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Chapter Fifteen

ON GRAMMAR AND GRAMMATICS (1996)

1 The problem

Most of us are familiar with the feeling that there must be somethingodd about linguistics. We recognize this as a problem in the interper-

sonal sphere because as linguists, probably more than other profession-als, we are always being required to explain and justify our existence.This suggests, however, that others see it as a problem in the ideational

sphere.The problem seems to arise from something like the following. All

systematic knowledge takes the form of language about somephenomenon; but whereas the natural sciences are language aboutnature, and the social sciences are language about society, linguistics islanguage about language language turned back on itself , in Firthsoften quoted formulation. So, leaving aside the moral indignation somepeople seem to feel, as if linguistics was a form of intellectual incest,there is a real problem involved in drawing the boundary: where doeslanguage end and linguistics begin? How does one keep apart theobject language from the metalanguage the phenomenon itself fromthe theoretical study of that phenomenon?

The discursive evidence rather suggests that we dont, at least notvery consistently. For example, the adjective linguistic means both of

language, as in linguistic variation, and of linguistics as in linguisticassociation (we never know, in fact, whether to call our professionalbodies linguistic associations or linguistics associations). But a situation

First published in Functional Descriptions: Theory in Practice, 1996, edited by Ruqaiya Hasan,Carmel Cloran and David G. Butt. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 138.


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analogous to this occurs in many disciplines: objects in nature havephysical properties, physicists have physical laboratories; there are astronomicalsocieties and astronomical forces (not to mention astronomical proportions). It

is easy to see where this kind of slippage takes place: astronomersobserve stars, and an expression such as astronomical observations couldequally well be glossed as observations of stars, or as observations

made during the course of doing astronomy. Likewise linguistic theory

is theory of language, but it is just as plausibly theory in the field oflinguistics.

To a certain extent this is a pathological peculiarity of the English

language, because in English the ambiguity appears even in the nouns:whereas sociology is the study of society, psychology originally the studyof the psyche has since slipped across to mean not only the study butalso that which is studied, and we talk about criminal psychology (whichmeans the psyche characteristic of criminals, though it ought to meantheories of the psyche developed by scholarly criminals). So now

psychology is the study of psychology; and an expression such asAustralian psychology is unambiguously ambiguous. Such confusion is

not normally found for example in Chinese, where typically a cleardistinction is made between a phenomenon and its scientific study;

thus shehui : shehuixue :: xinli : xinlixue (society : sociology :: psyche :psychology) and so on. But one can see other evidence for the specialdifficulties associated with linguistics. For example, it is a feature oflinguistics departments that, in their actual practice, what they teach isoften not so much the study of language as the study of linguistics.(And one of the few fields where the terminological distinction is notconsistently maintained in Chinese is that of grammar, where yufa oftendoes duty also for yufaxue.) There do seem to be special categoryproblems arising where language is turned back on itself.

2 Grammar and grammatics

In fact the ambiguity that I myself first became aware of, as a teacher

of linguistics (and before that, as a teacher of languages), was thatembodied in the term grammar. Here the slippage is in the oppositedirection to that of psychology: grammar, the name of the phenomenon(as in the grammar of English), slides over to become the name of the

study of the phenomenon (as in a grammar of English). This was alreadyconfusion enough; it was made worse by the popular use of the termto mean rules of linguistic etiquette (for example bad grammar). As away of getting round part of the problem I started using the term


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grammatics I think the first published occasion was in a discussion ofineffability (see above Chapter 12). This was based on the simpleproportion grammatics : grammar :: linguistics : language. I assumed it

was unproblematic: the study of language is called linguistics; grammaris part of language; so, within that general domain, the study ofgrammar may be called grammatics.

But this proportion is not quite as simple as it seems. The relationshipof linguistics to language is unproblematic as long as we leave languageundefined; and we can do this as linguists, we can take language forgranted, as sociologists take society for granted, treating it as a primitive

term. Grammar, on the other hand, needs defining. Although the wordis used in a non-technical sense, as in the bad grammar example, onecannot take this usage over to define a domain of systematic study: inso far as it has any objective correlate at all, this would refer to aninventory of certain marginal features of a language defined by the factthat they carry a certain sort of social value for its speakers. We canstudy ethnographically the patterns of this evaluation, and their place inthe social process; but that is a distinct phenomenal domain. Grammatics,

in fact, has no domain until it defines one for itself (or until one isdefined for it within general linguistics exactly at what point the term

grammatics takes over from linguistics is immaterial). And it is this thatmakes the boundary hard to draw. Since both the grammar and thegrammatics are made of language, then if, in addition, each has to beused to define the other, it is not surprising if they get confused.

Now you may say, as indeed I said to myself when first trying tothink this through: it doesnt matter. It does no harm if we just talkabout grammar without any clear distinction between the thing and thestudy of the thing. They are in any case much alike: if you turnlanguage back on itself, it is bound to mimic itself in certain respects.But this comforting dismissal of the problem was belied by my ownexperience. If I had become aware of the polysemy in the word

grammar it was because it got in the way of clear thinking my own,and that of the students I was trying to teach. (It does not help,

incidentally, to take refuge in the term syntax, where precisely the samepolysemy occurs.) There was confusion in certain concepts, such asuniversals of grammar and rule of grammar, and in the status andscope of grammatical categories of various kinds. But also, I suspect, aproblem that has been so vexing in recent years that of relating thesystem to the text (so often discourse is analysed as if there were nogeneral principles of meaning behind it) is ultimately part of the sameoverall unclarity.


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3 Defining grammar

In the simplest definition grammar is part of language. If we pick up a

book purporting to describe a language, or to help us to learn it, weexpect to find some portion or portions of the book but not thewhole of the book devoted to grammar. In my own work, I haveoperated with the concept of lexicogrammar (that is, grammar andvocabulary as a single unity), while usually referring to it simply asgrammar for short; this is a stratal concept, with grammar as one amongan ordered series comprising (at least) semantics / lexicogrammar /

phonology. But whatever partwhole model is adopted, languageremains the more inclusive term.But there is a further step, by which grammar is not just one among

various parts of language; it is a privileged part. The exact nature ofthis privilege will be interpreted differently by different linguists, andsome might deny it altogether; but most would probably accept it inone form or another. I would be inclined to characterize grammar inthe first instance as the part of language where the work is done.

Language is powered by grammatical energy, so to speak.Let me approach the definition of grammar, however, from a

somewhat different angle. I shall assume here, as a general theoreticalfoundation, the account of language given by Lemke (1993). Lemkecharacterizes human communities as eco-social systems which persist intime through ongoing exchange with their environment; and the sameholds true of each of their many sub-systems. The social practices bywhich such systems are constituted are at once both material andsemiotic, with a constant dynamic interplay between the two. Notethat by semiotic I mean having to do with meaning, not having to dowith signs; thus, practices of doing and practices of meaning. Theimportant feature of the materialsemiotic interplay is that, as Lemkepoints out, the two sets of practices are strongly coupled: there is ahigh degree of redundancy between them. We may recall here Firths

concept of mutual expectancy between text and situation.

Underlying the semiotic practices are semiotic systems of variouskinds. In fact, we usually use the term system to cover both systemand process: both the potential and the instances that occur; thus asemiotic system is a meaning potential together with its instantiation inacts of meaning. Now, one special kind of semiotic system is one thathas a grammar in it: such a system means in two phases, having adistinct phase of wording serving as the base for the construction ofmeaning. In other words, its content plane contains a grammar as


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well as a semantics. We could characterize this special kind of semioticsystem as a grammatico-semantic system. It is the presence of agrammar that gives such a system its unique potential for creating (as

distinct from merely reflecting) meaning.

