A Functional Grammar for Writers
Derek Irwin [+–]
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
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Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic [+–]
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
A Functional Grammar for Writers is designed to show writers why learning about grammar can be empowering, rather than boring or baffling. The book takes the approach that the knowledge of grammar is the knowledge of language resources, and while speakers of English have a grasp of one set of resources – those of the spoken language – writers need a new grammatical understanding for the creation of written works, in particular, those which depart significantly from spoken language, such as academic essays. With a knowledge of all the resources and options which the English language offers, writers can rationally select from an array of choices how best to get their intended message across.
In order to help writers, whether students or more experienced writers, move into this understanding, the authors first review traditional grammatical terms and approaches involving the “parts of speech.” They then introduce the approach they advocate, that of systemic functional grammar (SFG), albeit informed by another writing tradition, that of prescriptive grammar. SFG is explained with an emphasis on those aspects which are most relevant to written text. Finally, the authors bring the discussion into the “rules” of grammar and correctness, presenting easy-to-understand explanations of which types of writing are appropriate in which situations, depending on such matters as audience, genre, and rhetorical goals.
The book is aimed at writers of English, and in particular those who wish to understand how grammar can contribute to choices in writing. Teachers of writing and English in general will find it useful for themselves and their students in clarifying the systems in English and the ways to effectively create effective sentences, paragraphs, and written works of various kinds. The book has already been used successfully as both an undergraduate and postgraduate textbook for native speakers and learners of English. Other audiences for the book might include teachers and teacher educators in both first-language and second-language contexts, researchers in applied linguistics, writers in any academic field, creative writers, and editors and journalists.
Series: Frameworks for Writing
Table of Contents
Introduction
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
The introduction is designed to theoretically orient the reader in terms of why learning about grammar is meant to be empowering, not baffling. The book takes the approach that the knowledge of grammar is the knowledge of language resources, and while speakers of English have a grasp of one set of resources, students need a new set of grammatical understanding for the creation of acceptable academic texts. In order to move into this understanding, we will first bring the reader up-to-date on what other writers typically have meant with the use of grammatical terms (traditional grammatical approaches). We will then introduce our fundamental approach, that of systemic functional grammar (SFG), albeit informed by another writing tradition, that of prescriptive grammar. The major approaches of SFG will be explained along with the strands which are most relevant to student writing. Finally, we bring the discussion into the “rules” of grammar, presenting readers with easy-to-understand explanations of which types of writing they should choose in which situations, depending on such matters as audience, genre, and rhetorical goals.
Chapter 1
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
This chapter focuses on the ways that grammar has been taught in the past, and takes students through the terminology from a formal (i.e., word class, phrase structure) to functional (i.e., clause constituent) understanding. It will demonstrate how people have used these labels to understand the underlying organization of language, then taking these patterns and defining them as “rules.” It will use contemporary examples of language to illustrate that there is nothing particularly special in this way of approaching language, except for the value placed on it by language guardians – a theme which will be elaborated and enhanced in the final chapter of the book. By the end of this chapter, readers should be able to recognize parts of speech as most people who have studied grammar would parse them: nouns and verbs, nominal and verbal groups, subjects and predicates.
Chapter 2
Creating Sentences [+–]
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
This chapter focusses on how to combine the clause structures in Chapter 1 and present them in a variety of ways. It maintains a traditional approach, though it brings this use of jargon into the realisation of text-level concerns. By the end of this chapter, students will have an awareness of sentence structures, and the basic constituents of them, as well as how to integrate a number of different sentence types for different purposes into a whole text.
Chapter 3
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
This chapter takes the previous approach of clause-level constituents and elaborates it according to the types of grammar as delineated by functional grammarians such as Halliday and Matthiessen (Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd ed. 2004), Martin (English Text: System and Structure 1985), Butt et. al, (Using Functional Grammar: an explorer’s guide 2000) and Thompson (Introducing Functional Grammar, 2nd ed. 2004), amongst others. This approach includes three strands, or metafunctions, in language, pertaining to notions of the clause as interaction, the clause as message, and the clause as part of text structure. What is most important to emphasize here is that grammar is part of a holistic system of systems in language, embedded in context. The simple fact is that we use language to achieve something, and there are a number of tools at our disposal as language users which allow us to achieve these varying goals. By the end of this chapter, readers will have a better grasp of the various ways we can approach the grammars of English, depending on what strand of meaning we wish to focus on at the time.
