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The Cardiff Grammar: What is it? and Why is it? Robin P. Fawcett

The Cardiff Grammar: What is it? and Why is it? Robin P. Fawcett Centre for Language and Communication Research Cardiff University. Our starting point: the two questions in the lecture’s title: 1 What is it? 2 Why is it? – i.e.

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The Cardiff Grammar: What is it? and Why is it? Robin P. Fawcett

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  1. The Cardiff Grammar: • What is it? and Why is it? • Robin P. Fawcett • Centre for Language and Communication Research • Cardiff University

  2. Our starting point: the two questions in the lecture’s title: • 1 What is it? • 2 Why is it? – i.e. • Why does it exist as a separate entity within SFL? • Why – and how - did it come into existence? • We’ll take ‘Why is it?’ first. So... • Part 1 will try to answer ‘Why is it?’ and • Part 2 will begin to answer ‘What is it?’ • because the answer to ‘why’ will explain quite a lot about ‘what’ the CG is. • But first, a brief, interim answer to ‘What is it?’

  3. Gordon Tucker and I have given lectures and courses introducing ‘the Cardiff Grammar’ in many counties. • A subtitle that I often use answers the question What is it? • neatly - but still inadequately: • Introduction to the Cardiff Grammar: • a cognitive-interactive version of • Systemic Functional Grammar for the 21st Century • The CG is just as systemic and just as functional as any of the Sydney-based varieties of SFL.

  4. Both the Cardiff Grammar (CG) the Sydney Grammar (SG) are components of larger architectures of language and it use. • So within SFL there are: • two major models of language and its use: • the Sydney Model (SM) and the Cardiff Model (CM). • The CM differs in emphasis from the SM (or SMs) in several ways – notably in • providing a cognitive-interactive framework for modelling language and its use - while still • giving a major place to the socio-cultural aspects • (on which Halliday and most Sydney-based SF linguists focus). • Now: on to...

  5. Part 1 • Why - and how - did the Cardiff Grammar • (and so the Cardiff Model of language and its use) • come into existence?

  6. Purpose of Part 1 • To describe the origins, development and current position of a version of SFL that has been explicitly developed to meet the demands to be expected in the 21st Century.

  7. This is the story of how a few relatively minor differences in the description of English developed - contrary to the intentions of any member of the Cardiff Group - to become: • a distinct theory of language, • one with a bibliography of over 250 items, written by over two dozen authors, • one about which introductory textbooks have been published in English, Chinese and Spanish. • Why tell the story? • 1 So you will understand more about this major phenomenon that is emerging within SFL; • 2 So you can decide whether or not it is something you want to know more about - and to use - as many others already have;

  8. To help you to decide whether to buy my Invitation to Systemic Functional Linguistics through the Cardiff Grammar (Fawcett 2008a); • To tell you how to get hold of other materials, (including sections of forthcoming books – • so that you will be in a better position to decide whether or not to use this version of SFL as the basis of your work in linguistics / applied linguistics - as others have already done. • But first let’s establish...

  9. What do you want from a theory of language? • What I want: • a picture - a model - of what language is like, one that enables me to feel that I understand (i)what the various components of a language in use are, (ii) how we use them to produce and understand texts, (iii) what each major component is like inside, and (iv) how they function together in human communication. • Its grammar must equip me to analyze text-sentences, in terms of their functional syntax, their words, and their intonationor punctuation - and the meanings of all of these. • It should be based in a soundly-based, scientific approach to understanding language, taking account of recent advances in the field.

  10. It should have proved itself in rigorous testing, e.g. (i) in large quantities of rigorously checked text analysis, (ii) through being implemented in a computer, and in other ways. • And that is what the theory of language to be presented here gives to me - and to many others. • But note: it is the ‘Cardiff Model’ of language and its use - not just a ‘grammar’.

  11. 1 How - and why - I chose to work in SFL • So - first, a littleabout myself (my CV!) • Born: Sedbergh, Yorkshire (like Halliday and his teacher, J.R Firth) • School: Bootham School, York • University of Oxford: Modern Languages • Institute of Education, University of London: PGCE in TESL • Then to Kenya: • 1961 Kenya: Kapsabet Secondary School • 1963 Kagumo College of Education • 1965-70 Kenya Institute of Education: • Curriculum Development and Research Unit • My task: to develop a new primary English course. • What framework? What theory? (In 1965, note!) • Chomsky’s TGG? Halliday’s S&C? (only later -> SFG)

  12. So I was first - and remain - a teacher • (later a researcher, and now a researcher and writer) • Then.... • 1971 University College London: PhD in Linguistics • Topic: to identify the best framework for use in language teaching (Supervisors: Michael Halliday -> Dick Hudson). • 1973 West Midlands College of Education, then to • University of Glamorgan (major corpus project, SF syntax) • c.1980 Emergence of the exciting new field of Natural Language Generation (branch of CL) • 1987 To Cardiff University • 2000 Retired (!) Emeritus Professor • So what did I do 1987 - 2000?

