is, j3 followed by
a; these two are actually the same phenomenon, since where the ~-
clause does come first it is thereby marked as thematic in the clause
complex).
So if we want to establish what it is that emerges as the overall
information structure of this text, the motifs that make up the "main
point" as it unfolds, we can examine two sets of instances: (a) the
unmarked tonics (i.e. those which are clause-final - here mainly also
final in the segment), which select tone 1; and (b) the tone 4 tonics,
which are either marked (not clause-final) or on clauses that are not
final in the segment. Those of type (a) will directly reveal the main
point; while those of type (b) will express highlighted Themes, some-
times involving a feature of contrast (e.g. national vs. local in § 19),
against which the main point is explicitly foregrounded. We can ignore
tonics on tone 3. (Tone 13, which occurs rarely here, can be treated as
a variant of tone 1.)
The story told by the tone 1 tonics is that the text begins by taking
the 'wow!' of publicity as its main point(§ 4-9). Note that the relevant
unit is the whole element of clause structure on which the tonic falls;
hence, in § 7, such an ovenvhelming response, and in § 8, nothing short of
incredible. It then moves on to public health and the cities{§ 9-12), and
from there to the sense of crisis and appeal for help (§ 14-18). The
next five segments re-enact the two previous points with slightly
different emphases: the quality of life on a more local level(§ 19-21),
and the urgency of the appeal (§ 22-23; note tonics on today,
immediately, most). Finally the postscript returns to publicity (§ 29) and
then requests a reply (§ 30).
The tone 4 tonics, on the other hand, mainly highlight motifs that
we have already identified as Themes: us, our data, our meagre
resources, and our Urban Stress Test. Interestingly, the other Themes
- you, and the general public - turned out not to be highlighted in
this way. But, as already stressed, too much should not be derived from
one reading; especially a reading by someone who is an outsider to this
sub-culture.

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3 Mood and modality

Table 2 gives the mood of each ranking clause in the text, and the
modality if any; and enters the items functioning as Subject and as
Finite (verbal operator). All ranking clauses are included, since all may
have Subjects; but non-finite clauses do not select for mood, and finite
dependent clauses are declarative by default (except for types of
projection, which do not occur in this text).
Of the 23 clauses that select for mood (36 ranking clauses, minus
four dependent finites and nine non-finites), all but one are declarative.
Of the first six of these (§ 4-9), five have past as primary tense (started,
Jammed, stayed, had, came; cf. their dependents released and the sequent
form would in we'd); the sixth has primary tense present but secondary
past (has been, past in present). This reflects the narrative beginning of
the text. The tense then shifts to present and remains so up to § 21
(need).
Then comes the one clause that is not declarative but imperative
(§ 22: please make ... ); this brings about a sudden change in the
relationship of writer to reader, the writer shifting to the goods-&-
services mode of 'I'm asking you to do something'. On the way to
this, however, there has been one modalization (§ 17, may be); this -
the only expression of probability in the text - has added a feature of
tentativeness to the argument that your support now is critical (this
may be our best opportunity, but it is important not to be too definite
about that because we may want to ask for your support again later
on).
After the imperative clause the mood becomes declarative again; and
the primary tense switches to future, then past, then future (§ 23, 29,
30): the first to tell you what we are going to do with your money,
the second to return to the narrative left unfinished at the beginning,
and the last to express another request, this time in the form of a
declarative projection by a mental process (affect) verb, I hope you
will. ... This mildly metaphorical representation is preferred to a direct
imperative for the final segment of the letter.
There are two modulated clauses, both of the 'ability' type expressed
by can (§ 18, ZPG can arm; § 19, we can act); the Subject in both is
'ZPG'.
We saw in Section 1 that in almost all of the declarative clauses the
Subject is also the Theme. Where the two are not conflated (in § 4,
18, 20), the Subjects are our phones, ZPG and decisions; no.pattern there,
of course, but it is interesting that the only time ZPG appears as a

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

Table 2 Subject, Finite and the selection of mood

Clause Primary tense

no. Subject Finite /modality Mood

4 our phones started past declarative

5 calls jammed past declarative
6A staffers stayed past declarative
B (non-finite)
C (non-finite)
7A we released past declarative
B we had past declarative
C we would future sequent declarative
8 media and public reaction has present [past in} declarative
9 the deluge of calls came past declarative
10 we are present declarative
11A ZPG's 1985 Urban Stress Test is present declarative
B (non-finite)
12 it ranks present declarative
13 the Urban Street Test translates present declarative
14A (non-finite)
B we need present declarative
15A our small staff is present declarative
B our modest resources are present declarative
16 your support now is present declarative
17 ZPG's 1985 Urban Stress Test may probability /low declarative
18 ZPG can ability/low declarative
19A our national government continues present declarative
B we can ability /low declarative
C (non-finite)
20 decisions are present declarative
21A (non-finite)
B (non-finite)
C both elected officials and the need present declarative
American public
22 imperative
23A whatever you give - $25, will future declarative
$50, $100, or as much as
you can
B (non-finite)
29 the results of ZPG's 1985 were past declarative
Urban Stress Test
30A I hope present declarative
B you will future declarative
C (non-finite)

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participant (in the transitivity structure of the clause) it is Subject but

not Theme. Otherwise, ZPG appears only as possessive Deictic,
modifying Urban Stress Test (elsewhere it is replaced by we). So the
movement of Subject in the text is similar to the movement of Theme;
if anything, because of the instances where the two are dissociated the
periodicity between 'us' and 'others' appears slightly more clearly with
the Subject. We might recognize phases (as in Gregory 1985,
pp. 194-8) as set out in Figure 3:

w e ~ public 4-9
we
public

II you
we~
14-23
we officials
we
you
m 1
30
----you

Figure 3 Phases based on Subject selection

- with the Urban Stress Test ("our" test) appearing from time to time
as before. But the significance of Subject is rather different from that of
Theme; the Subject is the element in which is vested "modal responsi-
bility" - on which the validity of the writer's argument is made to rest,
in.each clause. This appears clearly when we a~d a response:
Staffers stayed late into the night. - Did they?
Media and public reaction has been incredible. - Has it?
We urgently need your help. - Do you?
It is even clearer in the imperative, where "modal responsibility" means
responsibility for providing the goods-&-services in question:
Please make a special contribution. - Must I?

Note finally that all ranking clauses have pos1t1ve polarity. The
message is a positive one; the only negatives are either ensconced in
the lexicon (ignore, uncontrolled) or else used in nominal groups to
heighten the positive effect (we had no idea we'd get such an overwhelming
response; reaction has been nothing short of incredible).

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

4 Transitivity
Table 3 presents the analysis of transitivity, showing the process type
and the items occupying the various transitivity functions: the process
itself, and any participants and circumstances. These are shown for all
clauses, including those that are embedded, since embedded clauses
select freely in the transitivity systems. Embedded clauses are numbered
.1, .2, .3, etc. following the clause in (a nominal group within) which
they are embedded.
There are thus 55 clauses: the 36 ranking clauses already identified,
plus 19 that are embedded. The distribution of process types is given
in Table 4.
The clear preponderance of material processes (33 out of 55, constant
across all clause statuses) would suggest that the text is largely concerned
with actions and events; and so at one level it is. However, with the
doubtful exception of hold local offidals accountable, all these material
processes, whether middle or effective, represent actions which are
either abstract or, if concrete, then of a very general kind. We could
categorize these as in Table 5.
These portray a realm where the action is abstract, bland and
formulaic. Where there is agency, the Actor/ Agent is typically some
abstract object or process: calls or requests, a test or a study, pressures,
decisions and problems. The only actions performed by human Agents
are giving money, tackling problems, releasing results or completing
forms {there is also arming activists - with data). Where there is no
agency, and the Actor is just the Medium for the action or event,
human Actors preponderate; and their actions are vague generalities,
like planning, taking action, or making decisions and contributions.
Of the remaining 22 clauses, most (17) are either verbal or attribu-
tive. Thus one motif is that of verbal action, with seven instances of
answer, tell, hear, talk, report or warn. The ten attributive include the
four with need (see notes to Table 4), three with be (furious, critical,
incredible) and three others (have an idea, get a response, and criteria
rangingfrom ... to ...). Thus the motifs brought out by the transitivity
patterns are those of abstract or generalized actions, verbal events, and
attributes; the attributes being mainly prerequisites to such actions and
events, or their consequences.
All the four most frequent clause types - material effective, material
middle, verbal, and relational attributive - are distributed evenly
throughout the text; there is no clear pattern of movement from one
kind of process to another. This is perhaps partly why I felt that the

209
Table 3 Process types and transitivity functions
Clause Process Process Medium Other participants and circumstances
no. type

4 mat/mid ring phones Time: at 7 a.m. on October 25

5 mat/effec jam switchboard Ag: calls Dur: all day
6A mat/mid stay staffers Dur: late into the night
B verbal answer staffers Range: question
C verbal talk staffers Accomp: with reporters
7A mat/effec released results Ag:we
B rel: poss/attr have we Atte: no idea
C rel: poss/ attr get we Atte: response
8 rel: int/ attr be media & public reaction Atte: incredible
9 mat/mid come deluge of calls Place: from reporters and public officials
9.1 verbal tell (reporters)
9.2 rel:int/attr be (officials) Atte: furious
9.3 mat/mid blow we Range: whistle; Matter: on ... their cities
10 verbal hear we Place: from concerned citizens
10.1 mental:/cog know (concerned citizens)
10.2 mat/mid do (concerned citizens) Range: what
10.3 mat/effec hold local officials Ag: citizens: Atte; accountable
10.4 mat/effec tackle problems
10.5 mat/effec threaten public health & well-being Ag: problems
11A rel: int/id be the nation's first survey Ag: ZPG's Urban Stress Test
11A.1 mat/effec affect cities Ag: pressures
B mat/effec create {ZPG's Urban Stress Test) Time: after months of research
12 mat/effec rank 184 urban areas (Ag: ZPG's U.S.T.) Manner: on 11 critieria
12.1 rel: circ/attr range criteria Atte: from crowding ... to ... toxic wastes
13 mat/effec translate data Ag: U.S.T.; Atte: into an action tool; Cause:
for concerned citizens and ... leaders
14A mat/effect use it Manner: well
B rel: poss/attr need we Atte: your help
15A mat/effect swamp staff Manner/ Ag: requests for information
B mat/effect stretch resources Dist: to the limit
16 rel: int/attr be support Atte: critical
17 rel: int/id be the best opportunity Ag: ZPG's Urban Stress Test
17.1 verbal hear Range: population message (Ag: we)
18 mat/effect arm activists Ag: ZPG; Manner: materials
18.1 rel: poss/ attr need they Atte: materials
18.2 verbal warn Rec: leaders; Matter: about stresses
18.3 mat/mid reach stresses Place: crisis stage
19A mental: perc ignore national government Phen:consequences
B mat/mid act we
C mat/mid take Range: action; Place: at local level
20 mat/mid make officials Range: decisions; Time: every day
20.1 mat/effect affect lives (Ag: decision); Manner: drastically
21A mat/mid make Range: choices
B mat/mid plan Cause: for people
C rel: poss/ attr need officials and public Atte: data
21C.1 mat/effec reveal (data) Ag: our study
22 mat/mid make (you) Range: contribution; Place: to ZPG; Time:
today
23A mat/effec use whatever you give
23A.1 mat/effec give whatever Ag: you
B mat/effec put Urban Stress Test Place: in hands of those who need it most
B.1 rel: poss/ attr need (those) (Atte: U.S.T.); Manner: most
29 verbal report newspapers, TV and radio Range: results of test; Role: as top news
30A mental: aff hope I
B mat/effec monitor media coverage Ag: we; Instig: you
C mat/effec complete reply form (ag: you)
 EVERYDAY TEXTS

Table 4 Distribution of process types

material mental verbal relational total

effective middle identifying attributive

a-clauses 7 6 1 2 2 5 23
~-clauses 6 3 1 2 1 13
[[-clauses 8 3 3 4 19

21 12 3 7 2 10
Total 33 10 12 55
Notes:
1 The three clauses with make + Range (make decisions, make choices, make contributions)
are all interpreted as material: (i) make contributions, even if "unpacked" as contribute
(money), would still be material; (ii) make decisions, make choices could not be
unpacked here as decide, choose because they could not project: the attached clauses
are clearly expansions (x~ in planningfor people; = [[that could drastically affect the quality
ef our lives), whereas if the congruent fonns were mental they would be able to
project - as they could if the nominal groups in question were singular, e.g. make
the (sound) decision/ choice not to pursue the matter.further.
2 The four clauses with need (we need your help, the materials they need, the public need
the data, put the test in the hands ef those who need it) are all interpreted as relational:
attributive/possessive, 'must have'. Of these, the first could also be interpreted as
mental + projection, congruently we need you to help us; but given that help is
followed by a cohesive lexical chain support - contribution - contribution - give - $25
$50 or $100, it seems more appropriate to interpret this too as a possessive.
3 The clause to hold local qfficials accountable ... might by itself be taken as mental,
agnate to hold that local qfficials are accountable (' consider that ... '); but this is
precluded here by the preceding clause what they can do. In this context the
interpretation must be as material process, with accountable . . . as resultative
Attribute.

text lacked direction in its chosen field; it seemed not to be 'going

anywhere', not even round in a circle.

5 Clause complexes
As noted in the introduction above, eight of the thirty segments(§ 1-3
and 24-28) consist of clausettes; we shall leave these out of consider-
ation here, and consider the remaining 22 segments. These contain 36
ranking clauses; 13 standing alone (as clause "simplex"), 8 ~n 2-clause
complexes and 15 in 3-clause complexes.

212
Table 5 Material processes
abstract general
'make/be busy' 'do research' 'create/ affect/ do' 'give/use'
effective callsjam we monitor media test is created you give (money)
(Medium/ Goal; switchboard coverage
+Actor/ Agent) pressures affect cities we arm activists with
staff is swamped we release results data
with requests decisions affect lives
stress data are revealed (money) puts test in
resources are by study problems threaten hands of
stretched health
test ranks urban areas you can (give money)
you complete
form test translates data (money) is used

officials tackle
problems

middle phones ring we "blow the we act you make contributions

(Medium/ Actor) whistle"
staffers stay we take action

calls come decisions are made

stresses reach crisis officials make choices

stage
officials plan

they do what
 EVERYDAY TEXTS

Table 6 Tactic pairs, by taxis and interdependency

Expansion Projection
elaborating extending enhancing idea locution
hypotactic 1 9 2

para tactic 2

There are thus 14 tactic pairs - since a complex of two clauses has
just one such pair, while a complex of three clauses has two. Table 6
shows the distribution by taxis and interdependency (logical-semantic
relation). The favoured type is hypotactic enhancement; within these,
four are clauses of Cause: Purpose, all non-finite with to: to use it well,
to take positive action, to make sound choices, to put the Urban Stress Test in
the hands of those who need it most. Three others are also non-finite: one
Manner, by completing the enclosed reply form, one Matter, in planning for
people, and one which could be interpreted as Time: Simultaneity
('meanwhile', answering questions . .. ) or alternatively as not enhancing
but extending ('and'). The other two are finite: one Time and one
Concession.
Three of the four purpose clauses are associated with need: to use
it well we need your help, to make sound choices . , . elected officials ...
need the population-stress data, [your money] will be used immediately to put
the Urban Stress Test in the hands of those who need it most. This motif
also turns up in one of the three embedded clause complexes (see
below):
the materials [[they need '11 to warn community leaders ... ]]
This co-occurrence of need (required possession) with purpose lends
some sense of urgency to the discourse; and this is perhaps reinforced
by the other two purpose clauses, which co-occur with can do, can act.
Again, one of these sequences is in an embedded clause complex:
citizens ... [[who want to know '11 what they can do x 11 to hold local
officials accountable ... ]]
while the other is the quaintly worded we can act to take positive
action . ... But although purpose is clearly the single most favoured
fonn of interdependency (six out of the seventeen tactic pairs), it is
never highlighted: all six instances have the simple non-finite form
with to, instead of a finite clause (e.g. if we are to ... ), or ~n explicit
conjunction (e.g. in order to . .. ).

