6. From Form to Meaning in the Cardiff Model of Language and Its Use: A Functional-Syntactic Analysis of ‘He has been Talking about Going to the Grand Canyon with Margaret for Many Years’
Approaches to Systemic Functional Grammar - Convergence and Divergence - Gordon Tucker
Guowen Huang [+ ]
City University of Macau
Description
In this chapter, the author illustrates a functional-syntactic analysis of an English sentence within the theoretical framework of the Cardiff Grammar, with two aims: (1) to distinguish between Participant Roles and Circumstantial Roles by using the principles of functional syntax, with special reference to the Cardiff Grammar, and (2) to show how Halliday (1994) and Fawcett (2008) would differ in illustrating the relationship between form and meaning in terms of the analysis of the example. Specifically, the author argues for the importance of a two-level analysis (at the level of form / syntax, at the level of meaning / semantics) in a functional-syntactic analysis. This paper is designed as an exercise in illustrating an analytical approach to developing a scientific procedure for the analysis of texts.