Racism In Military

Racism In Military

Systemic Functional Linguistics

Lynne Young

Forthcoming, in J. Simpson (Ed.) Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics.

Introduction

To fully understand a particular theory about language and communication it is useful to examine the roots of the theory before going on to discuss the main conceptual base of the theory itself.   Also consistent in introducing a theory is contrasting it with other prominent approach(es) to language that surface at the same or similar time frames. Such a perspective offers core contextual information. For that reason I begin by briefly discussing the roots of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in the Prague School of Linguistics and in the work of J.R. Firth, followed by a short explanation of how SFL differs from the Chomskian tradition of the early 1980s just after Halliday’s central book, Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning, appeared (1978).

Roots of SFL

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has particularly strong connections to the Prague School of Linguistics founded in the 1920s in Czechoslovakia. Four central tenets of this School provide the roots for early and current SFL and especially the work of Halliday:

      1. The view of language as a network of relations which has to do with the fact that different features and aspects of language are related to each other and therefore do not exist in isolation.

      2. The view of language as a system composed of sub-systems which consist of levels or strata. In other words, every language has different levels and at each level different aspects of language are prominent. For example, at the lexicogrammatical stratum, the focus of study is on the structure of the language and the lexical or vocabulary choices. At the semantic or meaning level, the focus is on the ways in which these grammatical patterns realize different meanings related to content, attitude etc.

      3. The emphasis is on the functional...