  13. 2 SFL at Cardiff University • In 1987, within the • the Centre for Language and Communication Research Gordon Tucker and I founded the Computational Linguistics Unit (CLU). • Main research project: the COMMUNAL Project. • Over 0.5 million GBP, 1987-95 (2.5 million RMB) • Research goals • to build (components of) a computer system that would enable humans to communicate with ‘artificial intelligences’ within computers; • to use the ‘metaphor of the computer’ to increase our understanding of human language; • To use SFL principles, and so to contribute to the further development of SFL theory.

  14. Members of the resident CLU team • Director: Robin Fawcett: overall model, lexicogrammar, syntax • Deputy Director: Gordon Tucker: lexis, lexicogrammar • Joan Wright (2 yrs) computing • Francis (Yunqing) Lin (6 yrs): computing, general theoretical development, SFLF, discourse structure, etc. • David Young: morphology, lexicogrammar • Paul Tench: intonation • Victor Castel of the University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina (since 2000): computing, genre, discourse, lexicogrammar • Over time, many other major research contributions from: • several PhD theses (Linguistics AND Computer Science): Tucker, Huang, Neale, Ball, Weerasinghe, Day, Fontaine (and others)

  15. Contributions from foreign visiting SFL scholars: • from Germany: Prof ErichSteiner (1 yr) • from Japan: Prof Masa-akiTatsuki (Chair of JASFL)(1 yr)Dr Hiroshi Funamoto (1 yr) • from Canada: Prof Michael Cummings ( 4 visits) from Australia (then): Dr Mick O’Donnell (2 visits) • (both working on formalizing the visual representation of system networks) • from China: Dr Zhou Xiaokang via Melbourne (1 mth) • Prof Huang Guowen, now of Sun Yat-sen University (Chair of CFLA) (2 yrs) • Dr Yang Guowen, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing (1 yr)

  16. Visiting scholars from abroad • Many, including • Michael Halliday (Australia) • Christian Matthiessen (Sweden-USA-Australia-Hong Kong) • Leading figures in NLG: • David McDonald (USA) • Ehud Reiter (Scotland) • And from China: • Prof Miao Xingwei of Shandong University (1 yr) • Assoc Prof Wang Hongyang of Ningbo University (1 yr) • Dr Li Li of Xiamen University (though based at Birmingham) • Prof He Wei of USTB, Beijing (1 yr) • Professor Zhang Delu of the Ocean University, Qingdao (3 mths). • ... and many others

  17. Hence my many visits to China • In 2008: • 1 Teaching two MA courses at USTB • Using the Cardiff Grammar for text analysis • Current issues in Linguistic Theory from a SFL perspective • Visiting lectures at eight other universities. • In 2009: • USTB July-August 2009: SFL semantic analysis • In 2010: • Sun Yat-sen April-May: • 5 USTB May: Symposium: SFG: the full model (SFG as a generative grammar)

  18. The CLU team’s activities • Research on (i) describing English (and later Chinese and Japanese) and (ii) writing computer programs. • (More later on research methods, etc) • 2Teaching on • (i) two undergraduate BAs • (Language and Communication, English Language Studies • (Fawcett, Tucker, Tench, Young) • (ii) postgraduate MA in in Language and Communication • (Fawcett, Tucker, Tench) • (iii) postgraduate MScs in (a) Computer Science and (b) Cognitive Science (Fawcett) • 3 Supervising CG-related PhD thesesand MSc dissertations (Fawcett, Tucker, Tench, Young)

  19. 3 The products of 20 years of research • (a) Very large computer programsthat • (i) generate sentences (Fawcett, Tucker, Lin, etc) • (ii) generate discourse structures (Fawcett, Davies, Lin) • (iii) plan the input to generation (Fawcett, Lin) • (iv) analyze (i.e. parse) sentences (Weerasinghe, Day, Fawcett) • (v) interpret a syntactic structure as a semantic structure (O’Donoghue) • So ‘the Cardiff Grammar’ is just part of ‘the Cardiff Model of Language and its Use’ • - an entire architecture (See the handout)

  20. b) Publications on • (i) the computational work on lexicogrammar (which includes semantics, in the Cardiff Model) • (ii) other components of COMMUNAL, • e.g. SFLF, the belief system, microplanners, parser, etc • (iii) the Cardiff Grammar, • i.e. descriptions of English, Chinese, Japanese (so far!) and works on theory (e.g. Tucker 1998, Fawcett 2000a) • in the form of • (i) scholarly books (examples) • (ii) scholarly papers in journals and chapters in books – and, in 2008: • (iii) textbooks (in Chinese, English and Spanish)