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

Table 7 Ranking clauses: simplexes and complexes

Clause no. Symbol Boundaries (first and last word, with conjunction(s) if any;
{seg.) = clause takes u~ whole ofse8!!!enQ
4 (seg.)
5 (seg.)
6A a staffers ... night
B 'Pl answering questions
C p+2 and talking ... country
7A 'P and we ... test
B au we ... idea
C a'P we'd ... response
8 (seg.)
9 (seg.)
10 (seg.)
llA a ZPG's .. « ... » ... cities
B «-P>> created ... research
12 (seg.)
13 (seg.)
14A 'P but to use ... well
B a we ... help
15A 1 our ... infonnation
B +2 and our ... limit
16 (seg.)
17 (seg.)
18 (seg.)
19A 'P even though our ... growth
B ua we ... act
C a'P to take ... level
20 (seg.)
21A 'j>a to make ... choices
B P'P in planning ... people
C a both ... study
22 (seg.)
23A (l whatever ... immediately
B 'P to put ... most
29 (seg.)
30A a I hope
B •pa you '11 ... coverage
C ~·~ b~ comeleting ... form

Table 7 identifies each of the ranking clauses in the text, showing

the tactic status and logical-semantic relationship (interdependency) of
those entering into clause complexes. Table 8 identifies the clauses and
clause complexes which are embedded in nominal constructions
throughout the text.

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

Table 8 Embedded clauses and clause complexes

Clause no. Symbol Boundaries (first and last word, with relative or
conjunction if any)

9.1 = [[ ]] eager ... results

9.2 =[[ who were furious
9.3 'II JJ that we ... cities

10.1 = [[ who want ... know

10.2 'II what ... do
10.3 "II to hold ... accountable
10.4 "II for tackling ... problems
10.5 =[[ ]]])])JJ that threaten ... well-being
llA.1 '[[ ]] how population-linked ... cities
12.1 = [[ ]] ranging ... wastes
17.1 "[[ ]] to get ... heard
19.1 =[[ they need
18.2 xii to warn ... stresses
18.3 "II l1 before they ... stage
20.l = [[ ]] that could ... lives
21C.l = [[ ]] revealed ... study
22A.I = [[ ]] whatever you ... can
22A.2 "[[ ]] as you can
228.l = [[ ]] who need ... most

6 Lexical cohesion
The main lexical bonding in the text, as is to be expected, is provided
by reference to ZPG itself and to the Urban Stress Test. Either ZPG
or one of its reference items we, our occurs in almost all segments in
the substance of the letter (16 out of 22, and also in the Address); the
U.S. T., or it, is mentioned eight times.
The remaining lexical items cluster mainly into seven sets, which
we could label "action, research, publicity, concerns, stress· factors,

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

people, and places". The items entering into these sets are all nominals
(nouns or other constituents of nominal groups), and the chains are
purely lexical, not lexico-referential: the only reference item is such
in§ 7.
Taken together, the items in these nine sets (the seven above, plus
ZPG and the Urban Stress Test) account for 65% of all occurrences of
lexical words in the text (162 out of 250). The remaining 35% include
all the verbs and adverbs; high frequency and general lexical items like
idea, limit, trends, day, night; and items such as ovenuhelming, eager,furious,
drastic, outraged, remarkable, spedal, incredible where the linking motif is
interpersonal rather than experiential.
Figure 4 shows the pattern of occurrence of items from the major
sets in ·each of the 22 segments. Either ZPG or the U.S.T. (or both)
occurs in all but three (§ 8, 16, 20 - the our in § 20 is not referring to
ZPG); these connections are not shown. All other co-occurrences are
shown by lines labelled with the serial numbers of the segments in
question; thus, items from both "action" and "research" motifs will be
found in § 13, 18, 21. It will be seen that six out of the seven motifs
are strongly bonded: apart from "publicity - concerns", all possible
cluster pairs are represented in at least one segment, and the mean
number of occurrences of each such pair is three (that is, given six
clusters, there are fifteen possible cluster pairs, and the number of pair
occurrences in the text, by segment, is 45).
This strongly centripetal bonding, with each motif co-occurring
with all the others and with ZPG and the Urban Stress Test, tends to
keep the text in one place. There is a slight drift away from 'publicity'
in the first part towards 'action' in the second, with a brief return to
'publicity' at the end - the two being then cortjoined for the first time
in the prosaic appeal to help us monitor this remarkable media coverage by
completing the enclosed reply form. But there is little other movement. The
motifs of research, concerns, places and people occur throughout the
text, and there are no less than five segments in which three out of
these four occur together (§ 9, 10, 11, 18, 19; ZPG also figures in all
five).
The exception is the stress factors. These are mentioned only once,
in § 12; and they co-occur here only with the motif of place (184
urban areas), and with the Urban Stress Test, referred to here as it (the
only time it is not spelt out in full). ZPG does not occur in this
segment. This insulation of the stress factors from the rest of the
discourse keeps technical matters firmly at a distance; the effect is
somewhat paternalistic, with some such message as 'keep the funds

217
 CONCERNS
stresses pressures
problems consequences
uncontrolled population
growth
population stress crisis
public health well being
quality oflife

1011181920

10
18 IO
19 II
19
20

phone ca11s1 questions

response reaction message
request for infonnation
media coverage top news story
rcponers' switchboard
newspapers2 radio stations2 PEOPLE
TV stations2 (American) public'
concerned citizcns2
public officials local officials'
4S61 8 9 IS 1129 30 elected officials opinion leaders
people community leaders
network of local activists
national government

891013 181920

Figure 4 Lexical sets (nominals only) and their co-occurrence patterns

 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

rolling, but don't bother your heads with the difficult stuff - we'll look
after all that'. (Compare translates complex technical data into an easy-to-use
action tool.)

7 Nominalization and grammatical metaphor

As one way of exploring the grammatical metaphor I reworded the
text in a more congruent form, using the strategy of "how would I say
this to a 12-year-old?" Here is the result:

KEEPING THE POPULATION NO BIGGER THAN IT IS NOW

4 At 7 a.m. on October 25, our phones started to ring.
5 So many people were telephoning us that the switchboard was
jammed all day.
6 Our staff stayed (working) late into the night, answering questions
and talking with reporters from newspapers, radio stations, wire
services and TV stations in every part of the country.
7 When we told everyone what we had found out by our Urban
Stress Test in 1985 (which shows how people get tired and upset if
they live in cities) we'd no idea we'd have so many people taking
notice.
8 It was incredible how (much?) the TV, radio and newspapers, and
also ordinary people, talked about it.
9 At first the ones who kept telephoning us were mainly reporters,
who were eager to tell people about the results of the stress test,
and public officials, who were furious because we had "blown the
whistle on" what it's like to live in their cities.
10 But now we're hearing from ordinary citizens from all parts of the
country who are worried and want to know what they can do to
get local officials to accept that it's their job to tackle problems
coming from overpopulation, if this is (these are?) making people
unhappy.
11 When we were creating this Urban Stress Test we had to research
persistently and very thoroughly for months; it's the first time
anyone in the country has surveyed how much difference it makes
having so many people around if you live in U.S. cities.
12 We put 184 urban areas in order according to 11 different proper-
ties which we measured, including how crowded they are, how
many children are being born, how good or bad the air is, and
how much poisonous waste there is around.
13 What we found out with this test is complicated and technical; but

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

we've made the test (the results?) easy to understand so that citizens
who are concerned about these things, and elected officials, and
people whose opinions count, can use it (them?) to get things
done.
14 But to use it well we urgently need you to help us.
15 We have only a small staff, and they've been swamped by being
asked so many questions. We haven't enough resources to deal
with any more.
16 You have to support us now so that we can survive.
17 The Urban Stress Test may be our best opportunity ever to get
people to listen to what we are saying about population.
18 We can use the money you contribute for sending out to the more
and more people who are working for us in different places all the
information (?) they need in order to warn important members of
the community that people are already beginning to suffer (?)
because of overpopulation, before this becomes a crisis.
19 Even though our national government still ignores what happens if
the population goes on growing without being controlled, we can
try to do something about it in our own neighbourhoods.
20 Every day local officials in our communities are deciding things
which will make a difference to the way we live.
21 So that they can choose properly when they plan for people (plan
for the population?), both elected officials and the American public
need to know what we found out when we studied stresses coming
from overpopulation.
22 Please contribute extra money (?) to ZPG today.
23 Whatever you give - $25, $50, $100 or as much as you can - will
be used immediately to tell the results to the people who most
need to know them (give the test to the people who most need to
. ?)
use 1t ..
29 The results of the test were reported as a top news story by
hundreds of newspapers and TV and radio stations from coast to
coast.
30 I hope you'll help us to keep a record of all this remarkable number
of reports, by filling in the form I'm enclosing for you to reply on.

When the text is approached from this angle three features seem to
stand out: cliches, ambiguities, and grammatical metaphors. As a final
step, we will discuss each of these in turn.

(1) Cliches. The cliches seem to cluster around four motifs:

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

(i) 'we are under pressure', e.g. calls jammed our switchboard, the
deluge of calls, swamped with requests, resources stretched to the limit;
(ii) 'we amaze people', e.g. met with an overwhelming response, reaction
nothing short of incredible, remarkable media coverage;
(iii) 'crisis threatens', e.g. threaten public health and well-being, your
support is critical, reach crisis stage, ciffect the quality of our lives;
(iv) 'arm and act', e.g. arm our growing network of local activists, act to
take positive action at the local level.
It looks as though all these cliches serve a function: that of easing
the somewhat awkward disjunction (which appears in the theme and
information structures; c£ Sections 1 and 2 above) between two
apparently contradictory messages: 'look what we've done - we're
great!' and 'we're puny and weak - so help us!' The use of wordings
which are so hackneyed that they have lost much of their experiential
meaning may help to paper over this contradiction.
(2) Ambiguities. Ambiguity and grammatical metaphor are closely
interconnected: grammatical metaphors tend to leave many semantic
relationships implicit and by the same token to neutralize certain
distinctions. Ambiguities arose in this text particularly in relation to
three issues: the nature of the problem, the status of the test, and the
kind of assistance requested:
.(i) (§ 10, 18) population-related problems that threaten public health and
well-being; emerging population-linked stresses ... reach crisis stage: is
it the size of the population that is becoming threatening and
critical, or other factors that arise from this?
(ii) (§ 13, 23) translates complex data into an easy-to-use action tool; to
put the Urban Stress Test in the hands of those who need it most: is it
the test itself, or the results of the test, that are to be made
available?
(iii) (§ 22) make a special contribution to ZPG today: are we being
asked to do something to further the aims of zero population
growth, or to give money to a particular organization?
There are other, less salient ambiguities; for example in § 8 and
elsewhere referring to the media response (is it the quantity of the
reactions that is remarkable, or their nature and quality - many people
responded, or people responded favourably?), and in § 21 in planning
for people (does this mean planning on behalf of the public, or planning
what to do as regards the growth of population?).
The word population in fact occurs seven times; and every occurrence

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

is framed in one particular kind of grammatical metaphor: where nouns

representing processes or attributes function as Head of the nominal
group and are preceded by premodifying elements whose semantic
relationship to the Head noun is unclear. The examples are:

zero population growth

population-related problems
population-linked pressures
the population message
emerging population-linked stresses
uncontrolled population growth
population-stress data

It will be seen that the word population never occurs as Head; it is

either a Modifier or else a part of a compound Modifier, and if the
latter then followed either by another noun (population-stress) or by a
verb in V form (population-linked, population-related). Thus quite apart
0

from the vagueness of the last two, where the sense is 'having some
(unspecified) connection with (the) population', each one of these
instances is problematic. Population-stress data might be data about
the stress caused by the population, or undergone by the population;
the population message might be a message about how matters are, or
about how they should be, and either concerning or addressed to the
population; and even population growth, which presumably must
mean people becoming more in number rather than becoming taller
and fatter, is introduced in the contradictory context of zero.
Nowhere is the concept of 'too many people', overpopulation, made
explicit.
It could fairly be said that those to whom the letter is addressed will
"get the message" in all these instances and reject interpretations that
are inappropriate; and that it is of no consequence if they are misinter-
preted or not understood by others. But, apart from the fact that this
seems rather shortsighted - surely the message is one that is intended
to be spread? - there is a deeper problem with these rather oblique
forms of discourse: that they become so bland as to lose all impact. If
the grammar creates a universe of pseudo-objects, like easy-to-use
action tools, population-related problems, emerging population-linked
stresses approaching crisis stage and positive action at the local level,
then all of reality is held at a safe distance; and when these objects are
further disneyfied by the use of pseudo-intimacies like dear friend of
ZPG, our phones started to ring, our small staff is being swamped, with

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

your contribution, and I hope you'll help us, the underlying message is
that life can go on beingjust one long Happy Hour.

(3) Grammatical metaphors. As is clear from the rewording at the

beginning of this section, the text displays a considerable range of
grammatical metaphor: not extremely dense, but varied (cf. Jones et
al., 1989, pp. 268-9, 302-4). It would take a separate paper to
categorize and describe it in detail; instead, I shall look at some of its
consequences by examining one segment (§ 18).
The following is an informal account of the major decisions that
have to be made in interpreting this segment. Not all of these would
necessarily be accounted for as grammatical metaphors; some involve
lexical metaphor (i.e. metaphor in the usual sense of the term), while
others are neutralizations by the grammar of semantic distinctions that
are typically not, in fact, made explicit (e.g. ef, -ist below). Each
instance is discussed, and a decision taken among the possible interpre-
tations; the number of possibilities is given in square brackets, usually
[2]. A less ambiguous rewording is suggested.

(i) With your contributions, ZPG can arm our network ...
(a) Who are your and our? 'You' is obviously the recipient of the letter.
Assuming that 'we' are the writers, is this our anaphoric to ZPG or
not? [2] (It is, although the structure is unusual; it would be more
usual to write We at ZPG can ann our. ... )
(b) With your contributions: does this with mean "giving", as in with your
guns we can ann our militia, or does it mean "using"? [2] (It means
"by using your contributions".)
(c) Your contributions: is 'you' here a possessor, as in your property, or is
it a participant in some transitivity relation, like your role "the part
you play"? (The second; "you" is Actor in a process of giving, i.e.
"giver"). In that case, has the action been performed or not - that
is, is the giving in the past or in the future? [3 options altogether]
(The action is in the hoped-for future.)

Rewording: By using the money we hope you are going to give us,
we at ZPG can arm our network ...

(ii) . . . arm our growing network of local activists with the

materials they need ...
(d) Ann our network with materials: does this mean "give our network
supplies of weapons" or "give our network materials which can be
used as (if they were) weapons"? [2] (The second.)