4 The emergence of grammar through time

We could locate grammatico-semantic systems within the frameworkof an evolutionary typology of systems, as in Figure 1. In this frame,semiotic systems appear as systems of a fourth order of complexity, in

that they are at once physical and biological and social and semiotic.Within semiotic systems, those with a grammar in them are morecomplex than those without.

physical + life

= biological + value

= social + meaning

= semiotics1

[primary]

+ grammar

= semiotic2

[higher order, i.e.grammatico-semantic]

S S S S S1 2 3 4.1 4.2

Figure 1 Evolutionary typology of systems

Semiotic systems first evolve in the form of what Edelman (1992)calls primary consciousness. They evolve as inventories of signs, asign being a content/expression pair. Systems of this kind, which maybe called primary semiotics, are found among numerous species: allhigher animals, including our household pets; and such a system is also

developed by human infants in the first year of their lives I referredto this as the protolanguage (Halliday 1975). Primary semiotic systemshave no grammar. The more complex type of semiotic system is thatwhich evolves in the form of Edelmans higher order consciousness.This higher order semiotic is what we call language. It has a grammar;and it appears to be unique to mature (i.e. post-infancy) human beings.In other words, it evolved as the sapiens in homo sapiens. (I say this

without prejudice; I would be happy indeed very excited to learn


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that higher-order, stratified semiotics had evolved also with otherspecies, such as cetaceans, or higher primates. But I am not aware ofany convincing argument or demonstration that they have.1)

Certain features of the human protolanguage, our primary semiotic,persist into adult life; for example expressions of pain, anger, astonish-ment or fear (rephonologized as interjections, like ouch!, oy!,wow!. . .). On the other hand, human adults also develop numerousnon-linguistic semiotic systems: forms of ritual, art forms, and the like;these have no grammar of their own, but they are parasitic on naturallanguage their meaning potential derives from the fact that those who

use them already have a grammar. (See OToole (1994) for a richinterpretation of visual semiotics in grammatico-semantic terms.) Thusall human semiotic activity, from early childhood onwards, is as it werefiltered through our grammar-based higher order consciousness.

What then is a grammar, if we look at it historically in this way, asevolving (in the species) and developing (in the individual)? A grammaris an entirely abstract semiotic construct that emerges between thecontent and the expression levels of the original, sign-based primary

semiotic system. By entirely abstract I mean one that does not interfacedirectly with either of the phenomenal realms that comprise the materialenvironment of language. The expression system (prototypically, thephonology) interfaces with the human body; the (semantic componentof the) content interfaces with the entire realm of human experience;whereas the grammar evolves as an interface between these two inter-faces shoving them apart, so to speak, in such a way that there arisesan indefinite amount of play between the two.

5 Grammar in semiotic function

The grammar is thus the latest part of human language to have evolved;and it is likewise the last part to develop in the growth of the individualchild. It emerges through deconstructing the original sign and recon-structing with the content plane split into two distinct strata, semantics

and lexicogrammar. Such a system (a higher-order semiotic organizedaround a grammar) is therefore said to be stratified (Lamb 1964;1992; Martin 1992; 1993).

A stratified semiotic has the unique property of being able to createmeaning. A primary semiotic, such as an infants protolanguage,means by a process of reflection: its meanings are given, like here I

am!, Im in pain, lets be together!, thats nice; and hence theycannot modify each other or change in the course of unfolding. By


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contrast, a stratified semiotic can constitute: it does not simply reflect,or correspond to pre-existing states of affairs. The stratal pattern oforganization, with an entirely substance-free stratum of grammar at its

core, makes it possible to construct complex open-ended networks ofsemantic potential in which meanings are defined relative to oneanother and hence can modify each other and also can change in

interaction with changes in the ongoing (semiotic and material)environment.

The grammar does not, of course, evolve in isolation; meanings arebrought into being in contexts of function. The functional contexts of

language fall into two major types, and the constitutive function thatthe grammar performs differs as between the two types. On the onehand, language constitutes human experience; and in this context,the grammars function is to construe: the grammar transforms experi-ence into meaning, imposing order in the form of categories and theirinterrelations. On the other hand, language constitutes social proc-esses and the social order; and here the grammars function is to enact:the grammar brings about the processes, and the order, through

meaning. And, as we know, the grammar achieves this metafunc-tional synthesis, of semiotic transformation with semiotic enactment

(of knowledge with action, if you like), by constituting in yet a thirdsense creating a parallel universe of its own, a phenomenal realm thatis itself made out of meaning. This enables the semiotic process tounfold, through time, in cahoots with material processes, each provid-ing the environment for the other. To put this in other terms, thegrammar enables the flow of information to coincide with, and interactwith, the flow of events (Matthiessen 1992; 1995).

This metafunctional interdependence is central to the evolution oflanguage, and to its persistence through constant interaction with itsenvironment. In the experiential (or, to give it its more inclusive name,the ideational) metafunction, the grammar takes over the materialconditions of human existence and transforms them into meanings. Wetend to become aware of the grammatical energy involved in this

process only when we have to write a scientific paper; hence, thissemiotic transformation may appear to be just a feature of knowledgethat is systematic. But all knowledge is like this: to know somethingis to have transformed it into meaning, and what we call understand-ing is the process of that transformation. But experience is understoodin the course of, and by means of, being acted out interpersonally and, in the same way, interpersonal relations are enacted in the courseof, and by means of, being construed ideationally. The grammar flows


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these two modes of meaning together into a single current, such thateverything we say (or write, or listen to, or read) means in boththese functions at once. Thus every instance of semiotic practice

every act of meaning involves both talking about the world andacting on those who are in it. Either of these sets of phenomena mayof course be purely imaginary; that in itself is a demonstration of the

constitutive power of a grammar.

6 Grammar as theory

So far I have been talking about various properties of grammar. But intalking about grammar, I have been doing grammatics it is my

discourse that has been construing grammar in this way. Naturally, Ihave also been doing grammar: the properties have been beingconstrued in lexicogrammatical terms. In other words I have beenusing grammar to construct a theory about itself.

Every scientific theory in fact every theory of any kind, whetherscientific or otherwise is constructed in similar fashion, by means of

the resources of grammar. A theory is a semiotic construct (see Lemke(1990) for a powerful presentation of this point). That we are able touse a grammar as a resource for constructing theories is because agrammar is itself a theory. As I suggested in the previous section, thegrammar functions simultaneously as a mode of knowing and a modeof doing; the former mode the construction of knowledge is thetransformation of experience into meaning. A grammar is a theory ofhuman experience.

Construing experience is a highly theoretical process, involvingsetting up categories and relating each category to the rest. As Ellis(1993) points out, there are no natural classes: the categories ofexperience have to be created by the grammar itself. Or, we might say,there are indefinitely many natural classes: indefinitely many ways inwhich the phenomena of our experience may be perceived as beingalike. In whichever of these terms we conceive the matter, the grammar

has to sort things out, assigning functional value selectively to thevarious possible dimensions of perceptual order. The grammars modelof experience is constantly being challenged and reinforced in daily life;thus it tends to change when there are major changes in the conditionsof human existence not as a consequence, but as a necessary andintegral element, of these changes.

The difference between a grammar, as a commonsense theory of

experience, and a scientific theory (such as grammatics) is that grammars


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evolve, whereas scientific theories are at least partially designed. (Thenearest to an independent, fully designed semiotic system is mathemat-ics. Mathematics is grounded in the grammar of natural language; but

it has taken off to the point where its operations can probably nolonger be construed in natural language wordings.) But it is still thegrammar of natural language that is deployed in the designing of

scientific theories (cf. Halliday and Martin 1993).In the next few sections I shall discuss some of the properties of

grammars that enable them to function as they do: to theorize abouthuman experience and to enact human relationships. In addition to

their metafunctional organization, already alluded to as enabling theintegration of knowledge and action, I shall mention (a) their size andability to expand, (b) their multiplicity of perspective, and (c) theirindeterminacy. In talking about these features, of course, I shall still bedoing grammatics. Then, in the final sections, I shall turn to talkingabout grammatics.

7 How big is a grammar?

The semogenic operations performed by a grammar are, obviously,extremely complex. Neuroscientists explain the evolution of the mam-malian brain, including that of homo sapiens, in terms of its modellingthe increasingly complex relationships between the organism and itsenvironment. This explanation foregrounds the construal of experience(the ideational metafunction); so we need to make explicit also itsbringing about the increasingly complex interactions between oneorganism and another (the interpersonal metafunction). To this mustbe added the further complexity, in a grammar-based higher-ordersemiotic, of creating a parallel reality in the form of a continuous flowof meaning (the textual metafunction). It could be argued that, sincelanguage has to encompass all other phenomena, language itself mustbe the most complex phenomenon of all.

