The Language Dynamic; Bartlett; O'Grady

Gerard O’Grady [+–]

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

Tom Bartlett [+–]

University of Glasgow

Tom Bartlett is Professor of Functional and Applied Linguistics in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. His doctoral fieldwork was on intercultural discourse between indigenous groups, national government and international development organisations. His research interests lie in the relationship between culture and genre and in developing hybrid genres that enhance the participation of minority groups in gatekeeping discourses.

Language is both a socially distributed system, unknowable to any one individual, and an individually embodied biological system. As such it is subject to recursive biological and societal pressures which enable it to function and change. The Language Dynamic identifies a number of mechanisms that enable the meaning potential of language from the phoneme through grammar and discourse and onto ideological systems. These core mechanisms are: (i) articulation and stratality, by which meaningful units combine in context to form higher-order meanings which are greater than the sum of their parts; (ii) redundancy, as the mutually re-enforcing yet unstable relation between strata which allows for creativity and change; (iii) prospection, as the means by which speakers effectively and automatically recycle the syntagmatic patterns that emerge from language as a contextualised system. In providing an integrated account of the interconnections between these core mechanisms, the book allow us to conceptualise the dynamics of language change and growth as at once a motivated and agentless process.

The book, which underpins functional theories of language with concepts from biological and cultural evolution, social semiotics and systems theory, will be relevant to all who are interested in how and why we can mean and what it means for us as humans to be semiotic agents.

Chapter 1

The Language Dynamic: Recursive Processes from Morpheme to Ideology [+–] 1-16

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

In Chapter 1 we set out our general position with respect to three enduring points of contention in linguistic theory: embodiment, autonomy and the primacy of form or function. This discussion provides an essential backdrop to our theorising of language dynamics and the place within this of the core processes and properties we discuss in detail in the remainder of the book. These are the processes of distinction, articulation and prospection, and the attendant properties of these processes are systematicity, redundancy, stratality, metaredundancy, criteriality and serviceable noise. We finish Chapter 1 with a preview of the remaining chapters of the book.

Chapter 2

Embodiment [+–] 17-53

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

In Chapter 2, Embodiment we have two main aims. The first of these is to set out our view of embodiment and to distinguish it from the cognitive linguistic view that language, like other cognitive resources, is grounded in bodily perception, the sensorimotor system and emotions. While we are largely in agreement with this point, we further argue that as language is a distributed system that exists at different scales and times only some aspects of it can be said to be embodied within an individual at any one time. We argue that through reiterated contextualised interactions language is enacted in the sense that it becomes internally represented within individuals. This leads us to our second major point, which is that as the linguistic system is itself metastable and extravagant, what is embodied has the potential for change and will obey the logic of A-curves, where roughly 20% of the tokens do 80% of the work. The long tail of roughly 80% of the tokens comprises items which are declining and also ones which have the potential for growth. In order to illustrate our points the chapter is divided into a number of sections. The first of which details the cognitive and emotional skills a language-ready-made brain would require before moving on, in the second section, to consider what capacities have evolved within humans and what functions have coevolved in language. In this section redundancy will be introduced to illustrate the stark differences between animal communication systems and human language while at the same time showing how animal communication systems may have evolved into human language. Redundancy refers to the predictability between two occurring thing. To illustrate a response is 100% redundant if the presence of one form entails the other. In language there is no 100% redundancy between form and function though as we will see form and function are mutually predictive. In the fourth section we will illustrate the evolution of a linguistic feature: vowels, in order to show not only how the primary function of distinctiveness appeared but also how vowels developed a 2nd order contingent indexical meaning (a point developed in chapter 3). Finally we end the chapter by examining the relationship between syllable onsets and vowels in English. We do this to illustrate the complexity of the metastable system that has evolved and to show that it follows the logic of the A curve.

Chapter 3

A Systemic and Stratal Account of Language and Society, as Told by Three T-shirts, a Urinal and a Karaoke Machine. [+–] 54-91

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

In Chapter 3, A systemic and stratal account of language and society, our discussion moves from phylogenetic accounts of the emergence of language in the species to consider the ontogenesis of the capacity for language within the individual speaker. Drawing on the work of Tomasello (2003), we highlight the importance of children’s capacity to distinguish structures and their uses as they attend to the contextualised talk of socialised speakers. Turning to the language system, we then illustrate how such distinctions function within networks of interrelated meanings and emphasise that the distinctions captured in linguistic forms are not universal but language specific, reflecting alternative ways of carving up the concrete real into functional elements. We then introduce the twin concepts of articulation and stratality to explain how combinations of meanings at one order of abstraction create new higher-order meanings in a recursive and open-ended cycle. This entails a discussion of metaredundancy and the regular but not absolute correlation between meanings at one level of abstraction and their realisation by features from the next stratum down. We then expand on the indeterminacy inherent in the concept of metaredundancy to discuss different registers as subcategories within an overall language system that are distinguishable in terms of both their semantic content and the characteristic ways by which the lexicogrammar is used to realise the semantics. In this way we see that systems are not only language specific, but also context specific. Once again, these relations are relative rather than absolute, an idea we explore in terms of cultural evolution and an embodied human tendency to balance copying and risk-taking as an effective strategy in adapting to new contexts.