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

(e) What are materials: goods-&-services, or information? (2]

(Information.)
(f) Who or what are activists: people who support activism (c£ commun-
ists), or people who believe in activity (cf relativists), or people who
are active (cf. sensualists)? [3] (We ignore "people who act"! -
presumably, people who are active.)
(g) Our activists: is 'we' possessor, or in some transitivity function (cf
(c) above)? [2] (The latter: "on our behalf', "in our cause".)
(h) Are local activists those in different localities, as in local representatives;
those in our locality, as in local doctors; or those operating within a
small area, as in local government? [3] (Probably the first.)
(i) In network of activists, what is ef: ownership, as in house of her parents;
constituency, as in house of three storeys; description, as in house of ill
repute; material, as in house of cards; container, as in house of antiquities;
or collective, as in house of representatives? [6] (Presumably the last of
these.)
U) Is the growing network expanding in size, like the network surround-
ing a ball that is being inflated; or is it increasing in numbers? [2]
(The latter.)
Rewording: ... we can supply those who are active on our behalf in
different localities, now that they are organized into a network and are
growing in number, materials that can be used as weapons ...
(iii) . . . materials they need to warn community leaders about
emerging population-linked stresses ...
(k) What is to in they need to warn: "materials they need to warn
community leaders about (i.e. that community leaders must be
warned about)", or "materials that they need in order that they can
warn community leaders"? [2) (The second.)
(1) Are community leaders "people who lead the community", "people
who hold leading positions in the community" or "leaders who
live in the community"? [3] (Perhaps the second, rather than the
first of these.)
(m) What are emerging population-linked stresses (cf. the discussion of
population above)? Are they "stresses linked to emerging popula-
tion" or "emerging stresses linked to population" (i.e. which is
emerging, the population or the stresses)? (2] Is linked to "causing",
"caused by" or "co-occurring with"? [3] Is emerging "coming out",
"beginning to show" or "increasing"? [3] (Combining the appro-
priate selection each time we get "stresses which are c::aused by
population, and which are beginning to show".)

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 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

(n) Is population the kind of people, or the number of people? If it is

the number, are there too many, or too few? [3 altogether] (Too
many.)
Rewording: ... materials that they need to use in order to warn those
who hold leading positions in the community about stresses caused by
there being too many people, stresses which are now beginning to
show .. .
(iv) ... before they reach crisis stage.
(o) Who is they: the activists, the community leaders, or the stresses?
[3] (We can choose "stresses", because it is the nearest, and because
of the collocational relation between stress and crisis.)
(p) Is crisis stage the stage which is a crisis, or the stage where crises
occur? [2] (Uncertain.)
(q) If stresses reach crisis stage, is this a time, a place, or a degree of
intensity? [3] (Probably a degree of intensity; in combination with
(p) above, perhaps "a degree of intensity where crises occur", rather
than "a degree of intensity which is a crisis".)
Rewording: ... before the stresses become so intense that crises will
occur.
It would be possible partially to "repack" this wording in a way
which eliminates some at least of these alternatives; for example:
Any money that you contribute to ZPG can pay the cost of sending out
information to supporters in different localities, so that armed with this
information they can warn leading members of the community about
the increased stresses brought on by overpopulation before these stresses
start to cause a crisis.

Any interpretation of a text involves decisions. Most of these do not

engage our attention; we reject improbable alternatives without ever
noticing them. In this particular segment we should probably not
envisage that reach ... stage might refer to a play performed at a theatre,
or that growing network could be a network for growing plants on,
although neither of these is totally impossible. Here I have tried to
include only alternatives which seemed reasonably plausible. Note that
this is not a composition exercise for purposes of "improving" the text;
there are far too many variables in discourse construction for any
operation - even that of reducing ambiguity - to guarantee improve-
ment. (The rewording of the text at the beginning of this section was
different again; it was an intuitive venture at making the text more

225
 EVERYDAY TEXTS

accessible - something that is connected with "less ambiguous" but by

no means identical with it.)
The present exercise in unpacking and repacking one segment does
suggest, however, that this text is somewhat problematic: not so much
in the number of possible interpretations as in the number of plausible
interpretations offered by its lexicogrammar. If we treated all of those
enumerated above as independent of each other we should have a little
over 4 X 107 acceptable readings. This is probably more than would be
typical of a sentence of comparable length in most kinds of discourse.
But it may be typical of this particular register, which we could perhaps
characterize as the discourse of the "soft touch".

8 Summary
In this paper I have adopted a grammatical perspective on discourse,
interpreting the text simultaneously as object and as instance. By
bringing a text under attention we assign to it value as an object; this is
the activity which turns a text into "literature" (not thereby implying
'good' literature, of course). By bringing it under grammatical attention
we display its properties as an instance; this shows how it means, since
every feature it displays is located in the context of its alternatives.
These agnate forms, representing what might have been meant but was
not, constitute an infinity of shadow texts against which the one in
focus achieves its reality.
Among the grammatical systems instantiated in any text we can
identify some where the choices made are likely to assume significance:
very general categories of theme, transitivity and so on, and also
syndromes of features like grammatical metaphor. Selections made
within these systems will give the text its distinctive flavour and
determine how we evaluate it relative to its sociosemiotic context. We
could have examined other features, or explored these ones further -
indefinitely further - in delicacy; in stylistic studies we may be treating
of choices that are very delicate indeed. But we also have to make
choices of our own, especially that between depth and breadth; and in
the absence of obvious foregrounding of any one grammatical system
it seemed preferable to aim for breadth.
I have not offered more than brief evaluative comments, although
no doubt the wording of my own discourse construes an attitude
towards its object. What I have tried to do rather is to s~ow the
grammar at work creating meaning in the form of written text. We

226
 LEXICOGRAMMATICAL FEATURES: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH

tend to think of grammar as simply taking its orders from above; our
own discourse has to make it strange, to show it de-automatized in the
text under review. The patterns we bring out create meaning both at
their own level and at each "higher" level that they realize - with
which they are related by metaredundancy, in the terms of Lemke's
explanatory model (Lemke 1984). I have concentrated on the meaning
of the grammar at its own level, trusting others to explore the various
realms of meaning that lie beyond.

Notes
1. For the grammar and its application to discourse analysis, see Halliday
1985a, 1985b.
2. The following symbols are used:
interdependency: logical-semantic relations:

parataxis 1 2 3 .. . ~ elaborating
hypotaxis a ~ y .. . + extending expansion
x enhancing
'idea
projection
"locution

3. The Subject is realized as that element· which, together with the Finite
verbal operator, constitutes the mood-marking element of the clause;
hence, in a declarative clause, the element that is recapitulated in the tag,
e.g. there in there's no danger ef that, is there? The unmarked pattern in a
declarative clause is that in which the Subject is also thematic.

227
 Chapter Eight

"SO YOU SAY 'PASS' ... THANK YOU

THREE MUCHLY"
(1994)

1 Preamble: third party

A text is a process of sharing: the shared creation of meaning. Those
who share in this process are the 'you' and the 'me' of the text. Our
status as co-actants is made explicit in the text itself - in the grammar,
which distinguishes between the speech roles (me and you)' on the one
hand, and everyone and everything else (him, her, it, them) on the
other. Thus 'you' and 'me' are not only creators of the text; we are
also created by it. 'You' and 'me' are brought into being by language.
It should be made clear that this sharing is a purely textual consensus.
'You' and 'me' agree to share in the semiotic process; without that,
there can be no text. There is no implication of consensus of any other
kind; we may be creating text in order to quarrel. Co-actants often
sense the inherent contradiction in this situation, and try to destroy the
textual consensus as well: "I'm not talking to you any more", palms
pressed on the ears to block reception. In this way they can stop being
'you' and 'me', until a new text creates them afresh.
Every text defines its insiders and its outsiders. In principle the
outsiders have no access to the text. In practice, they may overhear it;
but the role of the eavesdropper is problematic, because the grammar
does not admit a role of "third party to a text". The "third person"
comes in as a participant in its experiential structures, alternating with
"first" and "second person" in the functions of Actor, Goal, Agent,
Medium, Beneficiary, and the like; but in relation to the text, this

First published in What's Going on Here? Complementary Studies of Professional Talk, edited
by Allen D. Grimshaw. Norwood: Ablex, 1994, pp. 175-229.

228
 "so YOU SA y 'PASS'

'something or someone else' is simply a non-person. Such a one is

clearly excluded from the text by the grammar. Even if there was no
overt "person" system (as in some languages there is not), the third
party is always defined cryptotypically, and in a way which shows it to
be an outsider: the third party has no access to the modalities. So in
English, for example, perhaps can mean 'I think it possible', as in perhaps
they've gone away; or it can mean 'do you think it possible?', as in have
they gone away perhaps? But it can never mean 'he or she thinks it
possible'. Modalities are absolutely tied to the insider roles in the
discourse.
Thus, while the grammar gives only superficial recognition to the
Jakobsonian opposition of 'me (first person) versus the rest of the
universe', it provides abundant and significant evidence for setting off
'you and me' (first and second person) against the rest - so making
explicit the essentially dialogic nature of discourse. The 'you and me'
share the context of situation within which the text is enacted; we are
the co-actants - for us the text is a form of action, whereas for the
others, the hims and the hers, it is not. The roles of you and me are
interchangeable: the 'me' of one moment is the 'you' of the next - but
they are not interchangeable with those of him and her. Our status as
creators and creations of the text is institutionalized by the grammar,
and constantly reiterated throughout the proceedings.
Because you and me are sharply defined in this way we tend to
behave towards the text in proprietorial fashion, as if we owned it. A
text is a form of private property; in bringing it into being we also
establish title to it. In some cultural contexts the ownership of the text
may be vested solely in me, excluding even you from part possession.
This particular conception of ownership is associated with written text,
and arises with the monologic notion of the "author": If I am an
author you have to pay for the text by buying 'my' book, and if you
figure out ways of getting round this constraint there are copyright
laws to stop you threatening my livelihood. In the "process writing"
current in the primary schools of the 1980s, children have been actively
encouraged to claim ownership of their written texts, as if private
property was the ultimate realization of power.
With spoken text, which does not (or did not until recently) take
on the form of an alienable object, the sense of text as private property
is tuned to privacy rather than to property. The text is open to you
and me, but closed to all outsiders; if there are any third parties
situated by the· text they are not just overhearing, they are eavesdrop-
ping. Of course, privacy is also a product of the culture; in societies

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where there are no categories of public and private there could be no

significance attached to private discourse. In others it exists, but as a
marked option: institutionalized, for example, in the inviolability of the
confession. But in our highly privatized cultures of today the outsider
is typically excluded from the text. The text is confidential to you and
me; 'they' have no right to be "listening in".
But since society cannot function if all discourse is private, there has
to be some provision for listening in. Again, it is the marked option
that comes to be institutionalized. We see this happening in the forms
of dramatic art, the theatre and cinema, where the "audience" plays
the eavesdropper role. Other kinds of text may of course be staged for
the benefit of third parties, from politicians negotiating arms limitation
agreements that are "meant" for the ears of their constituents back
home, to the muttered asides that enrich domestic rhetoric. And where
the power sources of society need to listen in, we have high technology
eavesdropping: telephones are tapped, encounter spaces bugged and
monitored. There are rewards and punishments for these actions, giving
a high social value to discourse that is overheard.
One class of eavesdropper that is now well established is that of
ethnographers, equipped since the advent of the tape recorder with a
resource for surreptitious listening in. This in its turn has engendered a
special variety of text, signalled by "do you mind if I record you?",
where the interactants are creating what would have been private
discourse except that they already know that eavesdroppers are around.
All this of course has an. effect on the nature of the discourse itself:
what is "spontaneous, un-self-conscious, natural speech" any more?
The present text is one on which we have been invited, as
ethnographers, to listen in. We feel somewhat embarrassed at this - or
one of us does, at least - not because we are intruding into the privacy
of the text; the interactants knew they were being recorded, and the
text was in fact enacted, if not for that purpose, at least with that
particular subplot in view. I felt embarrassed more in the way that one
does when invited to sit in on a ceremony where I could not be sure
of understanding what was happening. What do all these complex
moves express? How many levels of interpretation are going to be
needed as we try to penetrate the multiple semiosis of the text - and in
so doing, to uncover our own role as its ethnographer? And how was
that role to be acted out? - in the traditional ethnographic stance of
the invisible observer, whether extraterrestrial being or professional
sociologist? or as observer/participant, recognizing as semioticians the
inevitable impact of our observation on the discursive processes them-

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 "so YOU SAY 'PASS'

selves, and hence reflecting on the meaning-making nature of our own

allotted enterprise?

2 Orientation
I decided to behave as a grammarian, since that is what I am, and I
have been studying the grammar of conversation for a reasonably long
time. The text thus became for me an instance of a particular register:
that is, typical not just of "text in English" but of text in a particular
functional variety of English. This is a semantic characterization:
functional variation, as embodied in the concept of register, refers to
the orientation towards certain areas of meaning, which can be inter-
preted theoretically as a setting of the probabilities in the content-plane
systems of the language. The register, in tum, is associated with a
particular situation type, particular settings of the parameters of field,
tenor, and mode, which in the present instance could be summarized
as follows:

Field Education: tertiary: university: postgraduate: research degree:

PhD; social science: sociology: examination: thesis:
defence.
[examiners] assessment of candidate's qualifications (knowl-
edge and ability) to be admitted to the profession; nego-
tiation of own views in order to arrive at consensus
(candidate] convincing examiners of her suitability for award
of degree
Tenor Teacher/student: examiners/examinee: dissertation com-
mittee/ candidate; four/ one.
[examiners] three male/one female; three external members/
one internal, chair: one more "expert" (senior, specialist
in field)
[candidate] female; mature age
Mode Spoken: unrehearsed (impromptu); institutionalized: inter-
view: judgemental, with reward dependent on outcome;
bounded (opening-closing) and time-constrained.
Structured: interview proper + deliberation + enactment
[structure of subtext discussed in present chapter: problem
(enunciation + proposals + complication) + decision
(decision proper + summing-up) + post-mortem (prob-
lem2 + closure)]

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The institutional term that had been given to us was "dissertation

defence"; as an outsider to the culture I had come to recognize that
there was no translation equivalent of this expression; rendering it as
"PhD oral" was more confusing than helpful. But in any case such
generic labels are of limited value in enabling us to make predictions
about the register: it has to be assumed that they are a shorthand for
typical clusterings of field, tenor, and mode.
Out of the major systemic components of a systemic-functional
grammar I selected three for detailed study: modality, the clause
complex, and theme. The clause complex combines an interdepen-
dency system of TAXIS (parataxis/hypotaxis) with a logical-semantic
system of expansion/projection; the two together would construct the
combination of (1) spoken mode, with (2) the field of academic
assessment. The modality features, including both modalization and
modulation, would construe the tenor, the interpersonal relations
among those taking part. The thematic organization would carry the
planning of the discourse, its method of development as an interview.
It seemed likely that these three taken together would give a reasonably
revealing account of how the discourse was organized to function
effectively in a context of situation of this kind - and some explanation
of where it was (or was not) successful.
There was no possibility of covering more than a small proportion
of the whole text; so I decided to focus on the designated "core"
passage of approximately 12.5 minutes, beginning at Adam's So you say
"pass". I shall refer to this passage as the "subtext". It shares many
features with the remainder of the text, but departs from it in respect
of others: specifically, it contrasts with all that precedes it in that it
stands to the preceding discourse in the relation of a conclusion. No
detailed analysis has been made of the previous portions; but a few
points of contrast are noted in the discussion that follows.
I found I had to make a new transcription, in order to put in the
intonation and the rhythm: these are necessary to any grammatical
interpretation of speech. At the same time I was able to leave out
various features that had been included in the original, "conversational
analysis" -type transcription, which are not necessary for my purposes.
(I was also able to correct a few errors in the original transcription.)
The version of the subtext in this form of systemic text notation is
included as an appendix to this chapter (Appendix 1).
I then made a clause-by-clause analysis of the subtext in respect of
the systems of theme, information, transitivity, mood, modality, and
key; and an analysis of each clause complex by interdepende~cy and

232
 "SO YOU SAY 'PASS' ... "

expansion/projection. The transcription (Appendix 1) shows the infor-

mation structure, since this is carried by the intonation and rhythm.
The worksheets (Appendix 2) show (a) the structure of each clause
complex; then for each clause (including any that are embedded) (b)
the functional components of the theme (textual, interpersonal,
topical); (c) the mood and polarity; (d) the modality (modalization and
modulation), and (e) the transitivity (process type, and any grammatical
metaphor).
The analysis of the subtext shows that it contains 267 clauses,
distributed over 116 turns. These form a rather coherent structure,
which will be presented in the section that follows.