While we may not want to go as far as this, there is still the problem

of how language achieves the complexity that it has. Let us pose thesimple question: how big is a language? (It seems strange how seldomthis question is actually asked.) A simple (though not trivial) answermight be: a language is as big as it needs to be. There is no sign, as faras I know, that languages are failing to meet the immense demandsmade on them by the explosion of knowledge that has taken place thiscentury. In major languages of technology and science, such as English,Russian or Chinese, there must be well over a million words in use, if


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we put together the full range of specialized dictionaries and thedictionaries can never be absolutely exhaustive. Of course, no oneperson uses more than a small fraction of these. But counting words in

any case tells us very little; what we are concerned with is the totalmeaning potential, which is construed in the lexicogrammar as a whole.And here again we have to say that there seems no indication that

languages are collapsing under the weight.From this point of view, then, it seems as if all we can say is that a

language is indefinitely large; however many meanings it construes, itcan always be made to add more. Is it possible to quantify in some way

its overall meaning potential? At this point we have to bring in a specificmodel from the grammatics, in which a grammar is represented para-digmatically as a network of given alternatives (a system network).Given any system network it should in principle be possible to countthe number of alternatives shown to be available. In practice, it is quitedifficult to calculate the number of different selection expressions thatare generated by a network of any considerable complexity.

If we pretend for the moment that all systems are binary, then given

a network containing n systems, the number of selection expressions itgenerates will be greater than n (n+1 if the systems are maximally

dependent) and not greater than 2n (the figure that is obtained if allsystems are independent). But that does not help very much. Given anetwork of, say, 40 systems, which is not a very large network, all ittells us is that the size of the grammar it generates lies somewherebetween 41 and 240 (which is somewhere around 1012). We do notknow how to predict whereabouts it will fall in between these twofigures.

So let me take an actual example of a network from the grammar ofEnglish. Figure 2 shows a system network for the English verbal group

(based on the description given in Halliday 1994, but with tense treatednon-recursively in order to simplify).

This network contains 28 systems, and generates just over seventythousand selection expressions 70,992 to be exact. That is a little way

over 216

. (Not all the systems in it are binary.) This network is relativelyunconstrained: it shows no conjunct entry conditions, and it shows anunusually high degree of independence among constituent systems

probably more than there should be, although in this respect theEnglish verbal group is somewhat untypical of (English and other)grammars as a whole. On the other hand, it is not outstandinglydelicate: it does not distinguish between can and may, for example, orcould and might, or between [they] arent and [they]re not; or among the


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Figure 2 The English verbal group: a simplified system network

various possible locations of contrast in a verbal group selecting morethan one secondary tense. (And, it should be pointed out, the optionsshown are all simply the variant forms of one single verb.) So when Iprepared a network of the English clause as the first grammar forWilliam Manns Penman text generation project in 1980, which had


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81 systems in it, Mann was probably not far wrong when he estimatedoff the cuff that it would generate somewhere between 108 and 109

clause types.

Of course there are lots of mistakes in these complex networks, andthe only way to test them is by programming them and setting themto generate at random. It is not difficult to generate the paradigm ofselection expressions from a reasonably small network (already in 1966Henrici developed a program for this purpose; cf. Halliday and Martin1981), where you can inspect the output and see where it has gonewrong. But even if the program could list half a billion expressions it

would take a little while to check them over. As far as their overallcapacity is concerned, however, they are probably not orders ofmagnitude out.

It has been objected that the human brain could not possibly processa grammar that size, or run through all the alternative options wheneverits owner said or listened to a clause. I am not sure this is so impossible.But in any case it is irrelevant. For one thing, this is a purely abstractmodel; for another thing, the number of choice points encountered in

generating or parsing a clause is actually rather small in the networkof the verbal group it took only 28 systems to produce some 70,000selection expressions, and in any one pass the maximum number ofsystems encountered would be even less probably under half thetotal, in a representative network. In other words, in selecting one outof half a billion clause types the speaker/listener would be traversing atthe most about forty choice points. So although the system network isnot a model of neural processes, there is nothing impossible about agrammar of this complexity that is, where the complexity is such thatit can be modelled in this way, as the product of the intersection of anot very large number of choices each of which by itself is extremelysimple.

8 How does your grammar grow?

Grammars do not remain static. They tend to grow; not at an evenrate, but with acceleration at certain moments in the history of aculture.

On the one hand, they grow by moving into new domains. Thishappens particularly when there is an expansion in the culturesknowledge and control: in our present era, new domains are openedup by developments in technology and science. We are likely tobecome aware of this when we meet with a crop of unfamiliar words,


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like those associated with the recent move into nanotechnology (engin-eering the very small); but the expansion may take place anywhere inthe lexicogrammar, as new wording, in any form. The grammar is not

simply tagging along behind; technological developments, like otherhistorical processes, are simultaneously both material and semiotic thetwo modes are interdependent. Early on in his researches into science

and technology in China, Needham noted how in the medieval period,when there was no adequate institutional mechanism for keeping newmeanings alive, the same material advances were sometimes made twoor three times over, without anyone realizing that the same technology

had been developed before (Needham 1958).On the other hand, grammars grow by increasing the delicacy intheir construction of existing domains. (This has been referred to byvarious metaphors: refining the grid or mesh, sharpening the focus,increasing the granularity and so on. I shall retain the term delicacy,first suggested by Angus McIntosh in 1959.) This is a complex notion;it is not equivalent to subcategorizing, which is simply the limiting case

although also the one that is likely to be the most easily recognized.

The grammar does construct strict taxonomies: fruit is a kind of food, aberry is a kind of fruit, a raspberry is a kind of berry, a wild raspberry is a

kind of raspberry; these are typically hyponymic and can always beextended further, with new words or new compositions of words in agrammatical structure, like the nominal group in English and manyother languages. But greater delicacy is often achieved by intersectingsemantic features in new combinations; and this is less open to casualinspection, except in isolated instances which happen to be in someway striking (like certain politically correct expressions in present-day English). The massive semantic innovations brought about bycomputing, word processing, networking, multimedia, the informationsuperhighway and the like, although in part construing these activitiesas new technological domains, more typically constitute them as newconjunctions of existing meanings, as a glance at any one of thousandsof current periodicals will reveal. On a somewhat less dramatic scale,

we are all aware of the much more elaborate variations in the discourseof environmental pollution and destruction than were available ageneration ago. Even a seemingly transparent piece of wording such assmoke-free construes a new confluence of meanings; indeed the wholesemogenic potential of -free as a derivational morpheme has recentlybeen transformed. (Similar expansions have happened with -wise and-hood.)

There is a special case of this second heading perhaps even a third


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type of grammar growth in the form of semantic junction broughtabout by grammatical metaphor. Here what happens is a kind ofreconstrual of some aspect of experience at a more abstract level,

brought about by the metaphoric potential inherent in the nature ofgrammar. A new meaning is synthesized out of two existing ones, (a) alexicalized meaning and (b) the category meaning of a particular

grammatical class. So, for example, when [weapons] that kill more people

was first reworded as [weapons] of greater lethality, a new meaning aroseat the intersection of kill with thingness (the prototypical meaningof a noun). Much technical, commercial, bureaucratic and technocratic

discourse is locked in to this kind of metaphoric mode.We can observe all these processes of grammar growth when weinteract with children who are growing up (Painter 1992; Derewianka1995). This is a good context in which to get a sense of the open-endedness of a grammar. In the last resort and in some sense that isstill unclear there must be a limit to how big a grammar can grow:that is, to the semiotic potential of the individual meaner; after all,the capacity of the human brain, though undoubtedly large, is also

undoubtedly finite. But there is no sign, as far as I know, that the limitis yet being approached.