Chapter 4
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
Writers should be aware that their word choices have a profound effect on the way that the reader interprets the text. The same is true of a number of grammatical forms. This chapter looks at the resources for interpersonal interaction in language, particularly from the point of view of grammatical mood, modality and modalization, and systems which have been used to indicate appraisal in English as per Martin and White (The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English 2005). In particular, we will explain the expectations of academic work in terms of engagement, attitude and graduation so that writers will be able to effectively incorporate what some grammarians refer to as “hedging,” a necessary means of negotiating stance. By the end of this chapter, the reader will understand the various choices available to encode types of linguistic engagement (positioning of the participants in the dialogue), attitude (affect, judgement and appreciation qualities of the text) and graduation (increasing or decreasing the assertive force). They will be expected to understand how some clause parts (particularly Subject and Finite) fit together to provide grammatical mood, and what this means in terms of how the text is read.
Chapter 5
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
This chapter addresses the various process types available to a writer in English, and explains how the choice of these process types positions the text. In essence, writers encode experience either in material processes (the world of doing), mental processes (the world of thinking and feeling), or relational processes (the world of identifying or attributing). Important also are verbal processes (the world of saying), in which we are able to place words and concepts in the mouths of others, a means in academic writing of creating solid argument structures. Finally, it turns to the resource or grammatical metaphor – the ways that we can take something from one type of grammatical structure (the verb “drink,” for example) and shift it to another (the participial adjective or gerund “drinking”) to allow for greater abstraction of process, thereby allowing greater precision of modification. By the end of this chapter, readers will be able to see the broad patterns in process type and participant in English, and understand why certain choices are made in academic writing. Further, they will be able to judge and increase or decrease lexical density according to the needs of the text.
Chapter 6
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
Chapter 6 has two purposes, both related. It will begin with an explanation of clause combination: the logical ways in which we place clauses against one another in order to create arguments in systems of dependence (or independence). It will then move into the notion of information structure, or how we can link the grammatical, thematic structure of the clause (as per Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) with the notion of text structure (hyper-theme and macro-theme as per Martin 1985; briefly taken up in SWYT?) These structures will be placed specifically against an essay outline, in order to demonstrate how the writer can construct clear overall structures and use specific clause combination strategies to achieve a unified, coherent text.
Chapter 7
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
This chapter ties together the previous grammatical knowledge with the overall structures introduced in Chapter 5 (it further serves to tie this book together with SWYT?, as that text concentrates much more fully on argument structures and other rhetorical techniques in writing). It introduces the idea of a text type being a particular register configuration of Field (topic), Tenor (reader-writer relationship), and Mode (channel of communication). This register leads the writer to choose a particular underlying pattern of text which is designed to serve a particular social purpose (in this case, an essay designed to convince an instructor of a certain achievement in knowledge and understanding). In being able to deliberately employ structures in the purpose of argument, the writer will be much more successful at achieving his or her aims: a better grade. By the end of this chapter, the reader will understand how all texts are read in terms of a genre, and are also judged in terms of the writer’s mastery of the genre, along with grammatical features. Using this knowledge, writers will be able to consciously construct more successful texts for their purposes, employing the previous grammatical knowledge into larger system structures.
Chapter 8
University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
Derek Irwin is the Head of School for the founding of the School of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He completed his BA (Hon) in Theatre and Literature at the University of Guelph, his MA in English Literature at York University, and his PhD specializing in Canadian Literature and Textual Analysis at York University, Canada. He spent eight years as an ESL instructor in various locations before turning to systemic functional linguistics as a framework for language inquiry. He was a grammar and writing instructor at York University, and a founding faculty member of Lakehead University’s Orillia campus, before joining the University of Nottingham, first at the Ningbo China campus and then on to Malaysia. He supervises PhD students in several areas, including second-language pedagogy, genre and text analysis, language modelling, language contact, identity and culture. His most recent critical work focuses on grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, literary textual analysis, and writing for post-secondary students.
University of Toronto
Viktoria Jovanovic-Krstic is a sessional faculty member at the University of Toronto and a faculty member at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Jovanovic-Krstic teaches for the Writing and Rhetoric Program and The Faculty of Applied Arts and Science respectively. Her research interests are located in Appraisal Analysis, Business Communications and writing and rhetoric. She teaches courses in writing, rhetoric, and communications. She has published in the areas of war discourse, writing pedagogy, and reading and writing theory
This chapter is dedicated to exploring and explaining the tradition of marking certain structures as “errors” and insisting that writing which contains these structures is inferior to that which is “error-free.” Although sociolinguists generally agree that such markers are not the mark of inferior language, they are nevertheless used in academic writing in a gatekeeping function, significantly affecting the marks of the students who do not know how to avoid them. Given the extensive vocabulary and skill set that the reader now has, this chapter will be able to easily explain such structures as the comma splice, run-on sentence, improper pronoun reference, and other academic writing bugbears. The reader will be given simple solutions to these problems, and will be able to avoid them in future writing.