3 Structure of the subtext

Hasan (1985) has shown that, given a particular "contextual configura-
tion" of field, tenor, and mode, it is possible to derive a "structure
potential" which represents the predicted limits within which the
structure of texts of that situation type will fall. The "structure formula"
for any one instance - any particular text in that register - will be a
variant of that potential, incorporating all features that are obligatory
(elements that must be present, or constraints on the ordering of
elements) and making some selection from among the remaining
options.
This comprehensive "macro-structure" may in turn comprise
smaller, micro-structures; hence there is a great deal of variation. Some
of these are more constituent-like, such as those Sinclair and Coulthard
(1975) were able to establish in their studies of classroom discourse. At
other times the micro-structures are more prosodic: they represent co-
occurrent motifs, like the "phasal" structures recognized by Gregory
(1985). Both may be present simultaneously, the more constituent-
like structures being typically field-derived (having to do with the
nature of the social activity, 'what is going on'), the more prosodic
ones typically tenor-derived (having to do with the relationships
among the interactants, 'who are taking part'). Berry (1981) has
shown that text structure is not detennined solely by considerations of
field.
I have not attempted any overall characterization of the macro-
structure of the present text. I shall assume that the subtext selected for
detailed treatment is itself a functional element in the structure of the
text as a whole, and shall refer to it simply as "conclusion". In this
subtext, the interactants are reaching, and also enacting, a joint decision;

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

both the process and its outcome are critical to the effective functioning
of the text in the defined context of situation.
The subtext, in turn, has its own micro-structure deriving from this
culminative function that it performs in relation to the text as a whole.
The most general structure that we could postulate for such a culmi-
native subtext would be that of
(Problem • Resolution J Decision
- that is, a decision component either alone or preceded by the raising
and disposing of one or more problems. In this instance all these
elements are present, with perhaps three cycles of problem plus
resolution; but there is an additional element following the decision,
which would not have been predicted and which may or may not
figure as an optional element within this text type (the alternative being
that it falls outside it and indicates a shift of register). In the absence of
evidence either way we shall adopt the simpler solution and treat it as
an optional element that is part of the same text.
Within this there is a further layer of micro-structure which is still
reasonably constituent-like, though as the subtext proceeds it becomes
more a structure of interpersonal motif and hence more prosodic in its
realization. The "problem and resolution" sequence begins with an
enunciation of the problem, which is followed by proposals for its
solution; then there arises another problem, in the form of a challenge
followed by a defence. Focusing more delicately still, we can recognize
two proposals for the solution of the initial problem, and then two
cycles of challenging and defending. The "decision" component turns
out to consist of a decision proper (itself comprising enunciation plus
symbolic enactment - the enunciation incorporating a motif of "comic
relief'), followed by a summing-up. At this point the subtext proceeds
beyond the decision to a "post-mortem"; the post-mortem, in tum,
engenders another problem, which is, however, shelved, not resolved.
This post-mortem imparts to the subtext an incipient cydicity which
presumably could become severely dysfunctional; but it is inhibited by
an ex machina closure, and it is this that allows us to treat the entire
subtext as an element of the "dissertation defence", at least for purposes
of the present exercise.
The movement of the subtext is set out in Figure 1.

234
 "so YOU SAY 'PASS' ••. "

4 Relation of text structure to clauses and turns

At this point we need to specify the sequence of turns in the subtext,
and the sequence of clauses in each turn, to show how the text
structure is made manifest. The subtext consists of 116 turns. (There is
a gap on the recording between nos. 82 and 83, which are actually by
the same speaker but are treated here as separate turns because of the
gap.)
The distribution of turns and clauses in the second-order elements
of structure (those numbered 1-7 in Figure 1) is shown in Table 1. It
will be noted that the elements numbered 4 and 6 are interleaved;
these two motifs are enacted in alternating bursts. The "post-mortem"
phase is actually initiated by the last clause (clause 141) in turn 45:
Sherm's {speaker S) I must say that her nineteen sixty-eight story shocks me,
immediately following the summing-up. The problem raised in the
post-mortem is then pursued alongside, and despite interruptions by,
the symbolic enactment of the decision. Figure 2 shows the pattern of
the subtext with turns and clauses related to third-order elements of
structure.
Before closing this section it may be of interest to summarize the
distribution of turns and clauses among the different speakers {Table 2).

5 Commentary on the structure of the subtext

If we consider the subtext simply as the culminative phase of a
dissertation defence, then the "problem" is very simply stated: decide
on a joint recommendation. If we take account of the separate roles of
the different interactants, however, then the problem will appear in
more specific terms.
For Adam, the problem is to get the committee to initiate and
support, in consensus, the recommendation that he considers appropri-
ate. For the other members of the committee, the problem is to arrive
at this recommendation in the appropriate way: that is, while fulfilling
their role as adjudicators, which requires demonstrating their severity
by making critical comments on some aspect of the work. There is
thus a partial conflict of aims as the other members raise minor but
nevertheless repair-demanding challenges.
Thus, following Adam's initial feedline so you say pass, the other
members bring up critical comments; and these come in two stages.
First, there are the riders to the proposals themselves (2: James, turns
8-12; Sherm, tum 14); then there are the distinct challenges (3:James,

235
I (upswing)

Problem • Resolution:
1 Enunciation of problem
2 Proposals for resolution:
J - proposal
S - proposal
3 Complication (challenge and defence):
time factor:
challenge
A- defence
scope factor:
challenge
A-defence

----=--

Decision
4 Decision proper:
enunciation of decision (incl. comic relief)
enactment
5 Summing-up

--=-========~
III (return upswing)

Post-mortem:
6 Problem
7 Closure
Figure 1 Movement of the subtext
 "so YOU SAY 'PASS' . . . "

Table 1 Distribution of turns and clauses in elements of structure

Element of structure Tums Clauses
N Numbers N Numbers
1. Enunciation of problem 7 1-7 8 1-8
2. Proposals for resolution 10 8-17 62 9-70
3. Complication(s) 15 18-32 38 71-108
4. Decision proper 20 32-38; 46-47; 43 109-127; 142-143;
76; 79-81; 188-189; 191-194;
106-113 245-260
5. Summing-up 7 39-45 13 128-140
6. Post-mortem: problem 57 45; 48-75; 102 141; 144-187; 190;
77-78; 82-105; 195-244;261-266
114-116
7. Closure
- 0 116
- 1 267
116 2,67

turns 18 and 20; Pat, turns 22-31). Each of these calls forth a response
from Adam in defence of his supervisee. The choreography is as
follows:
2. James: recommends 'pass'
but qualifies 'judgement defective'
Adam: counters 'has learnt something'
Shenn: recommends'pass'
but qualifies 'vision too narrow'
Adam: counters 'has to produce something'
3. James: challenges 'timing too slow?'
Adam: defends 'not really slow'
Pat: challenges 'coverage too restricted?'
Adam: defends 'not really restricted'
Adam has now countered all reservations and challenges, aided by
some temporary alliances (e.g. with Sherm on the question of scope).
He now comes to the hinge of the subtext, clause 109 in tum 32: So I
can tell her that - you know, I . . . , where the introductory so functions
as internal causal conjunctive: "as a result of (causal) the preceding
discourse (conjunctive) I conclude (internal) .... " The conventions of
this particular register require that the sponsoring magus should not
actually pronounce the magic spell. He can set it up, create the context

237
Tums Clauses

1-7 1 enunciation of problem 1-8

8-17 2 proposals for resolution 9-70

8-13 IJ - proposal I 9-30

14-17 I S - proposal I 31-70

18-32 3 complication 71-108

18; 20 time challenge 71; 81

19; 21 A- defence 72-80; 82-85

22-31 scope challenge 86-99

32 A- defence 100-108

4 decision proper

32-38 I enunciation of decision 109-127

46-47; 76; symbolic enactment 142-143; 188-189;

79-81; 106-113 191-194;245-260

39-45 l 5 summing-up 128-140

45; 48-75; 6 post-mortem: problem 141; 144-187; 190;

77-78; 82-105; 195-244;261-266
114-116

116 _7_c_l_os_u_re_ _ _ _ _ __,

._I 267

Figure 2 Tums and clauses in third-order elements of structure

 "so YOU SAY 'PASS' . . . "

Table 2 Distribution of turns and clauses by speaker

Interactant No. ofturns No. of clauses Clauses per turn (mean)

Adam 26 76 2.92
James 16 31 1.94
Lee 25 45 1.80
Pat 11 12 1.09
Sherm 38 103 2.71
Total 116 267

for it; and this Adam does, as far as the formulation of a projecting
clause I can tell her that . .. ; but he must not complete the projection.
What Adam does is to keep the formula open with a holding expression
you know and then wait for the visiting druids to come in with the
words themselves. This they do, in turns 33 and 34 - Sherm: she's won;
James: she's overcome.
Adam's role now becomes that of the jester; he provides some comic
relief Phases 1-3 have involved a certain amount of tension: not in
relation to what would be decided - the decision has already been
arrived at; but in relation to what processes would be gone through on
the way to its being adopted. Each of the interactants has to mould the
discourse in a certain patterning, to use it to achieve certain prescribed
ends; and this has entailed a modest degree of conflict - or at least of
incompatibility, such that they have had to manoeuvre, take up
positions, and monitor the direction in which they were going. The
resolution of the problem is at the same time a resolution of the
tension, an audible sigh in the discourse; and Adam adopts the textbook
strategy for such occasions - he tells a funny story, one that has himself
as foil and that is relevant to the business in hand. This role naturally
falls to the local druid: it is his novice who is being initiated, so it is
he who plays the clown at this critical juncture in the proceedings.
There remains the final symbolic act: the execution of the charter.
This is performed in a series of self-consciously casual little rituals that
are strung throughout the remainder of the subtext (turns 46-47, 76,
79-81, and 106-113). I have interpreted these as a continuation of
Phase 4 because they constitute the formal enactment of the decision;
but they do not in fact begin to appear until after the completion of
Phase 5, when Adam has gone out and then returned accompanied by
the candidate.
Meanwhile, in Adam's absence, the three visiting magi have proceeded

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to talk about the novice; and they have been doing so in noticeably
different terms - seeing her now as an initiate, "one of us", who has
duly performed the rites. They have discussed her future in the order,
the important work she has already been doing, and how to ensure her
continued participation. This has contributed further to relaxing the
tension, and might well have been the final sequence in the discourse.
But - perhaps partly prompted by the need to keep the text alive for
the symbolic enactment of the decision - one of the interactants,
Sherm, has by now become personally involved. His own uprightness,
and that of the institution itself, has been called into question by this
newcomer to the order; and he probes the issue in a lengthy exchange
extending over 57 turns, a total of 102 clauses. The debate rests
inconclusive; partly because it is extraneous to the matter in hand - it
cannot affect the main business of the text - and partly because in any
case it cannot be resolved without going and looking up the records.
Once again it falls to the sponsor of the candidate to de-fuse the
tension and bring the business to a close. This he does by again
providing comic relief; again, in fact, referring to the past, but this time
in very general terms: all those changes depended on how some mothers
behaved in 1937. Then, before anyone can come back to the topic
anew, he signs off, smartly, with an uncompromisable closing formula:
O.K. Thank you three muchly. This has the appropriate "coefficient of
weirdness" recognized long ago by Malinowski (1923/ 1959) as a
necessary feature of the spell.
In the next three sections I shall examine certain features of the
grammar of the subtext, interpreting these in terms of a systemic-
functional grammar. For a summary of the relevant aspects of the
grammar of English see Halliday (1985a). For an example of other
discourse studies embodying the same approach see Hasan (1985) and
Martin (1992).

6 Grammar (1): the clause complex

The "sentence" of our linguistic tradition arises from the recognition,
by those who learnt to write language down, that there is structure in
the grammar above the clause. A sequence of clauses may be tactically
related - by parataxis and/ or hypotaxis - so as to form a clause
complex; and it is this clause complex that is encoded in writing in the
form of a sentence.
I will refer to the clause complex here by the more familiar term.
But - since this is a spoken text - it must be remembered that the

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 "so YOU SAY 'PASS' •.. "

Table 3 Tums, clauses, and sentences in. each phase

Phase No. of No. of No. of Clauses per
turns clauses sentences sentence (mean)
1 7 8 7 1.1
2 10 62 28 2.2
3 15 38 19 2.0
4 20 43 32 1.3
5 7 13 11 1.2
6 57 102 73 1.4
7 0 1 1 1.0
Total 116 267 171 1.6

sentence is defined by the tactic relations among its constituent clauses.

The limiting case is a sentence consisting of one clause: the "simple
sentence" of traditional grammar. Table 3 shows the number of turns,
clauses, and sentences in the seven phases of the subtext. Table 4 sets
out the comparable figures for the different speakers.
Taken by itself, the average (mean) number of clauses per sentence
in a dialogue signifies little, because it is constrained by the nature of
the turns: rapid dialogic exchanges are characterized by short turns in
which typically one tum = one clause = one sentence, as in turns 1-5
and 22-28, and the mean therefore tells us little about the grammar of
the longer monologic passages. What is of more significance is the
extent to which a speaker exploits the potential of complex sentence
formation in those environments where it is possible for him to do so;
and since the sentence is, overwhelmingly, bounded by the tum, this
means in those turns which consist of two or more clauses. In the
discussion that follows, therefore, we shall consider particular speakers

Table 4 Tums, clauses, and sentences by speaker

(totals as in Table 3)
Speaker No. of No. of No. of Clauses per
turns clauses sentences sentence (mean)
Adam 26 76 38 2.0
James 16 31 23 1.3
Lee 25 45 30 1.5
Pat 11 12 11 1.1
Sherm 36 103 69 1.5

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 EVERYDAY TEXTS

at particular phases of the text, concentrating on passages where the

turns are mainly longer than a single clause.
When James and Sherm are making their proposals, in Phase 2,
stating why the candidate should be commended despite her faults,
their clause-to-sentence ratio averages between 2 and 2.5 (James 17:9;
Sherm 32:15, or 32:13 if two short turns are discounted). The structure
is predominantly paratactic, though Sherm's becomes more hypotactic
towards the end as he becomes more critical. During this same phase,
Adam's ratio is just under 4 (11 :3); one of his turns is the single word
Sherm? (asking for Sherm's opinion), so that the remaining ten clauses
are structured into just two sentences, one of 3 clauses and one of 7.
Both of these, which are largely paratactic, show Adam on the
defensive, somewhat urgently marshalling his clausal reinforcements
with ands and buts and therefores.
In Phase 3, the positive rating of the candidate is explicitly chal-
lenged, first by James and then by Pat. In each case, the challenge
occupies one turn (turns 18, 22); the turn is just one sentence, and the
sentence is just one clause. Thus the challenges have the simplest
possible sentence structure and a very high lexical density, with the
embedding and grammatical metaphor that typically accompany it. For
example,
James: Adam, along these lines does she see the length of time [(it
took her [[to finish this thesis]) ]] as predictive of [[what she
- her production record?
Even Pat's rather less ponderous To what extent are these - the three
theories that she selected truly representative ef theories in this area? is still
much more marked in these respects than is typical of the text as a
whole. The challenges are set in the grammar of more formal, written
discourse. Adam's defence, in each case, is in striking contrast. Again,
he relies more on the grammatical resource of sentence structure, with
a clause-to-sentence ratio of 13:3 in the one case and 14:5 in the other
- omitting his one-clause turns, 22:4 overall (see, in particular, Adam's
turns 19 and 32). Given the high degree of hypotaxis in these instances
we might well refer to this as a defence in depth.
It might appear from this that the greater degree of grammatical
intricacy is characteristic of Adam as an individual speaker. But in Phase
6, where Adam is less personally involved, his clause-to-sentence ratio
is only around 1 (15: 13), whereas Sherm and Lee, who are now
expounding positions in which they are personally concetl).ed, go up
to 1.5 (Sherm 45:30, Lee 33:22) - still a low figure for informal speech,