9 Grammar as multiple perspectives

In a stratified semiotic system, where grammar is decoupled fromsemantics, the two strata may differ in the arrangement of their internalspace. Things which are shown to be topologically distant at onestratum may appear in the same systemic neighbourhood at the other.(See Martin and Matthiessen 1992, where the distinction is interpretedas between topological (semantics) and typological (lexicogrammar).) Itis this degree of freedom the different alignment of semogenic

resources between the semantics and the grammar that enableslanguage to extend indefinitely its meaning-making potential (a strikingexample of this is grammatical metaphor, mentioned at the end of the

previous section). It is also this characteristic which explains howsyndromes of grammatical features scattered throughout differentregions of the grammar may cluster semantically to form what Whorfcalled frames of consistency; cf. Hasans ways of meaning (1984b),Martins grammatical conspiracies (1988).

This amount of play is obviously to be encountered across the(typically arbitrary) boundary between content and expression: we donot expect things which mean the same to sound the same although


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there is considerable seepage, which Firth labelled phonaesthesia(Firth 1957). But between the semantics and the grammar, this newfrontier (typically non-arbitrary) within the content plane, we expect

to find more isomorphism: things which mean alike might reasonablybe worded alike. As a general rule, they are: grammatical proportion-alities typically construe semantic ones. But not always. On the one

hand, there are regions of considerable drift in both directions; anobvious one in English is the semantic domain of probability andsubjective assessment, which is construed in many different regions ofthe grammar each of which may in turn construe other semantic

features, such as obligation or mental process. On the other hand, thereare the syndromes mentioned above high-level semantic motifswhich are located all around the terrain of the lexicogrammar, such asthe complex edifice of meanings that goes to make up a standardlanguage. People make much use of these realignments in reasoningand inferencing with language.

This stratified vision of things enables the grammar to compromiseamong competing models of reality. As pointed out above in Section

6, a grammar sorts out and selects among the many proportionalitiesthat could arise in the construal of experience. It does this by making

adjustments among the different strata. Things may appear alike fromany of three different angles: (i) from above similarity of functionin context; (ii) from below similarity of formal make-up; and (iii)from the same level fit with the other categories that are beingconstrued in the overall organization of the system. The grammar looksat objects and events from all three angles of orientation. It takes accountof their function: phenomena which have like value for human existenceand survival will tend to be categorized as alike. It takes account oftheir form: phenomena which resemble each other to human percep-tions will tend to be categorized as alike. And it takes account of howthings relate to one another: phenomena are not categorized in isolationbut in sets, syndromes and domains. In other words, the grammar adoptswhat we may call a trinocular perspective.

It often happens that the various criteria conflict: things (whethermaterial or semiotic) that are alike in form are often not alike infunction; and the way they relate to each other may not reflect eitherkind of likeness. Other things being equal, the grammar tends to givesome precedence to functional considerations: consider any crowdedlexical domain, such as that of maps, plans, charts, figures, diagrams, tablesand graphs in English; or grammatical systems that are highly critical forsurvival, like that of polarity in any language. But the construal of


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categories must make sense as a whole. And this means that it needs tobe founded on compromise. The grammar of every natural language isa massive exercise in compromise, accommodating multiple perspect-

ives that are different and often contradictory.Such compromise demands a considerable degree of indeterminacy

in the system.

10 Indeterminacy in grammar

It seems obvious that grammars are indeterminate (or fuzzy, to

borrow the term from its origins in Zadehs fuzzy logic), if onlybecause of the effort that goes into tidying them up. Formal logic andeven mathematics can be seen as the result of tidying up the indeter-

minacies of natural language grammars.The typology of indeterminacy is itself somewhat indeterminate. For

the present discussion I will identify three types: (a) clines, (b) blends,and (c) complementarities, with (d) probability as a fourth, thoughrather different case.

Clines are distinctions in meaning which take the form of continuousvariables instead of discrete terms. The prototype examples in grammarare those distinctions which are construed prosodically, typically byintonation (tone contour): for example, in English, force, from strongto mild, realized as a continuum from wide to narrow pitch movement

if the tone is falling, then from wide fall (high to low) to narrow fall(midlow to low). But one can include in this category those distinctionswhere, although the realizations are discrete (i.e. different wordings areinvolved), the categories themselves are shaded, like a colour spectrum:

for example, colours themselves; types of motorized vehicles (car, bus,van, lorry, truck, limousine . . . etc.); types of process (as illustrated onthe cover of the revised edition of my Introduction to Functional Grammar1994). In this sense, since in the grammars categorization of experiencefuzziness is the norm, almost any scalar set will form a cline: cf. humps,mounds, hillocks, hills and mountains; or must, ought, should, will, would,

can, could, may, might.Blends are forms of wording which ought to be ambiguous but arenot. Ambiguity in the strict sense, as in lexical or structural puns, is nota form of indeterminacy as considered here, because it does not involveindeterminacy of categorization. Blends also construe two (or more)different meanings; but the meanings are fused it is not a matter ofselecting one or the other. A favourite area for blends, apparently inmany languages, is modality; in English, oblique modal finites like


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should provide typical examples, for example the brake should be on,meaning both ought to be and probably is. There is then the furtherindeterminacy between an ambiguity and a blend, because a wording

which is clearly ambiguous in one context may be blended when itoccurs in another. A metaphor is the limiting case of a blend.

Complementarities are found in those regions of (typically experi-

ential) semantic space where some domain of experience is construedin two mutually contradictory ways. An obvious example in English isin the grammar of mental processes, where there is a regular comple-mentarity between the like type (I like it; cf. notice, enjoy, believe, fear,

admire, forget, resent . . . ) and the please type (it pleases me; cf. strike,delight, convince, frighten, impress, escape, annoy . . .). The feature ofcomplementarities is that two conflicting proportionalities are set up,the implication being that this is a complex domain of experiencewhich can be construed in different ways: here, in a process ofconsciousness the conscious being is on the one hand doing, withsome phenomenon defining the scope of the deed, and on the otherhand being done to with the phenomenon functioning as the doer.

All languages (presumably) embody complementarities; but not alwaysin the same regions of semantic space (note for example the striking

complementarity of tense and aspect in Russian). One favourite domainis causation and agency, often manifested in the complementarity oftransitive and ergative construals.

Strictly speaking probability is not a fuzzy concept; but probabilityin grammar adds indeterminacy to the definition of a category. Con-sider the network of the English verbal group in Figure 2 above. As anexercise in grammatics this network is incomplete, in that there aredistinctions made by the grammar that the network fails to show: inthat sense, as already suggested, no network ever can be complete. Butit is incomplete also in another sense: it does not show probabilities. If

you are generating from that network, you are as likely to come upwith wont be taken as with took; whereas in real life positive issignificantly more likely than negative, active than passive, and past

than future. Similarly a typical dictionary does not tell you that go ismore likely than walk and walk is more likely than stroll, though youmight guess it from the relative length of the entries. A grammar is aninherently probabilistic system, in which an important part of themeaning of any feature is its probability relative to other features withwhich it is mutually defining. Furthermore the critical factor in registervariation is probabilistic: the extent to which local probabilities departfrom the global patterns of the language as a whole; for example a


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register of weather forecasting (and no doubt other kinds of forecastingas well), where future becomes more probable than past; or one inwhich negative and passive suddenly come to the fore, like that of

bureaucratic regulations (Halliday 1991). Probabilities are significantboth in ideational and in interpersonal meanings, as well as in thetextual component; they provide a fundamental resource for the

constitutive potential of the grammar.

11 Some matching features

In the last few sections I have picked out certain features of naturallanguage grammars which a theory of grammar a grammatics is

designed to account for. The purpose of doing this was to provide acontext for asking the questions: how does the grammatics face up tothis kind of requirement? Given that every theory is, in some sense, alexicogrammatical metaphor for what it is theorizing, is there anythingdifferent about a theory where what it is theorizing is also alexicogrammar?

