Theoretical and Descriptive Categories in Systemic Functional Linguistics
Edward McDonald [+–]
Independent Researcher
Edward McDonald gained his BA(Hons) from the University of Sydney in 1988, his MA from Peking University in 1992, and his PhD from Macquarie University in 1999, with theses on the clause and verbal group grammar of modern Chinese. He has taught linguistics, Chinese language, translation, semiotics, and music at universities in Australia, China, Singapore, and New Zealand. His recent research interests include the application of systemic functional theory to a range of languages including modern Chinese and Scottish Gaelic (Meaningful Arrangement: exploring the syntactic description of texts, Equinox 2008); Chinese language teaching and the hybrid concept of “sinophone” (Learning Chinese, Turning Chinese: challenges to becoming sinophone in a globalised world, Routledge 2011); and the comparative history of European and Chinese traditions of language scholarship (Grammar West to East: The investigation of linguistic meaning in European and Chinese traditions, Springer forthcoming).
Halliday’s 1992 paper “Systemic Grammar and the Concept of a ‘Science of Language’” provides one of the clearest statements, as well as one of the most perceptive warnings, about the potential dangers of “comparative description” in linguistics. Halliday makes a distinction between theoretical categories, the basic building blocks of any theory, which represent how language is modelled within that theory; and descriptive categories, derived from theoretical categories in generating the description of a particular language. Such a distinction is beautifully clear in theory, but highly problematic in practice; and goes against the long tradition of European linguistics to adapt the descriptive categories of an “originary” language to any “new” language. This bias is deeply rooted in the practice of modern linguistics under the heading of universals, which Halliday has characterised as “descriptive categories said to be present in every language”. This book uses the example of developing a grammatics for Modern Chinese, whose relatively short history has been political and ideological as much as intellectual and applied, to explore what is involved in generating descriptive from theoretical categories within the framework of systemic functional linguistics, and in the process derive some useful working principles for all linguistic theories.