242
 "so YOU SAY 'PASS' "

Table 5 Summary of clause-to-sentence ratios (entire subtext) m five

segments identified by mode and tenor
Dominant Tenor cl:sent mean cl:sent mean
mode [main interactants] (unadjusted) c/s (adjusted) c/s
Defence against 38:11 3.5 32:6 5.3
challenge [Adam]
monologic Challenge 51:26 2 49:24 2
Uames, Pat]
Light relief 15:7 2.1
[Adam]
dialogic Confrontation 78:52 1.5
[Sherm, Lee]
Other turns 85:75 1.1

but again allowing for the very short length of many of the turns; and
higher than the three other interactants, whose contributions are almost
entirely one-clause sentences. It is the roles in the development of the
discourse, not the individual qualities of the speaker, that are being
realized through the lexicogrammatical organization of the sentences.
When Adam's role shifts to that of light relief, in Phase 4, his clause-
to-sentence ratio goes up again to 2 (15:7): not as high as when he is
defending the candidate, but higher than when he is largely uninvolved.
At the same time the dominant form of interdependency becomes
parataxis, instead of the more structured hypotaxis of the defensive
passages.
The number of instances is not large, and these figures could arise
by chance. But it is a general principle of spoken discourse that the
more spontaneous, un-self-monitored the speech, the more intricate
the tactic structure of the sentences; and it seems likely that this is what
is being reflected here, as summarized in Table 5.
Thus, as expected, if we simply measure the overall intricacy of the
sentences - their mean length in terms of the number of ranking
clauses - this is primarily determined by the mode: where turns are
short (that is, the mode orientation is dialogic) the sentences will
average out as less intricate, because many turns will consist of one
clause only. But if we break the text up according to mode orientation
into its predominantly dialogic and predominantly monologic portions,
and consider these separately, then within each mode the intricacy of

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the sentences appears as a function of the degree of personal involve-

ment: the more the speaker is "wrapped up" in the discourse, the more
complex the sentence grammar becomes. The depth of the sentence is
a realization of (and metaphor for) the depth of the feelings.
This is not because of any conscious organization of the discourse.
On the contrary, in highly self-monitored discourse the sentences tend
to be less intricate '"'" it is the lexical density that goes up under such
conditions. Rather it is a feature of its spontaneity. What makes the
grammar stretch in this way is the unconscious rhetoric of sustained
commitment: to a topic, a position, or a goal. Nor is the complexity
simply a matter of stringing together paratactic sequences of "andings".
Parataxis does play a part (and is, in any case, itself a fonn of
grammatical relationship); but the intricacy of these portions of text is
characterized as much by hypotaxis as by parataxis. It is the combi-
nation of the two that gives the sentence (in this sense of a clause
complex) the remarkable power that it has in spoken language. The
present text does not display this intricacy to any very great extent; the
speakers are monitoring themselves too closely for the grammar to get
too far off the ground. But it does embody some of the kind of
variation that is characteristic of such shifts of mode and of tenor.

7 Grammar (2): Modality: modalization and modulation

Modality is the judgemental component of the meaning of the clause:
the opinions - offered by the speaker, or sought from the listener -
regarding the likelihood (modalization) or the desirability (modulation)
of the thesis. It is best considered along with polarity (positive/negative)
as forming a single, complex semantic space.
Consider the proposition it is. If we vary this along the dimension of
"probability" we get a semantic range as in Figure 3. The polar tenns
it is, it isn't are simply the limiting cases of the dimension of probability.
In similar fashion we can expand the proposal do! along the dimension
of obligation, as in Figure 4.
Thus, modality covers the intermediate space between the positive
and negative poles: the speaker is explicitly selecting some band that
lies between 'is' and 'isn't' (his judgement of how things are) or
between 'do!' and 'don't!' (his judgement of how things should be). Of
course, the speaker is also making a judgement in selecting one of the
polar terms; what the modality system does is to specify certain
intermediate values. The grammar identifies three of these: ;t median
value ('probably' /'supposed to', where the polarity is equally balanced:

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 "so YOU SAY 'PASS'

it will be

probably

ositive
ositioll P
proP ative
·tiOll r,eQ
propos1

probably not

it won't be
(= not probable)

Figure 3 Modality: modalization (scale of probability)

'probable that ... not' = 'not probable that', 'supposed not to .. .' =
'not supposed to ... ') and two outer values where it is skew: high
('certainly'/'required to': 'certain that ... not'= 'not possible that .. .',
'required not to .. .' = 'not allowed to .. .') and low ('possibly'/
'allowed to'; 'possible that ... not' = 'not certain that .. .', 'allowed
not to .. .' = 'not required to .. .'). There are other, more delicate
distinctions within these three, and there are also other dimensions
joining positive to negative; but these can be ignored for purposes of
the present analysis.
In Phase 2 of the subtext the distribution of modalized clauses is as
shown in Table 6.
The numbers are small; but this does represent a rather high
concentration of modalities in relation to the subtext as a whole (and
apparently also in relation to the remainder of the text). No distinction
is being made here among the various sub-systems of modality: thus
they're probably away, it's probable/likely they're away, they're likely to be
away, I think they're away, are all being taken together as instances of
"median probability"; and so on. These all embody more delicate
semantic distinctions; but the text is too short to warrant our treating
them apart.

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you should do

supposed to

required not to
you mustn't do
(= not allowed to)

supposed not to

you shouldn't do
(= not suppos~ to)

Figure 4 Modality: modulation (scale of obligation)

Let us consider the 17 clauses ofJames' proposal first. Nine of these

contain modalizations; these are almost all median value (six include
the form I think), and are either qualifications of his own assessment (I
think my sense is that she has done a good job, I think though she felt this
compulsion about that) or predictions of the candidate's future perform-
ance (that may just come with exp[erience], she probably has to develop that
sense). These are matched by six clauses containing median- or high-
value modulations - for example, everything and more that a dissertation
should be; she'll have to develop some sense of what stones aren't worth lifting;
she can't publish a monograph of that- from which there emerges a strong
sense of the expected norms of scholarship, and of what a dissertation
ought to be. The two motifs are combined in the certainly she ought to

Table 6 Modality in Phase 2 Oames, Sherm)

Total no. Clauses with Clauses with
of clauses modalization modulation
J -proposal 17 9 6
S-proposal 31 13 3
Total 48 22 9

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 "so YOU SAY 'PASS' .•. "

Table 7 Modality in Phase 3 (Adam)

Causes
Total no. Clauses with with
of clauses modalization modulation
time-defence 13 10
scope-defence 9 4 3
Total 22 14 3

be commended, where the certainly is a blend of both types of modality:

with regard to the obligation to commend her (modulation: she ought
to be commended), (1) I consider it more than probable that we are under
such obligation (certainly as modalization), and (2) I insist that we are
required to carry it out (certainly as modulation).
By contrast, the 31 clauses of Sherm's proposal include only three
with modulations, and all of these are hedged around with a modaliza-
tion: I think it's important for her to quickly move ...; it may be wise to
restrict her vision; it'd be better it seems to me if she would expand her vision a
little bit (the last of which is followed by well - let me take it back). The
keynote here is much more one of tentativeness: another ten clauses
contain modalizations, which are mainly of "low" value, and are not
simply attached to evaluative propositions. Examples are what alternative
meanings might be given to the class variable; the class variable is interpreted as
a socialization variable but that's not necessarily the case; she could I think
write some of this stuff up; she may well not think of herself as a young person
initiating a research career; in the shorter run I'm not so sure.
When we come to Phase 3, the challenge and defence, it is Adam,
as defender, who displays the concentration of modalities, as shown in
Table 7. Of the three modulations, two are negative (you don't have to
worry about cognitions; without having to get into their heads at alQ and all
three are projected, as what "a real social structuralist ... would say";
Adam is explicitly removing the motif of obligation from the discourse.
Instead he uses a large number of subjective modalizations (I think, I
don't know, etc.); and most of his modalizations (9 out of the 14) are
thematic, for example, I don't know that it was that slow, I think that Mel
may encourage her (see Section 8 below). The overall impact is one of
deference and tentativeness, as Adam deftly leads up to the critical
modulation: 'have I your permission to say she's passed?'.
The other section of the subtext in which modality plays a promi-
nent part is Phase 6, where Sherm and Lee are negotiating towards a

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mutually acceptable version of past events. The proportion of the

clauses that are modalized is about one in four (23 out of the 102 in
question); but their effect is strongly enhanced, partly by the presence
of some interrogative and tagged declarative clauses (e.g. and didn't
Jennifer Bird teach? but Jennifer was married, wasn't she?), but more by the
large number of clauses in which the modality itself becomes the thesis,
for example, that's not true, I'll test that hypothesis too, I prefer not to believe
it, there's a further assertion, and so on.
Sherm begins with a thematic high-value modulation I must say in
its formulaic function of emphasizing an opinion; and the clause
introduced by it turns out to be the point of departure for the whole
discussion:
Sherm: I must say that her nineteen sixty-eight story shocks me.
He goes on with a· double high-value modalization:
Adam there had to be female Als pre-nineteen sixty-nine
I just don't believe I spent the first ...
As he becomes less sure of himself the certainty of his grammar goes
up:
these people taught classes for us, I'm absolutely certain
- followed by I'm going back and check. Lee counters with a clause that
is doubly modalized but at median and low value:
I think you might find they were married
and maintains the same level with I think you were acting chairman in
sixty{our were you not? By a few turns later, the modalities have begun
to take over:
James: And didn't Jennifer Bird teach?
Sherm: Jennifer? I'm sure - well, again: I don't know, I'm not sure.
Adam: I think she taught; but then I'm not sure.
Lee: But Jennifer was married wasn't she?
until Sherm, following a Phase 5 interruption, resumes with:
Sherm: What you're implying may indeed be true
in which modality figures three times over: (1) the thesis of the
attributive clause 'x is true', (2) the embedded thesis in t~e Carrier
'what you're implying', and (3) the modalization itself 'may be'.

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 "so YOU SA y 'PASS' . . . "

Once the modality has become foregrounded in this way Sherm

holds on to it as a topic:
Sherm: I don't like what's being said ... I prefer to believe it's
not really true ... therefore I shall look for evidence that it's
not true ... and it may tum out that I won't find that
evidence.
This last clause establishes the basis for an amicable closure through the
use of the low-value modalization may: this then becomes a keynote
for Lee and Adam:
Lee: Well you may find it; and if you do ... [ ]
Adam: Well and there may be others too ... [ ]
Lee: Well that may have been a personal thing ...
At this point it becomes possible to disengage, and for Adam to move
to the final closing tum.
Modulation, therefore, appears as a significant feature only in Phase
2, the proposals for the evaluation of the thesis, which are essentially
judgemental in character: there is a norm, against which the present
offering has to be judged. The grammar of obligation expresses
this characteristic, both directly in instances such as should you have
examined-?, and symbolically as in she ought to be commended, where the
obligation is on our part - we have the duty to commend her - but
the motif of the maintenance of norms is clearly present.
Modalization, on the other hand, characterizes especially those parts
of the text involving some degree of interpersonal negotiation: the
examiners expressing their views, to arrive at a consensus, in Phase 2;
Adam coming to the defence, his special pleading showing the delicacy
that is expected of a candidate's sponsor, in Phase 3; and in Phase 6,
Sherm exploring a politically sensitive area in which both he and the
candidate are personally and professionally concerned. This final phase,
which I have interpreted as "post-mortem" in the subtext, is at the
same time a further subtext in its own right; as it moves away from the
business of the oral examination, the extended modalization allows it
to function as an armistice, terminating the preceding encounter while
at the same time providing a foretaste of the cold war that is obviously
going to come.

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8 Grammar (3): thematization

The system of THEMATIZATION is the textual component in the gram-
mar of the clause: it is the system from which the clause derives its
organization in the form of a message, as a Theme followed up by a
Rheme. In each ranking clause, one of the elements in the process (i.e.
an element in the transitivity structure: a participant or circumstance,
or occasionally the process itself) is assigned the status of topical Theme.
So, for example, in

in this literature the class variable is interpreted as a socialization variable

the topical Theme is in this literature. If we changed it to the class variable

is interpreted in this literature as a socialization variable then the class variable
would become the topical Theme.
The thematic organization is realized by the ordering of the ele-
ments: that which is put first functions as Theme. The first element in
the clause that has a function in transitivity (as Actor, Goal, Location,
Manner, etc.) is the topical component of the Theme; whatever
follows it functions as Rheme. It may be preceded, however, by
other, nontopical elements, in which case these elements also contrib-
ute to the Theme of the clause. They are of two kinds: textual and
interpersonal. For example, in

Well I think she has done a good job

well is textual Theme, I think is interpersonal Theme, and she is topical

Theme. Most textual Themes are items which have to come first if
they occur in the clause at all.
The significance of thematization is twofold. (1) In the clause itself,
the Theme is the point of departure. In the case of the topical Theme
we can interpret this in content terms: it is 'what the clause is about',
following the explanation offered by the ancient Greek rhetorical
grammarians. The textual Theme is the point of departure in another
sense: it is the d~ictic element in the clause, that which makes explicit
its relation to its environment. Textual themes are either continuative
(like well, oh, I mean), conjunctive Qike on the other hand, efter that, in
point offact), or structural (paratactic or hypotactic conjunctions such as
and, but, so; if, because, while). The interpersonal Theme is the point of
departure in the sense that it signals the value the speaker assigns to the
clause in the dialogue: this may be a mood element (e.g. a WH-item
signalling 'I am asking you a question'), a modality or comment (giving

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 "so YOU SAY 'PASS' .•. "

the speaker's angle, e.g. perhaps, unfortunately), or a vocative, making

explicit who is being addressed. Unlike the textual Themes, such
interpersonal elements are not obligatorily thematic; they may occur
elsewhere in the clause, so that if they do occur in thematic position
(i.e. preceding the topical Theme), their status as Theme is being
foregrounded - although not very strongly, since for many of them it
is the unmarked condition of their occurrence.
(2) The choice of Theme in the clause also has significance in the
discourse (Fries 1995; Ghadessy 1995): if we examine, clause by clause,
the thematic organization of the text, we find that the clausal Themes
are carrying the text along and guiding the direction in which it is
going. This does not mean the same element occurs repeatedly in
thematic function: this may happen in some registers (for example, a
participant recurring as Theme throughout a narrative), but in other
registers the pattern may be established by systematic variation in the
choice of Theme (e.g. Rheme of one clause becoming Theme of the
next in the dynamic of a technical description). What is noticeable,
however, is that when a text appears disjointed and directionless this is
often due to a kind of thematic drift, an apparent randomness in the
choice of Theme such that no pattern of any kind is set up. The effect
is a statistical one; it is not the case that every clause will contribute to
a particular pattern. But if a significant number of the ranking clauses
in a text - and in particular those that are independent, since they
possess the full range of thematic potential - displays a dominant
thematic orientation, then the text will maintain a significant sense of
movement that is clearly related to its function in the context of
situation. Like everything else discussed here, these patterns are typically
below the conscious awareness of speaker or listener; they need to be
revealed by the processes of linguistic analysis.
In the present text what the linguistic analysis reveals is singularly
predictable once the context of situation is given. Here are the
prevailing topical Themes of Phase 2 (Table 8). The dominant Theme
is clearly she, with it/the dissertation appearing as subsidiary Themes.
The organizing principle of this portion of the text is clearly the "third
party" of the discourse: the candidate and her work. First or second
person Themes hardly appear at all - until Adam's defence at the end
of the Sherm proposal (turns 15, 17). I was puzzled, looking at my
analysis, to find Adam suddenly talking about himself at this juncture;
but he is not doing, he is playing the candidate's part. Of the five
occurrences of I as clausal Theme, four are functioning as projections
of the candidate's view of herself.