  21. Look at the selected bibliography (See the handout)- • a demonstration that both • the COMMUNAL Project and • The Cardiff Grammar • are the results of a team effort. • Full bibliography: over 250 items • by over 25 authors • This brings us to …

  22. Overview of recent and forthcoming books • about the Cardiff Grammar

  23. Note especially • the recent book publications in Section A • the available pre-publications in Section B. • These are the mainworks that this lecture is designed to lead on to. • You can order Fawcett 2008 with a 25% discount (details on the handout) • and the new paperback edition of Fawcett 2000/2010, with a new ‘Preface to the 2010 paperback edition’ and an updated bibliography with a 30% discount • You can order the books in Section C, as they appear, for yourself or youruniversity’s library. • And skim Section D to get an impression of the range publications from the Cardiff Model

  24. Aside: the future of SFL at Cardiff • Gordon Tucker, Paul Tench and I have now all retired • - i.e. retired from teaching and admin! • NOT from research, writing, lecturing and teaching overseas, etc. • The future of SFL at Cardiff is safe in the hands of: • Dr Tom Bartlett (lexicogrammar, culture, ideology) • Dr Lise Fontaine (lexicogrammar, computer-mediated communication) • Dr Gerard O’Grady (intonation specialist; replacing Paul Tench)

  25. That’s Part 1 of the story. • What next? Part 2 of the story • What I CAN”T do in one lecture • - show you the whole of the Cardiff Grammar. • What I CAN do: • - give you reasons for • (1) reading the introductory books, • (2) considering using Invitation as the version of SFL to teach (plus supporting materials, - see the bibliography on the handout)

  26. Part 2 • Why has the Cardiff Grammar come into existence • as a distinct sub-theory within SFL?

  27. What is – or should be - the common ground between the SG and the CG? • Let us start by asking: • Who is the world’s greatest living linguist? • Chomsky? No! • Halliday? Yes! • A big claim! Grounds? • For me: the five revolutionary insights that Halliday introduced in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  28. Halliday’s five great innovations in lexicogrammar: • are they the common ground for all SFGs?

  29. Background • In the early 1960s, Linguistics was pre-occupied with syntagmatic relationsat the level of form - i.e. with syntax. • Most obvious in Chomsky’s TG grammar (focus on relating one structure to another). • Halliday too: e.g. in ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’ (1961). • Then in a few years (starting in 1966) he produced the following five revolutionary ideas.

  30. Innovation 1 • In ‘Categories’ (1961), Halliday’s four main concepts were: • unit, (element of) structure, class (of unit), and system. • But in ‘Some notes on “deep” grammar’ (1966/76: 93-4) • he proposed a change in the ‘balance of power’ - in the theory of language - and so also in descriptions oflanguages - • by giving a central role to the concept of ‘system’ - i.e. • he made system more ‘basic’ thanstructure, • so treating paradigmatic relations (choice) • as more fundamental than • syntagmatic relations (sequence + constituency).

  31. ‘The grammar is based on the notion of choice. …. The speaker of a language …. can be regarded as carrying out… a number of distinct choices. …. The grammar of any language can be represented as a very large network of systems.’ • (Halliday 1969/76:3) • => ‘Systemic Grammar’ (e.g. Hudson 1971)

  32. Innovation 2 • Halliday proposed that the system networks for TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc should be seen as presenting • choices between meanings • (rather than choices between forms). • Most famously in the New Horizons paper (Halliday 1970). • HUGE INFLUENCE! • ‘The system of available options is the grammar of the language.... [these are] the meaning potential of language itself.’ • (Halliday 1970: 142)

  33. Also at many points in Explorations (1973), e.g. • ‘A functional theory of language is a theory about meanings, not about words or constructions. …. Where then do we find the functions differentiated in language? They are differentiated semantically, as different areas of what I call the meaning potential[my emphasis].* • (Halliday 1971/73b:110) • * i.e. in the system networks for TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME, etc.

  34. The result of adding Innovation 2 to Innovation 1: • The concept of • choice between meanings in system networks • became the heart of the new model of language. • => ‘Systemic Functional Grammar’ • (Halliday; Hasan, Martin, Matthiessen, Butt; Fawcett, Tucker, Tench, Huang, Castel; O’Toole, Kress, van Leeuwen, etc, etc.) • Implemented computationally in 1980s and 1990s: • (i) the Penman Project (ISI, U. of S. California) • (ii) the COMMUNAL Project (CLU, Cardiff University) • (iii) many others, borrowing from both. • SFG became the dominant model in NLG in the 1990s.

