Functional Descriptions
Theory in practice
Editors
This volume focuses on the relation between theory and description by examining aspects of transitivity in different languages. Transitivity — or case grammar, to use the popular term — has always occupied a centre-stage position in linguistics, not least because of its supposedly privileged relation to states of affairs in the real world. Using a systemic functional perspective, the ten papers in this volume make a contribution to this scholarship by focusing on the transitivity patterns in language as the expression of the experiential metafunction. Through a study of different languages — English, Dutch, German, Finnish, Chinese and Pitjantjatjara — the contributors provide functional descriptions of the various categories of process, their participants and circumstances, including phenomena such as di-transitivity, causativity, the get-passive, etc. With the relation between theories and descriptions running through the ten chapters of this volume as sometimes an overt and sometimes a covert theme, the chapters point to the nature of the linguistic fact which is linked ineluctably on the one hand to the nature of the theory and on the other to the speakers’ experience of the world in which they live.
The majority of papers included in the volume derive from the 19th International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University.
The majority of papers included in the volume derive from the 19th International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University.
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 121] 1996. xxxvi, 381 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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About the Authors | p. ix
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Theories, Maps and Descriptions: An Introduction | p. xv
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On Grammar and GrammaticsM.A.K. Halliday | p. 1
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On the Idea of Theory-neutral DescriptionsChristian M.I.M. Matthiessen and Christopher Nesbitt | p. 39
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Ditransitivity and PossessionKristin Davidse | p. 85
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So Grammarians Havent the Faintest Idea?: Reconciling grammar and lexis in a systemic functional model of languageGordon H. Tucker | p. 145
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The Semantics of Get-passivesAngela Downing | p. 179
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Causation in Dutch and French: Interpersonal aspectsLiesbeth Degand | p. 207
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Process Types in Finnish: Implicate order, covert categories, and prototypesSusanna Shore | p. 237
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The Complement in Chinese Grammar: A functional reinterpretationEdward McDonald | p. 265
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Pitjantjatjara Processes: An Australian experiential grammarDavid Rose | p. 287
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Metalinguistic Diversity: The case from caseJ.R. Martin | p. 323
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Gómez-González, María Ángeles
Hoang, Van Van
Vandepitte, Sonia
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Subjects
Main BIC Subject
CF: Linguistics
Main BISAC Subject
LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General