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Table 8 Topical themes in Phase 2

Clauses with Clauses with
Total no. "candidate" "dissertation"
of clauses Theme Theme
James proposal 17 10 3
Sherm proposal 31 16 3
Total 48 26 6

The candidate remains as dominant clausal Theme (8 out of 15

clauses) throughout the first part of Phase 3, the time challenge. When
it comes to the scope challenge, however, the pattern changes. Follow-
ing Pat's initial Theme to what extent, which sets in motion the
development of the whole passage, the Theme in the six clauses she
exchanges with Adam is 'the three theories that she [the candidate]
selected', referred to by Pat as they and by Adam collectively as that.
This reflects a shift in orientation from the candidate ('she works
slowly') to the content of her thesis. In his defence, particularly to the
second challenge, Adam operates by changing the thematic basis of the
discussion: he introduces various impersonal Themes, including three
nominalizations which are almost the only nominalized clause Themes
in the entire subtext:
one thing that'll happen
the only thing that would be substantially different
what you have to do
These are all Value in the Value .. Token structure of an identifying
clause (a thematic equative, or "pseudo-cleft construction"); what
Adam is doing here is using the resources of the grammar to shift the
grounds of debate away from the candidate and her writings.
As might be expected, there is no clear thematic patterning in the
scattered segments of the decision and accompanying light relief; while
in the summing-up (Phase 5) the dominant Theme is either she (the
candidate) or the position (her appointment). In Phase 6, however, a
new progression emerges. Sherm and Lee have now changed roles; it
is not quite a reversal, since Lee cannot take on the mantle of power,
but a role switch whereby she has become the accuser and he the
_accused. Moreover he accepts this role not merely as a symbol of past
discrimination but as one who is seen to have been personally culpable
(turns 57-64). This marked shift of tenor is achieved by personalizing

252
 "so YOU SAY 'PASS' ••• "

the Theme: I and you become the primary motifs in the development
of this new phase of the discourse. Then follows a passage in which
other persons come in as topical Themes: Ann, Jennifer, and so on,
serve as examples of the topic under discussion. For the final movement
of this phase, the Themes are once again I and you, but now
interspersed with impersonal it, that, there, as Sherm and Lee manoeuvre
towards an acceptable compromise: one which involves an elaborate
thematic interplay between themselves and sections of their own
ongoing discourse - for example, it referring to what you're implying,
that referring to Ann eventually taught too, and so on. As a coda, Adam
comes in once again with a nominalized Theme what's really critical; this
puts all their Is and yous and its and thats to shame - and so has to be
softened with the aid of a Rheme that is yet another piece of light
relie£ Then, before Sherm and Lee can continue - or else both turn
on him -Adam closes the session.
Adam began this closing Theme by means of the continuative well -
a form of textual Theme, as noted earlier. This typically introduces a
new direction, either predicted (e.g. 'I'm now answering the question
you've just asked me') or unpredicted; here, it is what enables Adam
to get his overriding move accepted by the others. An interesting
feature of this subtext is how small a range of nontopical Themes
occur. A number of the modalizations in Phase 2 were thematic (6 out
of 9 of James', 5 out of 13 of Sherm's; c£ Section 6 above), showing
James and Sherm using 'in my opinion' as a method of development;
but other than these, interpersonal Themes were extremely rare. As far
as textual Themes are concerned, there were some continuatives
(mainly well and oh) at critical points, and the usual paratactic and
hypotactic conjunctions such as and, so, then, but, if, because, and that,
which have to be thematic if they are there at all (and hence appear in
every clause complex); but hardly any conjunctive expressions - in that
sense, along those lines, that is to say were almost the only ones to occur.
And within the topical Themes there are scarcely any circumstantials
(time, place, manner, matter, cause), such as are very frequently found
in many other varieties of text. The subtext studied here is developed
almost entirely around two motifs: first, the (then absent) candidate and
her work, and second, the interlocutors themselves and their own
discourse on the issue that concerns them. The exception throughout
is Adam, who uses the potential of thematic variation to bring about
the resolutions, the transitions, and finally a conclusion to the discourse.

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9 Summary
So to my own conclusion, which must be (like Adam's) brie£ My aim
has been, in intention at least, a modest one: that of showing the
language at work in the creation of meaning. A text is created by its
context, the semiotic environment of people and their activities that
we have construed via the concepts of field, tenor, and mode; it also
creates that context. The relationship that we refer to as realization
between levels of semiosis - situation (doing) realized in semantics
(meaning), semantics realized in lexicogrammar (wording), and so on -
is a dialectic one involving what Lemke (1984) interprets as n-order
metaredundancies. A semiotic event is an event on many levels.
In this chapter, the focus has been on wordings: on patterns of
selection at the lexicogrammatical level. It is important not to think
of the lexicogrammar as a kind of outer clothing, as the "expression" of
meanings that somehow pre-exist the text. There is no prior meaning
that is then encoded into wording: there can be no dissertation defence
(and, needless to say, no dissertation) except as lexicogrammatical
events.
In looking at patterns in the wording I have of course been highly
selective; I have said nothing about cohesion, mood, transitivity,
information structure, tense, grammatical metaphor, the verbal and
nominal groups, or derivational morphology, nor about the lexical
choices that represent the more "delicate" regions of the lexicogram-
mar. All these and other systems would have repaid equally detailed
analysis, and more: a rich interpretation of the grammar of any text
would itself constitute a text of vastly greater length than the original.
I chose to discuss one or two systems that related rather clearly, as it
seemed to me, to the functions of the text in its particular context of
culture. The text before us - and the subtext picked out for closer
attention - exemplified the power of discourse to change the environ-
ment that engendered it. In particular, Lee emerges from the text as a
changed persona; and in the process, her relation with all the others has
undergone a change. We might want to think of the entire text as a
kind of expanded performative: 'We dub thee PhD.' But this would
obscure a more fundamental point, which is that every text is perfor-
mative in this sense. There can be no semiotic act that leaves the world
exactly as it was before.

254
 APPENDIX 1
TRANSCRIPTION OF "SUBTEXT"*

* Numbers in this transcript refer to tum numbers, not to lines. The

text is that of the complete or shared text, i.e. lines 1491-1778.

Legend
// tone group boundary (always also foot boundary)
/ foot boundary
" silent beat
bold location of tonic prominence (focus of information)
pause (sufficient to disrupt rhythm)
incomplete clause

1 tone 1 (falling tonic) 1 + wide fall 1 - narrow fall

2 tone 2 (rising tonic) 2 variant having sharp fall-rise
3 tone 3 ('level' tonic, realized as low rise)
4 tone 4 (falling-rising tonic)
5 tone 5 {rising-falling tonic)
13 tone 1 followed by tone 3 in compound tone group
53 tone 5 followed by tone 3 in compound tone group

1 A. ff 1 .,. so / you say/ pass //

2]. // 1 oh yeah//
3 A. // 2.,. is / that a ... // 1 that's a / neutral / term //
4]. // 1.,. I'm/ not / sure //
5 S. ff 1 what are you / looking for/ Adam//
6 A. // 4 well I ... .,. I/ guess I/ have in the/ back of/ my mind that

255
 APPENDIX I

- II 1 • that I / want to be / able to con/vey / some sense of

...• the com/mittee's res/ponse//
7 S. II 1 • the com/mittee's res/ponse to the / enterprise as a/ whole//
8 ]. II 1 well I // 4 think/ my sense/ is that ... // 1 • she has/ done
• a / good / job // 4 • and she / certainly/ has -// 4 • I mean
/ this/ project for/ her has been // 1 everything and / more I
/ think that a // 1 dissertation / should be// 1 and at the / stage
of her pro/fessional de/velopment I / think this is / really a /
good / job and she // 1 ought to be com/mended II 1 certainly
she / ought to be com/mended for the/ very thing that/ Peg/
mentioned// 1 no / stone was / left un/tumed // 4. I/ think
in the/ future she'll // 4 have to de/velop / som e / sense of//
1 what stones / aren't worth I lifting you/ know but// 1 • but
/ that may just/ come ... / come with exp - // 1 • I mean she
/ can't. she / can't/ publish a // 1 monograph of/ that//
9 S. II 4 problem with/ that in the / disser/tation / Ja mes is that ifshe
II 1 didn't / tum them / someone on this com/mittee would
have said/ should you have ex/amined-
10 ]. II 1 right // 5 • but / I think / I think though / she felt this
com/pulsion about / that
11 S. II 1 her/self//
12 ]. II 1 yeah// 1 • her/self she // 5 wasn't really / worried about us/
looking over her / shoulder// 4 • and so / she probably / has
to develop / that sense but I // 1 think / that'll just/ come with
a - / you know with/ more ... / more/ research//
13 A. II 4. oh I/ think/ part ofit / was that// 3. you / know// 4.
that the / question that / you raised early / on and // 4 some of
the / questions that / I raised // 1 she got to / thinking about /
kinds of/ questions // 1 not / necessarily a/bout spe/cific /
things but I / • I / mean I // 1 think she's I learned something
about ...• the / kinds of/ questions that / • as / Sherm says / •
people/ would have asked // 2 Sherm //
14 S. II 4 • it's a / fine / job // 4 • by / my I lights // 4 • I/ would
have / wished it were I shorter II 1 • I I have some/ sympathy
for the twenty/five page / psych disser/tations ... // 4 this ...
the / one/ comment I'd/ have // 1 has to / do with her/
writing ... this I up ... // 4 her ... the disser/tation was /
written ...• was/ written within the / frame // 3 these are the
/ extant / theories let's // 3 use thes e to de/rive hy/potheses
and // 3 get some / data and // 1 cast them a/gains� ...• a/
gainst the / theories // 1 • and / that's ... / fine // 1 • but it's

256
 TRANSCRIPTION OF "SUBTEXT"

/ also a / limit II 1 + • because it/ leads her/ • for ex/ample /

not to // 1 ask such / questions as the / kind of thing I was /
pushing her on a / little bit // 1 what al/temative / meanings
might be / given to ... the ...• the / class / variable // 1 other
than the / sociali/zation it is // 4 true that / in this / literature
the // 1 class variable is in/terpreted as a/ socialization/ variable
// 1 • but / that's not I. I necessarily the / case if you // 4 start
from the more / general question of// 1 how can we ex/plain
/ radicalism // 4 rather than the / more par/ticular / question
of II l given the / theories / currently / used to ex/plain /
radicalism ... // 1 • she / could I think / write some of/ this
stuff/ up wi/thin the more // 1 limited I frame it'd be // 13
better it / seems to / me if she would // 1 • ex/pand her /
vision a // 1 little bit // 1 • so that she's / not / necessarily /
limited • al/though I - ... // 1 well / • / let me / take it /
back // 1 • in the / longer / run I would / want her to /. / do
that // 4 • in the / shorter/ run I'm // 1 not so / sure // 1 • it
/ may be /wise to re/strict her / vision // 1 • in / order to ...•
to I get some things / done // 1 • and / out I //I think it's im/
portant for / her to ...• to / quickly / move • to / get at least /
one piece / out and in the / literature just to / give her the /
confidence that she can / do it // 1 • I re/acted to that / forty
year old / woman comment// 1 • because I think / that's ... /
that's the / danger for/ Pat - ... // 1 • for/ Lee // 4 • if she
/ thinks of her/self that / way she may / well not / think of
her/self as ... // 3 • you / know a // 3 young I person // 3 •
in/itiating a re/search ca/reer // 3 getting things / moving // 1
and/ so on that - //
15 A. II 13 I can / tell you what her / view on / that is and / that is //
4. I'm I older and // 4 therefore I'm in a / worse com/petitive
po/sition and I've // 1 really got to pro/duce //
16 S. II 1 • but I'm I smarter //
17 A. II 1 and I'm I going to //
18 J. II 1 Adam a/long those /lines does // 2 she / see the / length of/
time it / took her to / finish this / thesis as pre/ dictive of/ what
she - • her pro/duction /record//
19 A. II 1 actually it's ... // 1 • it's / not / all that / long / 1 given the
/ norm in soci/ ology // 4 that - • I / think that the ...• the
first / draft of her pro/posal // 1 • was / less than / three years
a/go // 1 • and / then she / did col/lect you / know a sub/
stantial a/mount of/ data // 1 while she . . . and / she's been

257
 APPENDIX I

/ working the full / time // 4 • and / I don't / know that /

given that she / did collect her / own / data and // 4 did as we
/ all can / see a tre/mendous / search of the / literature // 4
and a tre/mendous a/mount of a/nalysis // 1 I don't / know
that it was / that / slow I / mean I // 4 don't think she was /
dragging her/ heels very/ much in this/ period//
20 S. II 1 James may be / thinking / more of her ..... her / total /
graduate ca/reer
21 A. II .. but I/ do/ also - II 1 yeah// 1 .. that's/ true// 1 - • and
I ..... and I / think she's / a/ware of this and I / think you /
know she - ... // 4 • I / think one / thing that'll / happen I
/ think that ... // 1 .. that/ Mel may en/courage her// 1. and
I / think that'll be / all to the / good //
22 P. II 4 • to / what ex/tent are / these / .. the / three / theories that
she se/lected // 1 truly repre/sentative of/ theories in this /
area//
23 II
A. 1 that's / it / .. II 1 that's /it II
24 II
P. 1 • they/ are in/deed//
25 II
S. 1 yeah //
26 II
P. 1 oh// 2 they are/ the/ theories//
27 A. II 1 that's about / it //
28 P. II 1 they are / not/ really repre/sentative / then //
29 S. II 1 well there are // 1 • there are / vari/ations // 1 • there are /
variations // 1 on/ themes but ... // 4 ... but I l don't know
of any / major con/tender .. there / may be II 1 .. well / I don't
/ know of / anything that / looks much / different from the /
things she's ...• she has / looked at in the spe/cific / time//
30 A. II 4. ex/cept for the/ sense that -
31 P. II 1 . so / nobody / nobody would at/tack her on / that ground /
then if she - //
32 A. II 1 oh no/ I don't I think so// 4. I think the/ only/ thing that
would be sub/stantially / different would be a // 1 real / social
/ structuralist who would / say // 4 • you / don't have to /
worry about cog/nitions // 1 what you have to / do is / find
the lo/cation of these / people in the / social / structure // 1
- • and / then you'll / find out how they're / going to be/have
with/out having to / get into their / heads at/ all // 4 • and /
that// 1 hasn't been/ tested// 1 - • ex/cept in/ very/ gross
/ kinds of/ ways with// 1 macro/ data which has / generally
/ not been / very satis/factory // 1 yeah / • // t • so I can /
tell her that - // 3.. you / know I - ·

258
 TRANSCRIPTION OF "SUBTEXT"

33 s. II 1 • she's I won //
34]. II 1 . she's / over/come II
35 A. II 1 yeah // 1 • I / told her the I story· of when I / took my /
orals // 1 • it was / big Jack / Bismark and // 1 Jedley /
Still/well and // 1 they came / out of the / oral and / Still/well
says / you're going to / have to / tell him / Jack and // 1
Bismark says oh / no he says / go on I you tell him / Jedley //
1 • it was / this whole I business // 1 • she / already / knows
so there's // 1 no I point //1 • let me - / • let me / go / get
her and // 1 bring her / in II
36 P. II 1 yeah it was an I excellent I job I / think II
37 A. II 1 + got to/ figure out I how to get/ out of here II
38 S. II 1 someone/ help/ Adam//
39 P. II 1 + she's been/ teaching new / courses // 1 + too / every se/
mester // 2 hasn't she II
40 S. II l yeah// 1 • she/ has// 3 • they/ teach I/ think nine/ hours
II
41 ]. II 1 . for a / while she was in/ danger of/ losing her ... /slot//
2 wasn't she //
42 P. II 2 • well / wasn't the po/sition o/riginally just a / one year po/
sition //
43 S. II 4 • yeah it / wasn't ...• it I wasn't that / she was in / danger
of/ losing the po/sition it was that the po// 1 + sition was in//
1 + danger of being/ lost//
44 ]. II 1 yeah //
45 S. II 4 . and in / point of/ fact I // 1 think it was / opened on the
II 13 basis of an ap/peal which / says // 1 this is just too /
valuable a / person to / lose she's an // 1 + absolutely / first
rate // 4 teacher // 1 + really / very very / good // 4 • I /
must say that her II 4 nineteen sixty/ eight story// 1 + shocks
me//
46 A. II 1 • well we I have something for you to / sign //
47 L. II 1 couple of/ somt;things //
48 S. II 1 Adam there/ had to be I female A I l's pre/ nineteen sixty/
nine I // 1 just don't be/lieve ... // • I spent the/ first -
49 P. II 2. you were in I shock/ there for a/ while II
50 A. II 4. there were ...• there were I certain I people who were .. ./
TI A's II
51 S. II 1. but the/ A / I's //
52 A. II 3 Carol/ Collins// 3 uh I Debbie/ what•s her name II
53 ]. II 1 Sue I Phillips II