There is (as far as I can see) no way of formally testing a grammar inits role as a theory of human experience: there are no extrinsic criteriafor measuring its excellence of fit. We can of course seek to evaluatethe grammar by asking how well it works; and whatever language wechoose it clearly does grammars have made it possible for humanityto survive and prosper. They have transmitted the wisdom of accumul-ated experience from one generation to the next, and enabled us tointeract in highly complex ways with our environment. (At the same

time, it seems to me, grammars can have quite pernicious side-effects,now that we have suddenly crossed the barrier from being dominatedby that environment to being in control of it, and therefore alsoresponsible for it; cf. Halliday 1993). I suspect that the same holds truefor the grammatics as a theory of grammar: we can evaluate such atheory, by seeing how far it helps in solving problems where languageis centrally involved (problems in education, in health, in information

management and so on); but we cannot test it for being right or wrong.(This point was made by Hjelmslev many years ago, as the generaldistinction between a theory and a hypothesis.) By the same token agrammatics can also have its negative effects, if it becomes reductionistor pathologically one-sided.

The special quality of a theory of grammar, I think, is the nature ofthe metaphoric relationship that it sets up with its object of enquiry. If

we consider just those features of language brought into the discussion


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above the size (and growth) of the grammar, its trinocular perspective,and its fuzz how does the grammatics handle these various parame-ters? To put this in very general terms: how do we construe the

grammatics so as to be able to manage the complexity of language?It seems to me that there are certain matching properties. The

grammatics copes with the immense size of the grammar, and its

propensity for growing bigger, by orienting itself along the paradig-matic axis, and by building into this orientation a variable delicacy; thisensures that the grammar will be viewed comprehensively, and thathowever closely we focus on any one typological or topological domain

this will always be contextualized in terms of the meaning potential ofthe grammar as a whole. It copes with the trinocular vision of thegrammar by also adopting a trinocular perspective, based on the stratalorganization of the grammar itself. And it copes with the indeterminacyof the grammar by also being indeterminate, so that the categories ofthe theory of grammar are like the categories that the grammar itselfconstrues.

Theories in other fields, concerned with non-semiotic systems, begin

by generalizing and abstracting; but they then take off, as it were, tobecome semiotic constructs in their own right, related only very

indirectly and obliquely to observations from experience. The proto-type of such a theory is a mathematical model; and one can theorizegrammatics in this way, construing it as a formal system. But agrammatics does not need to be self-contained in this same manner. Itis, as theory, a semiotic construct; but this does not create anydisjunction between it and what it is theorizing it remains permeableat all points on its surface. The grammatics thus retains a mimeticcharacter: it explains the grammar by mimicking its crucial properties.One could say that it is based on grammatical logic rather than onmathematical logic. In some respects this will appear as a weakness: itwill lack the rigour of a mathematical theory. But in other respects itcan be a source of strength. It is likely to be more relevant tounderstanding other semiotic systems: not only verbal art, but also

other, non-verbal art forms, as demonstrated by OTooles masterlyinterpretation of painting, architecture and sculpture in terms of sys-temic grammatics, referred to already (OToole 1994). And the newfield of intelligent computing, associated with the work of Sugeno,and explicitly defined by him as computing with (natural) language,requires a theory that celebrates indeterminacy (it is a development offuzzy computing) and that allows full play to the interface betweenwording and meaning (see section 20 below).


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In the next few sections I will make a few observations about thesematching properties of the grammatics, as they seem to me to emergein a systemic perspective.

12 Paradigmatic orientation and delicacy

When many years ago I first tried to describe grammar privileging theparadigmatic axis of representation (the system in Firths frameworkof system and structure), the immediate reasons related to the theoreti-cal and practical tasks that faced a grammatics at the time (the middle

1960s): computational (machine translation), educational (first andsecond language teaching; language across the curriculum); sociological(language and cultural transmission, in Bernsteins theoretical frame-work, for example Bernstein (1971)); functional-variational (develop-ment of register theory) and textual (stylistics and analysis of spokendiscourse). All these tasks had in common a strong orientation towardsmeaning, and demanded an approach which stretched the grammar inthe direction of semantics. There were perhaps five main

considerations.

i: The paradigmatic representation frees the grammar from theconstraints of structure; structure, obviously, is still to beaccounted for (a point sometimes overlooked when people drawnetworks, as Fawcett (1988) has thoughtfully pointed out), butstructural considerations no longer determine the construal ofthe lexicogrammatical space. The place of any feature in thegrammar can be determined from the same level, as a function

of its relationship to other features: its line-up in a system, andthe interdependency between that system and others.

ii: Secondly, and by the same token, there is no distinction made,in a paradigmatic representation, between describing some fea-ture and relating it to other features: describing anything consistsprecisely in relating it to everything else.

iii: Thirdly, the paradigmatic mode of description models languageas a resource, not as an inventory; it defines the notion ofmeaning potential and provides an interpretation of thesystem in the other, Saussurean sense but without setting upa duality between a langue and a parole.

iv: Fourthly, it motivates and makes sense of the probabilisticmodelling of grammar. Probability can only be understood asthe relative probabilities of the terms in a (closed) system.


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v: Fifthly, representing grammar paradigmatically shapes it naturallyinto a lexicogrammar; the bricks-&-mortar model of a lexiconof words stuck together by grammatical cement can be aban-

doned as an outmoded relic of structuralist ways of thinking.

This last point was adumbrated many years ago under the formula-tion lexis as delicate grammar (see above, Chapter 2); it has subse-quently been worked out theoretically and illustrated in two importantpapers by Hasan (1985; 1987). The principle is that grammar and lexisare not two distinct orders of phenomena; there is just one stratumhere, that of (lexico)grammar, and one among the various resources

that the grammar has for making meaning (i.e. for realizing itssystemic features) is by lexicalizing choosing words. In general, thechoice of words represents a delicate phase in the grammar, in the sensethat it is only after attaining quite some degree of delicacy that wereach systems where the options are realized by the choice of thelexical item. The lexicogrammar is thus construed by the grammaticsas a cline, from most grammatical to most lexical; but it is also acomplementarity, because we can also view lexis and grammar asdifferent perspectives on the whole. The reason people write gram-mars on the one hand and dictionaries on the other is that options atthe most general (least delicate) end of the cline are best illuminated byone set of techniques while options at the most delicate (least general)end are best illuminated by a different set of techniques. One canemploy either set of techniques all the way across; but in each case

there will be diminishing returns (increasing expenditure of energy,

with decreasing gains).To say that, as the description moves towards the lexical end, one

eventually reaches systems where the options are realized by the choiceof a lexical item, does not mean, on the other hand, that these aresystems where there is a direct correspondence of feature to item, suchthat feature 1 is realized by lexical item a, feature 2 by lexical item band so on. What it means is that one reaches systems where the featuresare components of lexical items. (Thus, they are like the features of a

standard componential analysis, except that they form part of theoverall system network and no distinction is made between featuresthat are lexical and those that are grammatical.) Any given lexicalitem then appears as the conjunct realization of a set of systemicfeatures; and the same lexical item may appear many times over, in

different locations, much as happens in a thesaurus (where however theorganization is taxonomic rather than componential).


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13 A note on delicacy

Inherent in the paradigmatic orientation is the concept of variable

delicacy, in which again the grammatics mimics the grammar: delicacyin the construal of grammar (by the grammatics) is analogous todelicacy in the construal of experiential phenomena (by the grammar).Since for the most part the lexicalized mode of realization isassociated with fairly delicate categories in the grammar, we can talk oflexis as delicate grammar (this refers to lexical items in the sense ofcontent words; grammatical items, or function words, like the, of,

it, not, as, turn up in the realization of very general systemic features).But this is not the same thing as saying that when one reaches the stageof lexical realization one has arrived at the endpoint in delicacy.

