Students: Di Dino, Giana and Dominguez Sala, Maira Nair

English Grammar II

Summaries of: Systemic Functional

Grammar and Lexical Cohesion.

Students: Di Dino, Giana and Dominguez

Sala, Maira Nair.

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Students: Di Dino, Giana and Dominguez Sala, Maira Nair

Systemic Functional Linguistics

Systemic Functional Linguistics or Grammar is a network of systems and choices, that language offers to the speaker/writer to convey meaning or to express his/her intentions through different possibilities as regards semantics, phonology/graphology and lexicogrammar. It deals with the structural organization of English clauses (Constituency); phrases and sentences, from a simple clause to more complex ones (Rank); meanings of language in use in the textual processes of social life, or the sociosemantics of text; construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis.

Michael Holliday in 1960 developed the analysis of SFL. The main difference with the formal grammar (that focuses on semantics, syntax and word classes) is that the functional grammar deals with the meaning of the language in a contextualized situation. According to this theory, it is possible to find many different meanings analyzing a piece of language from different angles, from different social contexts.

Michael Holliday said that the application on SFG is “to understand the quality of texts: why a text means what it does and why it is valued as it is.”

E.g.: In the short story “The Happy Prince”, the phrase “Swallow, Swallow, Little Swallow” has a special meaning because of its context; while in another context it’s just a phrase to call a Swallow, in this one denotes that the Prince is begging the Swallow to stay for another night to help him assist poor people.

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Students: Di Dino, Giana and Dominguez Sala, Maira Nair

Lexical Cohesion

Lexical cohesion is an important dimension of cohesion, it is a way of describing how words in a text relate to each other. Lexical cohesion refers to how the speaker/writer uses lexical items (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and event sequences to relate the text to its area of focus or its field. This type of cohesion operates between units which encode lexical content, such as nouns, main verbs, adverbs and adjectives which are called open-class items. The close-class items are the grammatical words (prepositions, pronouns, articles and auxiliary verbs) because they do not encode lexical content.

There are two main kinds of lexical relations between words:

Taxonomic lexical relations, which deal with the relation between one lexical item with another through class/sub-class or part/ whole relations. Inside this category there are two more branches, Classification, which studies the relationship between a superordinate term and its members (co-hyponomy, class/sub-class, contrast, similarity, synonymy and repetition), and Composition, that studies the part/whole relationship between lexical items (meronymy or co-meronymy)

Expectancy relations, which deal with the predictable relation between process and the doer of that process.

A lexical string is a list of all the lexical items that occur sequentially in a text that can be related to an immediately prior word or to a head word (taxonomically or expectancy relations) that can capture the lexical cohesion and give texture to a text.

E.g.:

Swallow: (his) wings - (his) courtship - (his) wing - (his) wings - little swallow - personal remarks - (his) wings - (had) a good heart - bird’s wings - (his) wings - dead bird - dead swallow - (the) dead bird - (this) little bird – his beak *

Prince: Happy Prince- statue- sapphires- ruby- his sword-hilt- wonderful statue- an angel- on the tall column- the feet of the Happy Prince- the eyes- tears- his face- golden cheeks- human heart- the beautiful sapphire- Prince’s shoulder- the lips- leaden heart- beggar- the metal- broken lead heart *

* some repeated nouns were omitted.

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