259
 APPENDIX I

54 S. II 2 these people/ taught /classes for/ us// 1 - I'm/ absolutely

/ certain// 1 - I'm going/ back and/ check//
55 L. II 1 do // 1 • and I / think you might/ find they were/ married
II
56 S. II 1 - • I'll/ test that hy/pothesis I too// I - • I'm/ curious e/
nough to/ check//
57 L. II 1 • and then I / think you / might ...• and then/ check on a/
nother one// 1 check who was/ acting/ chairman when they
re/ ceived the ...
58 S. II 2. ap/pointment //
59 L. II ...• ap/pointment //
60 S. II 1 I will / check / that one //
61 L. II 1. I / think/ you were //
62 S. II • well I - //
63 L. II 1 • cause I / think you were / acting / chairman in / sixty /
four were you / / 2 not / /
64 S. II 4 • I / was at / some point // 1 yeah // 4 sixty / four or/ sixty
/five//
65 P. II 2. dis/criminated in/ favour of/ married/ women/ Sherm//
66 L. II 1 • the I girl who's / husband was in / anthro/pology //
67 ]. II 1 + • the / girl who's / husband was in / anthro/pology //
68 L. II 1 • she's / now / down at the / state / unit // 1 she was /
teaching before // 4 I taught//
69 ]. II 1 oh yeah // 2 • and / didn't /Jennifer/ Bird teach //
70 S. II 4 Jennifer // 1 + • I'm / sure // 1 well - / • a/gain I don't //
1 know I'm not // 1 sure //
71 A. II 4. I / think/ she / taught// 1 • but/ then I'm not/ sure//
72 L. II 1 • but/ Jennifer was / married// 2 wasn't she//
73 ]. // 1 yes //
74 S. II 1 no // 4 not at ... /not at /that time// 1 no//
75 L. II 2 not at/ that point// 1 check it be/cause - // 4. see the ...
• the / reason I pre/sume that// 4 women were / allocated to
/ these po/sitions is because ...
76 ]. II 2 • can we / use this // 2 do we sign re/lease forms // 2 too
Adam//
77 L. II 1 • of I Clifford's/ teaching//
78 A. II 1 oh//
79 L. II 2 did you / already / sign them //
80 ]. II 5 no // 5 I didn't / sign them //
81 A. II 1 • that's / right // 1 + • we've / got something/ el~e for you
to /sign // 1 too //

260
 TRANSCRIPTION OF "SUBTEXT"

82 S. II 4 • you know / • / what you're im/plying may in/deed be /

true // 4 • but/ if/ • it/ is I ... // 3 • I'm I shocked by the /
fact I'm II 1 also shocked by my / lack of a/wareness of it II

** *** *
83 S. II 1 that's not I true because // 1 I did // 3 • when I Mary went /
out-
84 L. II 4. when/ you came/ in// 1 they went /out//. but you see
/ she was / looking about -
85 S. II 2 • be/fore that / time //
86 L. II 1 yeah // 1 • be/fore you were / in there II
87 A. II Ann-
88 ]. II 1 Wilder //
89 L. II 1 Lowell//
90 S. II 1 Wilder //
91 A. II 2 • did / she / teach // • I / thought she -
92 S. II 1 no there's / this - / • there's a / further as//1 sertion //
93 L. II 1 Ann e/ventually / taught // 1 too // 1 yes // 1 • but / that
just is / not des/ criptive of the I situ/ ation any / more and ...
94 S. II 1 • I / know but I ... / frankly I don't / like what's being // 1
said // 1 it / bothers me it dis// 1 turbs me // 1 • in the sense
that I pre/fer not - ...• to be/lieve it's not / really / true //
95 L. II 3 o I k // 1 fine //
96 S. II 1 + therefore I shall / look for I evidence that it's / not true //
97 A. II 5. and/ he'll/ find it god/dammit// 4 he knows/ how to be
a / soci/ologist //
98 S. II 13 • and uh /. it / may tum I out that I won't / find that /
evidence and// 1 then I'll / really be up/set II
99 L. II 4 well you / may / find it // 4 • and / if you / do // 1 look for
/ marriage as the //1 • differ/entiating / factor//
100 S. II 4 • but I if I / do find it I -
101 P. II 1 + have an un/usual ef/fect then if/ that's the/ case //
102 L. II 1 + • well / I've never been / able to / sort out the dis//4
crimination I've re/ceived as a / woman from the dis// 1
crimination I've re/ ceived as a / single / person // 1 • they get
/ inter/twined and they // 1 inter/act with each / other /
sometimes / /
103 A. II 1 well and there / may be / others / too // 1 other / kinds of
dis/crimination as/ well// 3. you I mentioned I age and// 1
that's that's / clearly a -

261
 APPENDIX I

104 L. II 1 oh yeah//
105 S. II 1 yeah but // 1 that would / not have been / • / relevant //
106 L. II 1 this is / not for I signature // 1 wait a minute // 1 wait a
minute/.// 1 this was/ just a/ double/ copy// 1. I/ wanted
a / copy of I what I /did//
107 S. II 2 • then it's / this and // 2 this just the // 2 two things //
108 L. II 1 yeah//
109 A. II 2 .just/ two things//
110 L. II 1 one is the / abstract / 1 yeah // 3 one is the / abstract and
// 1 one's the ac/ceptance //
111 S. II 1 that will be /. pre/sumably / duplicated // 1 • you'll need/
112 L. // 1 yes // 1 • and they / will ac/ cept the / xeroxing / of it //
113 S. II 1 + good they// 1 +save/ signatures//
114 L. // 4 • well / that / may have been a / personal / thing but the //
4 reason/ given wasn't/ based on/ personal-
115 S. II 4 • in / that sense it's // 1 + interesting how the / • / climate
and / circumstances have / changed / that is to say //4 if in/
deed there were ... a/ personal reaction/ negative the// 1 last
thing in the / world they would be / rationalized in / terms of
would be ...• you know the //1 • fact that it was a/ female or
/ whatnot at// 4 this point//
116 A. II 1 • well / what's really / critical is that// 4 all those/ changes
de/pended on// 1 how some I mothers behaved in/ nineteen
thirty / seven // ... // 1 o / k // 1 thank you / three // 1
muchly//

262
 APPENDIX 2
ANALYSIS OF "SUBTEXT"

Legend
CLAUSE
[n} clause broken off and not counted
[[ rankshifi:ed (embedded) clause
n- clause uncompleted but counted

CLAUSE COMPLEX
a /3 r ... hypotactic
1 2 3 ... paratactic
= elaborating
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' idea
"locution
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projection
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MOOD/POLARITY
declarative, interrogative: WH-, interrogative:yes/no, imperative, minor,
non-finite
positive, negative tagged('+ tag'), untagged (others)

MODALITY
modalization: e.g. modulation: e.g.
I think it is subjective, explicit I want you to
it may be subjective, implicit you should
it probably is objective, implicit you're supposed to
it's likely it is objective, explicit it's desirable for you to

263
 APPENDIX 2

TRANSITIVITY (PROCESS TYPE)

material; behavioural; mental: cognition, affection, perception; verbal;
relational: attributive, identifying/ intensive, circumstantial, possess-
ive; relational: existential
effective (voice) shown where it is marked option
congruent process type shown where that selected embodies grammat-
ical metaphor

Completion of Topical Themes

at the stage of her professional development
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
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12
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13
what you 're implying
14
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15
the climate and circumstances
16
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17
what's really critical
18
all those changes

264
 ANALYSIS OF "SUBTEXT"

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265
 APPENDIX 2

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267
 APPENDIX 2

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283
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285
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286
 APPENDIX3

Dear Friend of ZPG:

At 7 .00 a.m. on October 25, our phones started to ring. Calls
jammed our switchboard all day. Staffers stayed late into the night,
answering questions and talking with reporters from newspapers,
radio stations, wire services and TV stations in every part of the
country.
When we released the results of ZPG's 1985 Urban Stress Test we
had no idea we'd get such an overwhelming response. Media and
public reaction has been nothing short of incredible!
At first, the deluge of calls came mostly from reporters eager to tell
the public about Urban Stress Test results and from outraged public
officials who were furious that we had 'blown the whistle' on con-
ditions in their cities.
Now we are hearing from concerned citizens in all parts of the
country who want to know what they can do to hold local officials
accountable for tackling population-related problems that threaten
public health and well-being.
ZPG's 1985 Urban Stress Test, created after months of persistent and
exhaustive research, is the nation's first survey of how population-
linked pressures affect U.S. cities. It ranks 184 urban areas on 11
different criteria ranging from crowding and birth rates to air quality
and toxic wastes.
The Urban Stress Test translates complex, technical data into easy-
to-use action tool for concerned citizens, elected officials and opinion
leaders. But to use it well, we urgently need your help.
Our small staff is being swamped with requests for more information and our
modest resources are being stretched to the limit.

287
 APPENDIX 3

Your supprt now is critical. ZPG's 1985 Urban Stress Test may be
our best opportunity ever to get the population message heard.
With your contribution, ZPG can arm our growing network of
local activists with the materials they need to warn community leaders
about emerging population-linked stresses before they reach the crisis
stage.
Even though our national government continues to ignore the
consequences of uncontrolled population growth, we am ad to take
positive action at the local level.
Every day decisions are being made by local officials in our com-
munities that could drastically affect the quality of our lives. To make
sound choices in planning for people, both elected officials and the
American public need the population-stress data revealed by our study.
Please make a special contribution to Zero Population Growth today.
Whatever you give - $25, $50, $100 or as much as you can - will be
used immediately to put the Urban Stress Test in the hands of those
who need it most.
Sincerely,

Susan Webster
Executive Director

P .S. The results of ZPG's 1985 Urban Stress Test were reported as a top
news story by hundreds of newspapers and TV and radio stations
from coast to coast. I hope you'll help us monitor this remarkable
media coverage by completing the enclosed reply form.

288
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296
 INDEX

abstract 29,51,59, 107,111,114,150,209 choice 16, 23-4, 95-7, 99-100, 105-6, 127,
action 131, 167
social 52-9 ofkey 35-7
clauses 108-18, 173 semantic 48, 64, 80
actor 89, 110, 112-14, 156, 223, 228, 250 of theme 31-2, 80, 251
additive 40, 174 unmarked 31, 37, 80
adjective 172 class(es) 10, 12, 18, 42, 54-7, 63, 89, 95,
adjunct 111-14, 116 169-70
adverb 7, 24, 80, 112, 217 variable 247, 250
adverbial group 7, 24, 79 clause 6-7, 10-13, 16, 30-7, 46, 61-4,
adversative 40, 41, 174 79-81, 109-14, 117,158, 170-86,
aesthetic 103, 131, 187 197-216, 235-53
Agent 25, 31, 115-17, 228 clause-final 205
ambiguity 28, 220-1, 225 clause-internal 63
ambiguous 34, 60,158,223 clausette-complex 197
anaphora 7-8 complex(es) 24, 26, 64, 154-5, 160-4,
anaphoric 7-8, 10-12, 16,30,33,38,95, 112, 184-6, 197-8,205,212-16,232-3,240,
184-5, 223 244,253
apposition 7, 24, 62, 91 Theme 178-80, 201,252
art 50, 130 type(s) 49, 106, 170, 209
verbal 50, 58-9, 151, 177 code 63, 130
artistic 50,120,131 cognitive 91, 97
attributive 108, 113, 212 coherent 95, 151, 178
auxiliary 134, 146 cohesion 6-8, 15-18, 38-44, 57, 61, 186
axis 147 lexical 8, 16, 33, 41-3, 178, 197, 216
cohesive 7-8, 16, 30, 33, 39-43, 47, 56,
Beneficiary 228 184
Berger, P. L. 130, 148 co-interpretation 43
Bernstein, B. 52 collocation(al) 8, 13, 16, 19, 41-3, 182, 225
Braine, J. 9, 13-14, 126 communication 40, 91-2, 95, 151
Buhler, K. 89-92 communicative 63
comparative 6, 12, 18, 39, 63, 100, 118, 174
cataphoric 8, 10-11, 38 component
categories 6-8, 16-18, 57, 93, 119-20, 230 ideational 40, 53, 61-2, 119
causal 40, 174, 237 interpersonal 25, 29, 31, 35, 40, 53, 62
causative 113, 175 logical 26, 61, 80, 91
Cause 214 textual 25-30, 35, 45-7, 57, 61, 173, 186,
cluin 42, 49 250
chaos 177 conative 89, 91-2
Chaucer, Geoffrey 164, 170 conjunction{s) 43, 57, 152, 174, 215, 250, 253

297
 INDEX

conjunctive 30, 40-1, 237, 250, 253 scientific 164, 168-70

constituent 24-7, 34-5, 46, 93, 95, 241 spoken 11, 63
construe l52, l74-5, 178,182,226,232,254 written 11
context 9-11, 19, 29, 32, 47, 51, 90-2, 95, ethnographer 230
98, 102-4, 107, 116-19, 139, 147, 161-2, ethnographic 230
[67, 170, 186,200,222, 226, 237, 254 evolution 165, 182-3, 185
of situation 38, 51-7, 60-4, 127, 150-2, evolutionary theory 162, 165
229,232,234,251 exophoric 38-9
social 55, 64 expansion 151, 155, 232-3
conversation 40, 44, 52, 60, 63, 130-1, 231 experiential 23, 25-6, 29, 35, 54-5, 57, 62,
co-ordination 7, 24, 26, 62, 91, 102 64, 79, 91, 97, 151, 156, 174, 198, 217,
criteria 18, 88, 98, 120, 174 221, 228
cryptogrammar 152 exponent(s) 6-7
expository 57, 174
Darwin, Charles 162, 164-8, 178-87 expressive 89, 92, 97
dc-autornatizacion 126, 131, 141-8, 160, 227 Extent 25
declarative 31-2, 36-7, 61-3, 129, 15S, 158,
196,200,206,248 fable 44, 49, 59
deictic 7-8, 10-11, 15, 32-3, 80, 145, 208, Field
250 field, tenor, mode 55-60, 61-3, 152,
delicacy 17, 226 232-3, 254
most delicate grammar 79 particle, field and wave 50
demonstrative 38-9, 112 finite 12-13, 25, 31-2, 47, 60, 80, 105,
density, lexical 61, 164, 204-5, 242-4 108-9, 112,116,134,184, 206,214-15
dialect 17, 169 finiteness 25, 145-7
dialectal variation 168-9 Firth, J R, 130, 150, 152
dialectic 170, 182, 254 focus, information 32-3, 204
dialogue 18, 36-9, 44, 47, 49, 58-63, 115-19, foreground 175
130, 136, 139-42, 148, 158, 162-3, 241, foregrounded 30, 41, 50, 58, 105-7,
250 119-20, 139-42, 146-7, 151, 157, 173,
diatypic 100, 168 186, 205, 249
discourse 32, 41, 44, 48, 56-8, 92, 95, 97, foregrounding 49, 62, 98-9, 103-7, 110,
149-52, 160, 164-8, 173-4, 178-9, 214, 119-20, 127,148,226
217,222, 225-6,229-33,237, 239-44, free clause 12-14
247, 251-4 Fries, Peter 178, 201, 204
classroom S6, 233 function 8, 10, 12, 26-31, 35-6, 39, 51, 55,
scientific 149, 166-8 57-60, 64, 88-99, 105-7, 113, 118-20,
spoken 204, 243 130-1, 137, 139-41, 146, 149, 152, 155,
drama 147 160, 166, 173, 178-9, 184,197,200,206,
dramatic 126-31, 147-8, 162 209,221,224,228,230,232,234,237,
dramatist 128-30 248-51, 254
dynamic 50-1, 62, 109, 111-12, 150, 160-2, ideational 91, 95, 119
166, 173, 182, 251 interpersonal 91-2, 95
dynamics 53, 96, 160 linguistic 88, 98
dynamism 63 speech 139
functional 26-7, 30, 46, 62, 64, 80, 89-90,
eUipsis 40, 43, 57, 95, 185 93, 95-8, 120-1, 168, 177, 186-7, 231-3
embedded clauses 183-4, 198, 200, 209, 214, component(s) 26, 46, 233
216, 233 context 95, 120
embedding 164, 242 organization 64, 79
enactment 231-40 semantic 40, 92
encode 45,109 theory 89, 93, 96
encoded 32, 34-5, 48, 51,91, 117,240,254 variety 177, 231
encoding 34, 48, 57
endophoric 38-9, 61 genitive 10
English 6-11, 17-19, 24, 26, 27, 30-2, 35, genre(s) 6, 17-18, 44, 50, 52, 57, 60-1, 89,
37,43,49,61,63,92-3, 95,102,111, 100, 150, 177
113, 117-18, 127,134, 139, 145-6, 150, Gibson, Walker 160, 162
152, 164, 168-74, 177,231,240 Given 31-4, 61, 173, 178, 184, 204-
modem 7, 9, 11, 113, 118 goal 89, 113, 156, 228, 250

