Throughout his work on English grammar Halliday has used univariate structure to model logical meaning and multivariate structures to model experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning (the problems prosodic and periodic realisation cause for interpersonal and textual multivariate representations notwithstanding). In fact, only experiential meaning is ideally suited to multivariate representation. Halliday recognises two types of univariate structure, hypotactic and paratactic. With hypotaxis, the recurring variables have unequal status; with parataxis they have equal status. The contrast between multivariate and these two types of univariate structure is exemplified below, following Halliday (1985a):
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[1] To be clear, it is not so much that Halliday has used these structure types to model different metafunctional meanings, but that he has proposed that the each metafunction favours a specific type of structural realisation.
[2] This is misleading, because it is demonstrably untrue. A multivariate structure is 'a configuration of elements each having a distinct function with respect to the whole' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 30). Clearly, textual and interpersonal structures satisfy this definition, since, textually, Theme and Rheme each have a distinct function with respect to the whole structure, as do, interpersonally, Subject, Finite, Predicator, Complement and Adjunct.
[3] To be clear, it is the units in a unit complex that have unequal (hypotaxis) or equal (parataxis) status.
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