Chapter 4

Stratification, Redundancy, the Mechanism of Change [+–] 92-143

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

In Chapter 4 we revisit the conception of stratification in order to illustrate that an open, dynamic and cyclical system must be stratal and that the relationship between strata must be realisational. We specifically examine the relationship between the higher semantic stratum and the lower lexicogrammatical stratum and suggest a modification to the content expression boundary. Our arguments are grounded in a close textual and prosodic analysis of a short political statement. We show that slippage between strata leads to creativity and illustrate how the use of explicit objective interpersonal meanings rearticulates meanings. This is a topic we will examine further in a follow up companion volume, where we will argue that such rearticulations are a major driver in ideological formations such as populist discourse. The opening part reintroduces metafunctional meaning (discussed in chapters 2 and 3) in order to illustrate how a text is simultaneously the aggregate of particulate, prosodic and wave-like meaning-bearing elements. We conduct a close textual analysis and examine the choices made in field, tenor and mode. Our analysis includes both lexicogrammar and prosody. We note that recombinations of lexicogrammar and prosody have the effect of shifting experiential-like meanings into prosodic interpersonal meanings. We further note that while many of the prosodic choices were predicted by the lexicogrammar and hence redundant others were not. The recombination of prosody and lexicogrammar in order to realise a thought illustrates how the realignment of by the chapter reviewing both Halliday’s and Hjelmslev’s notions of stratification in order to explicate the bidirectional nature of realisation between higher and lower strata.

Chapter 5

Prospection: The Emergence of Target States and Common Ground in Speech [+–] 144-183

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

While earlier chapters have looked at how linguistic systems emerged through contextualised interactions, Chapter 5, Prospection: The Emergence of Target States and Common Ground in Text, by contrast, examines how in a metastable linguistic system the deployment of lexicogrammar and prosody allows for meanings to emerge within and across a text. While this chapter focuses on the instantiation of syntagms, reference is made to the fact that the syntagm itself results from paradigmatic choices. We introduce the key notion of prospection which states that the production of an element requires the production of a further element and that this continues until certain grammatical criteria have been satisfied. In the chapter we examine a short English source text and two translations (Japanese and Greek). We do this to illustrate how the linguistic structure of each language creates expectancies which result in the realisation of semantic meaning at two scales. The first is a local level and realises a proposition which then acts as the ground for the following proposition until the overall communicative intention, the second scale, is achieved. We then examine a reading of each of the three texts in order to examine the contribution prosody makes to prospecting further elements in tandem with the lexicogrammatical choices. The chapter demonstrates that the overall principle of prospection is valid for the three languages though the actual operation of what is prospected depends on the characterology of the language. Our take-home point is that the emergence of meaning in the three metastable linguistic systems results in perturbation in the overall system and once again affords the opportunity for change.

Chapter 6

Emergent Creativity [+–] 184-225

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

In Chapter 6, Emergent Creativity, we compare the processes of reception discussed in Chapter 3 with processes of production in context, We explore how these both respond to the expectations set up by previous productions and recalibrate these in real time as speakers respond to both the centripetal forces of conventionalised structures and the centrifugal forces generated by an overdetermined and multilayered context. We analyse in detail three texts from nursing handover meetings to illustrate the core principles we have been developing throughout the book as these operate across extended interactions and, on the basis of this analysis, to demonstrate how the nursing team involved has drawn on the serviceable noise of the conventional format to recalibrate the system of meanings open to them as they respond to contextual pressures. In this way we illustrate the emergence of distinctive language systems operating across specific spatiotemporal scales.

Chapter 7

Outline of a Socio-Biosemiotic Theory of Language Dynamics [+–] 226-232

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

Chapter 7 does exactly what it says on the tin, presenting the essential elements of our socio-biosemiotic approach to language dynamics in concise and stepwise form.

Appendices

Appendix A 233-234

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

Appendix B 235

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

End Matter

References 236-256

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

Index 257-263

Gerard O’Grady,Tom Bartlett

Cardiff University

Gerard O’Grady is a professor in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.

University of Glasgow

Reviews

This hugely original book remaps the territory for the study of language generally, and systemic functional linguistics in particular, as we enter the mid-21st century. O’Grady and Bartlett cover vast swathes of research, juxtaposing approaches that are normally kept separate by disciplinary and sectarian boundaries. No cow is sacred for them, yet neither do they indulge in iconoclasm for its own sake. They are unafraid to rethink the subject from the ground up, taking in its most complex and abstract dimensions and aiming to extract the key principles underlying them. And they possess the rare ability to get those dimensions across to readers in clear and engaging language. Halliday’s dream of a social semiotic is here realised on a solid empirical footing. A true tour de force.
John E. Joseph, Professor of Applied Linguistics, School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh

The Language Dynamic is a significant contribution not only to systemic-functional linguistics, but to the language sciences more broadly. Authors Gerard O'Grady and Tom Bartlett articulate a series of compelling arguments to demonstrate the irreducibility of 'language' to abstract form. They show how languaging involves the co-articulation of multi-scalar dynamics that range from and integrate the neural, the bodily, and the socio-cultural scales. Both the extensive and elegant empirical analyses and the carefully argued theoretical re-working of key constructs such as articulation, criteriality, stratification, system, meta-redundancy, and others provide readers with important new analytical and theoretical tools for re-thinking many core constructs of SFL in the light of recent advances in the developing dialogue between the biological, cognitive, ecological, linguistic, and social sciences. The book is a major contribution to this dialogue. Highly recommended.
Paul J. Thibault, professor emeritus, linguistics & communication sciences, University of Agder, Kristiansand.

O'Grady and Bartlett's insightful and inclusive synthesis is just what the current clogged-up discipline of Linguistics needs as a basis for the next stage of Theory. I love the way their key concept, "dynamic" so elegantly extends the scope of Linguistics into a well-motivated three-way interdisciplinarity, in which so many problematic dyads (language and society, body and mind, grammar and discourse, biology and language, future and past)come together as intrinsically related strands of language and life.
Bob Hodge, Author of Social Semiotics for a Complex World (2017).

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The Language Dynamic

Gerard O’Grady [+–]

Cardiff University

Tom Bartlett [+–]

University of Glasgow

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