  35. Innovation 3 • Halliday suggested that a clause is the simultaneous realization of • several different strands of meaning (or ‘metafunctions’). • FOUR to FIVE (and more) in the Sydney Grammar, i.e. in IFG

  36. EIGHT strands of meaning in the Cardiff Grammar (Fawcett 2008a):

  37. Innovation 4 • Halliday (1961) suggested the possibility that the system network might one day be extended beyond • the modelling of grammatical structures and items • and also be used in the task of modelling • a language’s lexis (vocabulary) - so creating • system networks for lexis, and so • an integrated lexicogrammar. • First implemented computationally in the COMMUNAL Project- and on a large scale (e.g. over 5000 terminal features in the ‘cultural classification of thing’ network); • See the survey of the literature in Tucker 1996, and the works of Tucker, Neale, Ball and myself.

  38. Innovation 5 • Halliday demonstrated, • by providing a remarkably full description, that • intonationcan - and should - be included in the lexicogrammar of a language. • (Halliday 1967, 1970) • First implemented computationally in the COMMUNAL Project (Fawcett 1980) - and also punctuation.

  39. It is these five concepts that constituted the core assumptions of the Cardiff Grammar in the 1970s. • So the Cardiff Grammar is in a direct line of descent from Halliday’s own specification of the nature of a Systemic Functional Grammar. • But are they still the core assumptions of the Sydney Grammar? • (It seems not, in one key respect..... Back to this later!)

  40. Taken together, these five innovations have immeasurably broadened and deepened our view, as linguists, of both • 1 the nature of language and • 2 the task that linguists face in constructing models of it. • Those who came into Linguistics after the 1970s may find it hard to understand how challenging to mainstream linguistics these proposals were. • The combined effect was REVOLUTIONARY!

  41. What was the effect of these ideas on those of us working in SFL at the time? • They inspired us to adopt the challenging position that • the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and the like ARE the semantics of language. • Our writings at the time demonstrate this clearly:

  42. Berry, in her classic introduction to SFG, wrote: • the terms in a system .... are distinct meanings within a common area of meaning [my emphasis]. • (Berry 1975: 144) • (Here ‘a common area of meaning’ = ‘a system or system network’.)

  43. And Kress (editor of Halliday 1976), states: • ‘the freeing of system from surface structure has a consequence that systems are now made up of terms which are semantic features [my emphasis].’ • (Kress 1976:35)

  44. And I wrote: • ‘Meaning’ is concerned with ‘the intra-linguistic level of semantics. …. A network may therefore be regarded as a summary of a complex area of meaning potential [my emphasis]. • (Fawcett 1973/81:157). • So all echo Halliday 1970 and 1971/3.

  45. , • These quotations from • (i) Halliday himself and • (ii) others writing in the 1970s • demonstrate that the Cardiff Grammar is based on the principles that established Systemic Functional Grammar. • i.e. it is just as systemic and just as functional as Halliday’s version (‘the Sydney Grammar’). • Halliday has described the Cardiff Grammar as: • ‘a closely related grammar [to that described in Halliday 1994], with some descriptive differences but based on the same systemic functional theory’. • (Halliday 1994:xii)

  46. Halliday’s 1970s proposals entail a model of language like this: It is implemented in the computer versions of both the Cardiff Grammar and the Sydney Grammar. To prove it, consider.....

  47. Matthiessen & Bateman 1991:102

  48. In a historical perspective, we should by now, over thirty years later, be well advanced in the long task of: • 1 revising and extending the descriptions of languages made prior to this still new view of language, • 2 testing and evaluating our revised descriptions, 3 revising again (and sometimes rejecting) large and small parts of them, • 4 re-testing and re-evaluating them .... • This has been the programme of research on the lexicogrammar since the 1970s of myself and, from 1987 onwards, of the whole Cardiff Grammar team. • But has this been the goal of the Sydney grammarians? • No! Why not? We’ll come to that...

  49. In my view, the common ground between all SFGs should be the combination ofHalliday’s five great innovations of the 1970s. • The big problem for the goal of a unified SFL: • Halliday - followed by most (all?) other Sydney Grammarians – has modified one of the most central of the five innovatory proposals, • without pointing out the enormous change to the model that this implies. • (Back to this shortly.) • So - When did the concept of a ‘Cardiff Grammar’ arise?

  50. In the early 1970s, my description of English differed from Halliday’s only in relatively minor ways • e.g. my version of the TRANSITIVITY network. • Aside: this has been widely used; it is simpler, more comprehensive, and more user-friendly for text analysts (e.g. by Anke Schulz at Darmstadt). • It was widely used in NLG and MT systems in the 1980s and 1990s (some still in use). • Throughout the 1970s and 1980s there was no ‘Cardiff Grammar’, nor any thought of developing a separate version of the theory. • So: • What brought the Cardiff Grammar into existence?

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