298
 INDEX

Golding, William 88-9, 98, 106, 110, 120 intricacy 243-4

goods-&-services 139-40, 206, 208, 224 Italian 170
grammar 7, 19, 24, 29-35, 46-9, 54, 61,
79-80, 92-3, 97-112, 127, 130-9, 150-2, Jakobson, R. 5, 8, 229
160, 166-86, 197-8, 222-54
systemic(-functional) 150, 170, 240 key 29,35-8,56, 232
granunatics 186 Kinkead-Weekes, M. 107, 110, 114
Greek 162, 170, 250
Gregor, I. 107,110, 114 Lamb, S. 23, 46
Gregory, M. 44, 58, 127, 150-1, 208, 233
language 5-9, 12, 16-19, 24-30, 32, 40,
Gutwinski, W. 30, 43 44-6, 50-61, 88-121, 126-7, 130-1, 134,
139, 146, 149-57, 160-77, 228,231, 240,
Hasan, R. 30, 43-4, 49, 105, 131, 150-1, 244,254
169,233,240 spoken 28, 40,166,244
hearer 29-35, 54, 62-3 written 27-8, 61, 160
Hebrew 162 Leech, G. N. 99, 101, 150
hierarchy 33-5, 44-6, 80, 97 Lemke, J. L. 150, 227, 254
Hjemslev, L. 46, 48, 128, 150 lexical
homophoric 8, 10-11 cohesion 8, 16, 33, 41, 43, 178, 197, 216
Hymes, D. 53, 99-100 density 164, 204-5, 242, 244
hypotactic 24, 37, 40, 180, 184, 214, 242, power 8, 13
250, 253 set(s) 7-8, 11, 15, 218
hypotaxis 155, 160, 164, 240-4 taxonomy 42, 79
see also parataxis lexicogrammar 24, 27, 45-6, 50, 79, 151-2,
154, 166, 182, 226, 254
iconic 175 lexicogrammatical 8, 23-7, 35-6, 44-50, 64,
ideational 26, 40, 45-9, 53, 62-4, 91-2, 95-7, 79, 141, 161, 185-6, 197, 243
119, 150-1, 159-61, 171-80 lexis 11, 19, 23
component 40, 53,61-2, 119 linguistics 5, 9, 16-19, 45, 89-90, 149, 151
function 91, 119 listener 91, 95-6, 152, 173, 251
meaning 62-3, 91, 95, 177 literary 5-9, 16-20, 43-4, 48-9, 52, 57-60,
ideology 48, 151-2 88-92,99-105, 119-20, 127-8, 131,
imagery 104, 107 149-51, 177
imagination 108, 147, 160-2, 165-6 literature 5-9, 16-19, 48, 56, 60, 88-9, 92,
imperative 31, 36, 139, 200, 206, 208 97, 102, 107, 130, 177, 185-6, 226
impersonal 252 Location 25, 250
indeterminacy 33, 47, 51, 93, 139-40, 145-6 logical 26
indetenninate 50-3, 106 logical-semantic 173-6, 214-15, 232
indicative 139, 145-6 Luckmann, T. 130, 148
information 27-38, 44, 47, 57, 61, 63, 95, Lyell, Sir Charles 162, 179
139-40, 151, 168, 172-5, 204-5, 220-5, lyric 42, 53, 147, 177
232-4
focus 33, 204 Malinowski, B. 60, 90, 240
structure 27-8, 33-8, 44, 61, 151, 170, Manner 158,214,250,253
197,205,221,233,254 material processes 209
system(s) 27, 35, 43-6 McIntosh, A. 18, 100, 130
unit 27, 32-7 McKellar, G. B. 162, 165
instantiation 54, 152 meaning 17, 31-62, 79-80, 90-2, 95-8,
interaction 19, 29, 37, 47, 51, 56-63, 92, 95, 102-7, 110,116, 119-21, 127, 130-1, 135,
120, 129, 182 141, 145-6, 149-52, 167, 173, 177, 186,
interpersonal 23, 25-6, 29, 31, 35, 37, 40, 221,227,228,231,244,254
45-7, 49, 53, 55-7,62-4, 79,91-2,95-7, act of 52, 145
136, 151, 155, 157, 159, 161, 171, 177, choices in 97
179-80, 183,200,201,217, 232-4, potential 51- 3, 58, 90, 92, 96, 102
249-51, 253 meaning-making 231
interrogative 31, 36-7, 61, 92, 155, 158, 248 meaningful 6, 19, 55, 97
intersubjective 151 Medium 25, 61, 156-7, 228
intertextual 151 metafunction(s) 151
intonation 19, 27-8, 29, 32, 35, 232-3 metafunctional 150-1, 154, 173, 179
intransitive 108, 113-17 metalanguage 17 6

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 INDEX

metaphor 19, 96, 244 past 47, 60, 105, 108-9, 112, 115-16, 145-7,
grammatical 160, 164, 196, 219-23, 226, 150-1, 158,160,165,181,183,206,223
233,242,254 periodicity 48, 50, 208
metaphorical 53-4, 107, 118, 206 penon 30,37,39, 56-7, 63,135,229,251
metaredundancy 227, 254 phonetic 6, 19,150
microsemiotic 52, 148 phonological 5, 19, 23, 27-8, 32, 35, 44,
micro-structure 233-4 45-6,49-50,88,98, 102,104,120
modal 25, 31, 36, 40, 134, 139 phonology 19, 23,27, 46,49-50,99, 169
modalities 96, 134, 229, 245, 247-8 Pike, K. 50-1
modality 32, 56, 79, 134-6, 139, 145, 151, poem 6,9, 11-12, 18-19, 52,88,98, 100,
197,206,232-3, 244-50 104, 152, 155, 160, 167, 178
modalization 206, 232-3, 244, 247-9, 253 poetic 8,162, 166-7, 177-8
mode poetry 53, 88,102,149,163,167,177
field, tenor and mode 54, 58, 60, 62, 64, polarity 31-2, 64, 79, 139-40, 145-6, 208,
152, 232-3, 254 233, 244
model 59, 63,150,164,169,174,227 possessive 7, 112, 208
modifier 8, 10-11, 14-15, 95, 111, 113, 115, pragmatic 90
222 Prague School 29, 92, 150
modulation 37, 61, 79, 134, 139-40, 232-3, predicate 102
244, 246-9 predicator 200
monologic 229, 241, 243 preposition 24, 32, 111, 113, 174
mood 18, 25, 29,31,35, 56-7,61, 63, 79, prepositional 32, 112, 114
139, 145, 151, 155, 156, 158, 171, 186, Priestley,J. B. 126-9, 131, 141-2, 146-7, 174
197,206, 232-3, 250,254 Prigogine, I. 162, 165, 167
morpheme 35, 42 probability 134-6, 139, 142, 146, 206, 244
most delicate grammar 79 process 25-6, 40-1, 43, 46-9, 51, 57-8,
motif 43, 50, 52, 63, 128-9, 139, 142, 150, 60-3, 106, 108-12, 130,135,140,145,
156-7, 161, 170, 177-85, 205, 209, 214, 151-2, 156, 163-4, 170,182,184,206,
217,233-5,247,249, 253 209,212,223,228,233-4,250
movement 13, 48, 108-9, 111-12, 115-16, mental 60, 95, 108, 111-12, 113-14, 115,
127, 137, 141, 144, 158-9, 162, 173, 175, 117, 135, 206
201,208,217,234,251 relational 63
Mukafovsky,J. 130-1, 147, 149 semantic 48, 53, 63
pronoun 7-8, 11, 14, 16, 30, 31
narrative 13, 36, 38-9, 41, 44, 47, 49, 52, prose 5, 9, 11-13, 15, 17, 49, 52, 88, 98, 107,
58-61, 96, 107-8, 136-7, 147, 151, 177, 118, 126, 130
200, 206, 251 prosodic 233-4
network 23-4, 30, 45, 64, 79-80, 96-7, 221, protolanguage 161
223-5
New 32-3, 61, 173-6, 178-86, 204
question 31-3, 36-7, 39, 61, 92, 95-6
Newton, Isaac 152, 164, 170, 172, 174
nominal 12-13, 111, 115, 175, 183
group(s) 7-8, 10-12, 14-16, 24-5, 30-2, Range 157
34, 79,80, 170,174,176,183,198, 208-9, rank 6-7, 10,24,27, 35, 46, 79
217, 222 scale 28, 46, 79
nominalization 30, 160, 164, 170, 172, 182, rankshift(ed) 7, 10, 12, 198
197 realization 26, 35, 45-6, 49, 50, 52, 59,
non-finite 116, 184, 206, 214 62-4, 79, 139, 142, 152, 160, 174, 234,
noun 15, 24, 80, 101, 111, 114, 172, 175-6, 244, 254
217, 222 recunion 91
novel 89,100,110, 118-19 recunive 24, 26, 64
referential 30, 38-40, 42, 149, 178
paradigmatic 24, 48, 51 relational 63, 170, 212
paragraph 8,38, 108,115,169,179, 184-5 representational, conative and 89
paratactic 24, 160, 184, 214, 242, 250, 253 Rheme 25, 30-1, 61, 89, 173, 178-9, 182,
parataxis 155, 160, 161, 164, 243-4 184-5, 200,204,250,251,253
see also hypotaxis rhetorical 55, 57, 92, 161-2, 178, 201, 204,
participant 44, 55-6, 61, 106, 108, 111-14, 250
119,129, 208-9,223,228, 250-1 rhythm 19, 35, 88, 185, 232-3
passive 113, 156, 185 rhythmic 104

300
 INDEX

science 99, 161-9, 176-7 taxonomic 111

scientific 13, 18, 50, 129, 149, 152, 161-70, taxonomies 79
175, 177, 182, 186-7 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 12-13, 105, 149, 152,
semantic 160-2, 164, 166-7, 177-8, 187
choice(s) 23, 47, 64, 80, 141-2 tenor 50, 55-64, 152, 231-3, 244, 252-3
component(s) 26, 35, 64 tense 32, 60, 79, 108-9, 112, 116, 144-5,
configuration(s) 58, 60, 139 158, 206, 254
feature(s) 57, 92, 139, 183 text-fonning 30, 39, 44, 47, 63
function(s) 31, 90 textual
option(s) 29, 54, 120 analysis 9, 16, 150
process 48, 53, 63 component 25-30, 35, 36, 37, 45-7, 57,
relation 39, 40 62,173,186,250
relationship 222 environment 28, 145
structure(s) 46, 53, 110, 137 meaning 55, 80
system(s) 23-9, 35, 43, 46-8, 51-4, 57-8, structure 44, 95
61-2,91, 139,141 Theme 250, 253
semantics 25-6, 49-50, 55, 88, 131, 143, 160, texture 30, 44-5, 47, 63, 95-6, 178
254 Theme 15, 25, 30-1, 35, 41, 47, 60-3,
semiotic 26, 40, 48-54, 57-60, 64, 130-1, 79-80, 89, 93,95, 105-7, 109, 116-20,
140-1, 151-2, 156, 162, 165-7, 175-7, 128-31, 136, 139, 141, 146-7, 168,
186, 228, 253-4 173-5, 178-82, 182, 184-6, 197-201,
function(s) 57-8 205,208,221, 232-3,250-3
structure(s) 44, 50, 55, 58 Thomas, Dylan 9, 13-14
system(s) 40, 48, 51, 151 tone (group) 11, 27, 29, 35-7, 173, 204-5
semogenic 173 tonic 11, 205
Shakespeare, William 18, 43, 50 accent 32-3, 36
Sinclair,J. McH. 24, 43, 57, 88, 150-1, 233 prominence 32-6
Sinfield, A. 155, 160-1 transitive 109-17
sonnet 9, 50-2, 104 transitivity 25-6, 35, 47, 49, 55, 57, 60, 101,
speaker 17, 29-39, 61-3, 91-7, 119, 134, 139, 107, 109-11, 113, 118-20, 151, 156-7,
146,152, 173,235,241-4,250-1 160,171,186, 197,200,209-10,223-4,
speaker-audience 47 226,233,250,254
speaker-hearer 147
speaker-oriented 31 universal 30, 89, 173
speaker-Theme 173 unmarked 10,28, 31-9,64, 79-80,96, 127,
speech 36, 39-41, 45, 54, 55, 60, 62, 91, 97, 131,200,205, 251
139,144,147,204,228,232, 242-3
spontaneous 37, 40, 44, 52, 58, 60, 243
strata/stratal/stratum 23-4, 44, 46, 49, 150 verb 12, 24-5, 31, 60, 80, 101, 105, 108-9,
structure-generating 30 112, 115, 135, 145, 170, 174-5, 206, 222
stylistics 5-6, 8, 99-100, 106, 127, 149, 177 verbal art 58-9, 151,177
Subject 25, 31-2, 61, 63, 111,180,200, 206, verbal gtoup 8, 12-13, 16, 25, 32, 79-80,
208 170, 174, 185-6
subjective 99, 130, 135, 139-40, 247
syllable 32, 34-5, 46, 47, 50 WH-element 31, 36, 80, 250
symbolic 51-2, 55-7, 59, 234-5, 239-40 Whorf. B. L. 91, 150
syntagmatic 7, 48, 51 word 7, 10, 24, 33-5, 39, 42, 46, 80, 95-6,
syntactic 37, 88, 90, 92-3, 95, 98, 104-11, 130, 185-6, 221-2
116, 118-20, 150 wording(s) 131, 225-6, 254
syntax 23,92-3, 104-7, 110, 114-16, 120 writing 11-13, 28, 49, 58, 130, 186, 204-5,
systemic 26, 64, 79, 131, 150, 167, 197, 232 240
systemic-functional 170, 232, 240 academic 176
dramatic 126-7
taxis 164, 214 prose 11, 107
taxonomy 42, 79 scientific 13, 170, 175, 177, 182

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