What is the endpoint, on the delicacy scale? How far can thegrammatics go in refining the categories of the grammar? In one sensethere can be no endpoint, because every instance is categoriallydifferent from every other instance, since it has a unique instantialcontext of situation. We tend to become aware of this when an

instance is codified in the work of a major writer and hence becomesimmortalized as a quotation. It seems trivial; but it may not be trivialin the context of intelligent computing, where the program might needto recognize that, say, turn left!, as instruction to the car, has a differentmeaning and therefore a different description at every instance ofits use. This is the sense in which a grammar can be said to be aninfinite (i.e. indefinitely large) system. But if we are literate, then inour commonsense engagements with language, in daily life, we behaveas if there is an endpoint in delicacy: namely, that which is defined bythe orthography. We assume, in other words, that if two instances lookdifferent (i.e. are represented as different forms in writing) they shouldbe described as different types; whereas if two instances are writtenalike they should be described as tokens of the same type howeverdelicate the description, it will not tease them apart. The orthography

is taken as the arbiter of paradigmatic boundaries: the way things are

written determines their identity.There is sense in this: writing represents the unconscious collectivewisdom of generations of speakers/listeners. And we do allow excep-tions. (a) We recognize homonymy and, more significantly, polysemy,where the delicacy of categorization does not stop at the barrier createdby the writing system. (b) We accept that there are systematic distinc-tions which orthography simply ignores: for example, in English, allthose realized by intonation and rhythm. (c) And, as already noted, it


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never was assumed, except perhaps among a very few linguists, that afunction word like ofhas only one location in the terrain describedby the grammatics. These exceptional cases challenge the implicit

generalization that the orthographic form always defines a typewithin the wording.

A more explicit principle could be formulated: that, as far as the

grammatics is concerned, the endpoint in delicacy is defined by whatis systemic: the point where proportionalities no longer continue tohold. As long as we can predict that a : a :: b : b :: . . . , we are stilldealing with types, construed as distinct categories for purposes of

grammatical description.In practice, of course, we are nowhere near this endpoint in writingour systemic grammars. (I find it disturbing when the very sketchydescription of English grammar contained in Halliday (1994) is takenas some kind of endpoint. Every paragraph in it needs to be expandedinto a book, or perhaps some more appropriate form of hypertext; thenwe will be starting to see inside the grammar and be able to rewritethe introductory sketch!) We are only now beginning to get access to

a reasonable quantity of data. This has been the major problem forlinguistics: probably no other defined sphere of intellectual activity has

ever been so top-heavy, so much theory built overhead with so littledata to support it. The trouble was that until there were first of all taperecorders and then computers, it was impossible to assemble the data agrammarian needs. Since grammars are very big, and very complex, aneffective grammatics depends on having accessible a very large corpusof diverse texts, with a solid foundation in spontaneous spokenlanguage; together with the sophisticated software that turns it into aneffective source of information.

14 A note on the corpus

A corpus is not simply a repository of useful examples. It is a treasuryof acts of meaning which can be explored and interrogated from all

illuminating angles, including in quantitative terms (cf. Hasan 1992a).But the corpus does not write the grammar for us. Descriptivecategories do not emerge out of the data. Description is a theoreticalactivity; and as already said, a theory is a designed semiotic system,designed so that we can explain the processes being observed (and,

perhaps, intervene in them). A corpus grammar will be (a descriptionbased on) a grammatics that is so designed as to make optimum use ofthe corpus data available, maximizing its value as an information source


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for the description. (Corpus-based grammar might be a less misleadingterm.) It is not a grammatics that is mysteriously theory-free (cf.Matthiessen and Nesbitt 1996). Not even the most intelligent computer

can perform the alchemy of transmuting instances of a grammar intothe description of a grammatical system.

Corpus-based does not mean lexis-based. One may choose to take

the lexicologists standpoint, as Sinclair does (1991), and approach thegrammar from the lexical end; such a decision will of course affect theinitial design and implementation of the corpus itself, but there isnothing inherent in the nature of a corpus that requires one to take

that decision. A corpus is equally well suited to lexis-driven or togrammar-driven description. It is worth recalling that the first majorcorpus of English, the Survey of English Usage set up by Quirk atUniversity College London, was explicitly designed as a resource forwriting a grammar in the traditional sense that is, one that would becomplementary to a dictionary.

The most obvious characteristic of the corpus as a data base is itsauthenticity: what is presented is real language rather than sentences

concocted in the philosophers den. Typically in trawling through acorpus one comes across instances of usage one had never previously

thought of. But, more significantly, any kind of principled sampling islikely to bring out proportionalities that have remained entirely beneathones conscious awareness. I would contend that it is precisely the mostunconscious patterns in the grammar the cryptogrammatic ones that are the most powerful in their constitutive effect, in construingexperience and in enacting the social process, and hence in theconstruction of our ideological makeup. Secondly, the corpus enablesus to establish the probability profiles of major grammatical systems.Again, I would contend that quantitative patterns revealed in thecorpus as relative frequencies of terms in grammatical systems arethe manifestation of fundamental grammatical properties. The grammaris an inherently probabilistic system, and the quantitative patterns inthe discourse that children hear around them are critical to the way

they learn their mother tongues. Thirdly, the corpus makes it possibleto test the realization statements, by using a general parser and, perhapsmore effectively, by devising pattern-matching programs for specificgrammatical systems; one can match the results against ones ownanalysis of samples taken from the data. Some form of dedicated parsingor pattern matching is in any case needed for quantitative investigations,since the numbers to be counted are far above what one could hope toprocess manually (cf. Halliday and James 1993). Fourthly, since modern


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corpuses are organized according to register, it becomes possible toinvestigate register variation in grammatical terms: more particularly, inquantitative terms, with register defined as the local resetting of the

global probabilities of the system.

15 Trinocular vision

The trinocular principle in the grammatics can be simply stated. Incategorizing the grammar, the grammarian works from above, fromroundabout and from below; and these three perspectives are

defined in terms of strata. Since the stratum under attention is thelexicogrammar, from roundabout means from the standpoint of thelexicogrammar itself . From above means from the standpoint ofthe semantics: how the given category relates to the meaning (what it

realizes). From below means from the standpoint of morphol-ogy and phonology, how the given category relates to the expression(what it is realized by). What are being taken into account are theregularities (proportionalities) at each of the three strata.

Since the patterns seen from these three angles tend to conflict, theresulting description of the grammar, like the grammars own descrip-tion of experience, must be founded on compromise. This is easy tosay; it is not so easy to achieve. Often one finds oneself hooked onone oculation obsessed, say, with giving the most elegant account ofhow some pattern is realized, and so according excessive priority to theview from below; then, on looking down on it from above, one findsone has committed oneself to a system that is semantically vacuous.If the view from below is consistently given priority, the resultingdescription will be a collapsed grammar, so flat that only an impov-

erished semantics can be raised up on it. On the other hand, if one isbiased towards the view from above, the grammar will be so inflatedthat it is impossible to generate any output. And if one looks from bothvertical angles but forgets the view from roundabout (surprisingly,perhaps, the commonest form of trap) the result will be a collection of

isolated systems, having no internal impact upon each other. In thiscase the grammar is not so much inflated or collapsed; it is simplycurdled.

Thus the categories of the grammatics, like those of the grammar,rest on considerations of underlying function, internal organization(with mutual definition) and outward appearance and recognition. Butthere is more than a simple analogy embodied here. I referred above tothe notion of semiotic transformation: that the grammar transforms


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experience into meaning. The trinocular perspective is simply that: it isthe process of transforming anything into meaning of semioticizingit in terms of a higher order, stratified semiotic. Construing the

phenomena of experience means parsing them into meanings, word-ings and expressions (you only have to do this, of course, when formand function cease to match; this is why the task is inescapably one of

achieving compromise). The entire stratal organization of language issimply the manifestation of this trinocular principle. Making thisprinciple explicit in the grammatics is perhaps giving substance to thenotion of language turned back upon itself.

16 Indeterminacy in grammatics

That the grammatics should accommodate indeterminacy does notneed explaining: indeterminacy is an inherent and necessary feature ofa grammar, and hence something to be accounted for and indeedcelebrated in the grammatics, not idealized out of the picture just asthe grammars construal of experience recognizes indeterminacy as an

inherent and necessary feature of the human condition.But construing indeterminacy is not just a matter of leaving things

as they are. Construing after all is a form of complexity management;and just as, in a material practice such as looking after a wilderness,once you have perturbed the complex equilibrium of its ecosystem youhave to intervene and actively manage it, so in semiotic practice, when

you transform something into meaning (i.e. perturb it semiotically) youalso have to manage the complexity. We can note how the grammarmanages the complexity of human experience. In the first instance, itimposes artificial determinacy, in the form of discontinuities: thus, agrowing plant has to be construed either as tree or as bush or as shrub(or . . .); the line of arbitrariness precludes us from creating intermediatecategories like shrush. Likewise, one thing must be in or on another;

you are eitherwalkingorrunning, and so on. At the same time, however,each of these categories construes a fuzzy set, whose boundaries are

indeterminate: on and run and tree are all fuzzy sets in this sense.Furthermore, the grammar explicitly construes indeterminacy as asemantic domain, with expressions like half in and half on, in between abush and a tree, almost running and the like. The specific types ofindeterminacy discussed in Section 10 above, involving complex

relationships between categories, are thus only special cases, fore-grounding something which is a property of the grammar as a whole.

Now consider the grammatics from this same point of view. The


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categories used for construing the grammar things like noun andsubject and aspect and hypotaxis and phrase are also like everydayterms: they impose discontinuity. Either something is a noun or it is a

verb (or . . .); we cannot decide to construe it as a nerb. But, in turn,each one of these itself denotes a fuzzy set. And, thirdly, the sameresources exist, if in a somewhat fancier form, for making the indeter-

minacy explicit: verbal noun, pseudo-passive, underlying subject, and soon.

What then about the specific construction of indeterminacy in theoverall edifice constructed by such categories? Here we see rather

clearly the grammatics as complexity management. On the one hand,it has specific strategies for defuzzifying for imposing discontinuityon the relations between one category and another; for example, fordigitalizing the grammars clines (to return to the example of force,cited in section 10, it can establish criteria for recognizing a small,discrete set of contrasting degrees of force). A system network is a casein point: qualitative relationships both within and between systems maybe ironed out, so that (i) the system is construed simply as a or b

(or . . .), without probabilities, and (ii) one system is either dependenton or independent of another, with no degrees of partial association.

But, at the same time, the grammatics exploits the various types ofindeterminacy as resources for managing the complexity. I have alreadysuggested that the concept of lexicogrammmar (itself a cline frommost grammatical to most lexical) embodies a complementarity inwhich lexis and grammar compete as theoretical models of the whole.There are many blends of different types of structure, for example theEnglish nominal group construed both as multivariate (configurational)and as univariate (iterative) but without ambiguity between them. Andthe two most fundamental relationships in the grammatics, realizationand instantiation, are both examples of indeterminacy.

I have said that a grammar is a theory of human experience. But thatdoes not mean, on the other hand, that it is not also part of thatexperience; it is. We will not be surprised, therefore, if we find that its

own complexity comes to be managed in ways that are analogous tothe ways in which it itself manages the complexity of the rest. In thelast resort, we are only seeing how the grammar construes itself.

17 A note on realization and instantiation

I referred earlier to these two concepts as being critical when we cometo construe a higher order semiotic. Realization is the name given to


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the relationship between the strata; the verb realize faces upwards,such that the lower stratum realizes the higher one. (Realization isalso extended to refer to the intrastratal relation between a systemic

feature and its structural (or other) manifestation.) Instantiation is therelationship between the system and the instance; the instance is said toinstantiate the system.

It can be said that, in the elements of a primary semiotic (signs), thesignifier realizes the signified; but this relationship is unproblematic:although the sign may undergo complex transformations of one kindor another, there is no intermediate structure between the two (no

distinct stratum of grammar). With a higher order semiotic, where agrammar intervenes, this opens up the possibility of many differenttypes of realization. It is not necessary to spell these out here; they areenumerated and discussed in many places (for example Berry 1977;Fawcett 1980; Martin 1984; Hasan 1987; Matthiessen 1988; Eggins1994).

But there is another opening-up effect which is relevant to thepresent topic: this concerns the nature and location of the stratal

boundary between the grammar and the semantics. This is, of course,a construct of the grammatics; many fundamental aspects of language

can be explained if one models them in stratal terms, such as metaphor(and indeed rhetorical resources in general), the epigenetic nature ofchildrens language development, and metafunctional unity and diver-sity, among others. But this does not force us to locate the boundary atany particular place. One can, in fact, map it on to the boundarybetween system and structure, as Fawcett does (system as semantics,structure as lexicogrammar); whereas I have found it more valuable toset up two distinct strata of paradigmatic (systemic) organization. Butthe point is that the boundary is indeterminate it can be shifted; andthis indeterminacy enables us to extend the stratal model outsidelanguage proper so as to model the relationship of a language to itscultural and situational environments.

Instantiation is the relationship which defines what is usually thought

of as a fact in the sense of a physical fact, a social fact and so on.Facts are not given; they are constructed by the theorist, out of thedialectic between observation and theory. This has always been aproblem area for linguistics: whereas the concept of a physical principlebecame clear once the experimental method had been established alaw of nature was a theoretical abstraction constructed mathemati-cally by the experimenter the concept of a linguistic principle hasproved much more difficult to elucidate.


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Saussure problematized the nature of the linguistic fact; but heconfused the issue of instantiation by setting up langue and parole as ifthey had been two distinct classes of phenomena. But they are not.

There is only one set of phenomena here, not two; langue (thelinguistic system) differs from parole (the linguistic instance) only in theposition taken up by the observer. Langue is parole seen from a

distance, and hence on the way to being theorized about. I tried tomake this explicit by using the term meaning potential to character-ize the system, and referring to the instance as all act of meaning;both implying the concept of a meaning group as the social-semiotic

milieu in which semiotic practices occur, and meanings are producedand understood.Instantiation is a cline, with (like lexicogrammar) a complementarity

of perspective. I have often drawn an analogy with the climate and theweather: when people ask, as they do, about global warming, is this ablip in the climate, or is it a long-term weather pattern?, what they areasking is: from which standpoint should I observe it: the system end,or the instance end? We see the same problem arising if we raise the

question of functional variation in the grammar: is this a cluster ofsimilar instances (a text type, like a pattern of semiotic weather), or

is it special alignment of the system (a register, like localized semioticclimate)? The observer can focus at different points along the cline;and, whatever is under focus, the observation can be from either of thetwo points of vantage.

18 Realization and instantiation: some specific analogiesIt is safe to say that neither of these concepts has yet been thoroughlyexplored. Problems arise with instantiation, for example, in using thecorpus as data for describing a grammar (why a special category ofcorpus grammar?); in relating features of discourse to systemicpatterns in grammar (why a separate discipline of pragmatics?); andin construing intermediate categories (such as Bernsteins code,

which remains elusive (like global warming!) from whichever end it isobserved which is what makes it so powerful as an agency of culturalreproduction). (See Francis 1993 for the concept of corpus grammar;Martin 1992 for showing that there can be a system-based theory oftext; Bernstein 1990 for code; Hasan 1989; 1992b for interpretation ofcoding orientation; and also Sadovnik 1995 for discussion of Bernsteinsideas).

As far as realization is concerned, Lemke has theorized this power-


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fully as metaredundancy (Lemke 1984) (and cf. Chapter 14 above);but this still leaves problems in understanding how metafunctionaldiversity is achieved, and especially the non-referential, interpersonal

aspects of meaning; and in explaining the realization principles at workat strata outside language itself (see Thibault (1992) and Matthiessen(1993a) on issues relating to the construal of interpersonal meanings;

Eggins and Martin in press, Hasan (1995), Matthiessen (1993b), onissues involving the higher strata of register and genre).

I am not pursuing these issues further here. But as a final step I willshift to another angle of vision and look at realization and instantiation

from inside the grammar turning the tables by using the grammar asa way of thinking about the grammatics. One of the most complexareas in the grammar of English is that of relational processes: processesof being, in the broadest sense. I have analysed these as falling into twomajor types: (i) attributive, and (ii) identifying. The former are thosesuch as Paula is a poet, this case is very heavy, where some entity isassigned to a class by virtue of some particular attribute. The latter arethose such as Fred is the treasurer/ the treasurer is Fred, the shortest day is

22nd June/ 22nd June is the shortest day, where some entity is identifiedby being matched bi-uniquely with some particular other. (See Halliday

19678; 1994.)The identifying relationship, as construed in the grammar of English,

involves two particular functions, mutually defining such that one isthe outward form, that by which the entity is recognized, while theother is the function the entity serves. This relationship of course takesa variety of more specific guises: form / function, occupant / role, sign/ meaning, and so on. I labelled these grammatical functions Tokenand Value. This Token / Value relationship in the grammar isexactly one of realization: the Token realizes the Value, the Value isrealized by the Token. It is thus analogous to the relationship definedin the grammatics as that holding between different strata. The gram-mar is modelling one of the prototypical processes of experience asconstructing a semiotic relationship precisely the one that is funda-

mental to the evolution of the grammar itself.The attributive relationship involves a Carrier and an Attribute,where the Attribute does not identify the Carrier as unique but placesit as one among a larger set. It was pointed out by Davidse (1992) thatthis Carrier / Attribute relationship in the grammar is actually one ofinstantiation: the Carrier is an instance of, or instantiates, the Attrib-ute. It is thus analogous to the relationship defined in the grammaticsas that holding between an instance and the (categories of the) system.


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(In that respect the original term ascriptive, which I had used earlierto name this type of process, might better have been retained, ratherthan being replaced by attributive.) Here too, then, the grammar is

construing a significant aspect of human experience the perceptionof a phenomenon as an instance of a general class in terms of aproperty of language itself, where each act of meaning is an instance of

the systemic meaning potential.Of course, the boot is really on the other foot: the grammatics is

parasitic on the grammar, not the other way around. It is because ofthe existence of clause types such as those exemplified above that we

are able to model the linguistic system in the way we do. Thegrammatics evolves (or rather one should say the grammatics isevolved, to suggest that it is a partially designed system) as a meta-phoric transformation of the grammar itself. This is a further aspect ofthe special character of grammatics: while all theories are made ofgrammar (to the extent that they can be construed in natural language),one which is a grammar about a grammar has the distinctive metaphoricproperty of being a theory about itself.

19 Centricity

Since the grammatics is a theory about a logo system, it is logo-centric, or rather perhaps semocentric: its task is to put semioticsystems in the centre of attention. In the same way, biological sciencesare bio-centric: biased towards living things; and so on. I think it isalso a valid goal to explore the relevance of grammatics to semioticsystems other than language, and even to systems of other types. Thegrammatics is also totalizing, because that is the job of a theory. Ofcourse, it focuses on the micro as well as on the macro the semioticweather as well as the semiotic climate; but that again is a feature ofany theoretical activity.

It has always been a problem for linguists to discover what are theproperties of human language as such, and what are features specific to

a given language. The problem is compounded by the fact that there ismore than one way of incorporating the distinction (wherever it isdrawn) into ones descriptive practice. Firth articulated the differencebetween two approaches: what is being sketched here is a generallinguistic theory applicable to particular linguistic descriptions, not a theory ofuniversals for general linguistic description (Firth 1957: 21; Firths em-phasis). I have preferred to avoid talking about universals because itseems to me that this term usually refers to descriptive categories being


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treated as if they were theoretical ones. As I see it, the theory modelswhat is being treated as universal to human language; the descriptionmodels each language sui generis, because that is the way to avoid

misrepresenting it.Thus while the theory as a whole is logocentric, the description of

each language is what we might call glottocentric: it privileges the

language concerned. The description of English is anglocentric, thatof Chinese sinocentric, that of French gallocentric and so on. (Notethat the theory is not anglocentric; the description of English is.) Thisis not an easy aim to achieve, since it involves asking oneself the

question: how would I describe this language as if English (or otherlanguages that might get used as a descriptive model) did not exist?But it is important if we are to avoid the anglocentric descriptions thathave dominated much of linguistics during the second half of thecentury.

In practice, of course, English does exist, and it has been extensivelydescribed; so inevitably people tend to think in terms of categories setup for English or for other relatively well-described languages. I have

suggested elsewhere some considerations which seem to me relevant todescriptive practice (Halliday 1992). As far as my own personal history

is concerned, I worked first of all for many years on the grammar ofChinese; I mention this here because when I started working onEnglish people told me I was making English look like Chinese! (Itseems ironic that, now that systemic theory is being widely applied toChinese studies, the work of mine most often cited as point of referenceis the descriptive grammar of English.)

In my view an important corollary of the characterological approach(that is, each language being described in its own terms) is that eachlanguage is described in its own tongue. The protocol version of thegrammar of English is that written in English; the protocol version ofthe grammar of Chinese is that written in Chinese; and so on. Theprinciple of each language its own metalanguage is important,because all descriptive terminology carries with it a load of semantic

baggage from its use in the daily language, or in other technical andscientific discourses; and this semantic baggage has some metalinguisticvalue. This applies particularly, perhaps, to the use of theoretical termsas metacategories in the description; words such as (the equivalents of)option, selection, rank, delicacy are likely to have quite significant (butvariable) loadings.

But the principle also helps to guard against transferring categoriesinappropriately. Even if descriptive terms have been translated from


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English (or Russian, or other source) in the first place, once they aretranslated they get relocated in the semantic terrain of the newlanguage, and it becomes easier to avoid carrying over the connotations

that went with the original. So if, say, the term subjectortheme appearsin a description of Chinese written in English, its status is as a translationequivalent of the definitive term in Chinese. Perhaps one should point

out, in this connection, that there can be no general answer to thequestion how much alike two things have to be for them to be calledby the same name!

20 A final note on grammatics

As I said at the beginning, when I first used the term grammatics Iwas concerned simply to escape from the ambiguity where grammarmeant both the phenomenon itself a particular stratum in language and the study of that phenomenon; I was simply setting up a proportionsuch that grammatics is to grammar as linguistics is to language. Butover the years since then I have found it useful to have grammatics

available as a term for a specific view of grammatical theory, wherebyit is not just a theory about grammar but also a way of using grammarto think with. In other words, in grammatics, we are certainlymodelling natural language; but we are trying to do so in such a wayas to throw light on other things besides. It is using grammar as a kindof logic. There is mathematical logic and there is grammatical logic,

and both are semiotic systems; but they are complementary, and insome contexts we may need the evolved logic of grammar rather than,or as well as, the designed logic of mathematics.

This reflects the fact that, as I see it, grammatics develops in thecontext of its application to different tasks. As Matthiessen (1991b) haspointed out, this, in general, is the way that systemic theory has movedforward. Recently, a new sphere of application has been suggested. Asmentioned above in Section 10, Sugeno has introduced the concept ofintelligent (fuzzy) computing: this is computing based on natural

language (Sugeno 1995). He has also called it computing with words,although as I have commented elsewhere (Halliday 1995) this is reallycomputing with meanings. Sugenos idea is that for computers toadvance to the point where they really become intelligent they have tofunction the way human beings do namely, through natural (human)

language. This view (and it is more than a gleam in the eye: Sugenohas taken significant steps towards putting it into practice) derivesultimately from Zadehs fuzzy logic; it depends on reasoning and


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inferencing with fuzzy sets and fuzzy matching processes. But to usenatural language requires a grammatics: that is, a way of modellingnatural language that makes sense in this particular context. Systemic

theory has been used extensively in computational linguistics; and thePenman nigel grammar, and Fawcetts communal grammar, areamong the most comprehensive grammars yet to appear in computa-

tional form (Matthiessen 1991a; Matthiessen and Bateman 1992; Faw-cett and Tucker 1990; Fawcett, Tucker and Lin 1993). But, moreimportantly perhaps, systemic grammatics is not uncomfortable withfuzziness. That is, no doubt, one of the main criticisms that has been

made of it; but it is an essential property that a grammatics must haveif it is to have any value for intelligent computing. This is an excitingnew field of application; if it prospers, then any grammarian privilegedto interact with Sugenos enterprise will learn a lot about humanlanguage, as we always do from applications to real-life challengingtasks.

Note

1. This is not to question the semiotic achievements of the bonobo chimpan-

zees (cf. Introduction, p. 3). The issue is whether their construal of human

language is an equivalent stratified system with a lexicogrammar at the

language is an equivalent stratified system with a lexicogrammar at the

core.

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