SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS (SFL)
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) views language in a social-semiotic perspective. Language in the perspective of social-semiotic has three principles, namely:
a) Language always occurs as a text, whether it is spoken or written.
b) Language is used to express meanings.
c) Language is functional; it reflects the attitudes, opinions, and the ideology of the users (Ibid cf. Halliday, 1995a).
Meanings in SFL are known as “metafunctions.” The metafunctions of language are:
a) to understand the environment (ideational meaning)
b) to act on the others in it (interpersonal meaning)
c) to breathe relevance into the other two (textual meaning) (halliday, 1985a).
The reflection of the attitudes, opinions, and values of the users will be clearly seen through register system below.
A. Text and Context
Halliday and Hasan (1976: 1) a text is “a unit of language in use”. As a text, language is always surrounded by its environment or its context. Context is simply “other text that accompanies the text or “text that is with” (Halliday & Hasan, 1985:5). The context here refers to the context of culture and context of situation (all those extra-linguistic factors which have some bearing on the text itself). Context of situation is divided into three components, corresponding to the three metafunctions. The three components are:
1. The field of discourse: the play (the kind of activity)
2. The tenor of discourse: the “players” the actors or the type of role interaction that are involved in the creation of the text.
3. The mode of discourse: the “parts” (the particular function functions that are assigned to language in this situation.
So text is language that is doing some job in its context of situation and of culture.
B. Register
The register is the set of meanings, the configuration of semantic patterns that are typically drawn upon under the specified conditions, along with the words and structures that are used in the realization of the meanings (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:23). Register is used to refer to the semiotic systems constituted by the contextual variables field, tenor, and mode (Martin, 1992:502).
1. Field
Halliday and Hasan (1985:12) defines field as “what is happening, to the nature of social action that is taking place: what is it that the participants are engaged in, which the language figures as some essential component.”
There are six functions of field.
a. Referential: focus on the denotative content of the message or the subject matter (Martin, 1992). This function is oriented towards referring to entitles, states, events, and relationship and is represented in the propositions.
b. Emotive: shows connotative rather than denotative meaning; subjective rather than objective; personal rather than public.
c. Conative functions: when language is being used to influence others.
d. Phatic function: focuses on the channel: on the fact that participants are in contact.
e. Poetic function: the orientation is towards the messages and the selection of element from the code which draw attention to them and to the text.
f. Metalinguistic derives from an orientation of the code that is the language being used to talk about language.
Kinds of Semiotic resources:
a. Lexis
Lexis is the physical glossary or terminology database that is an instant ‘look-up’ facility for lexical items both ‘words and idioms (Bell, 1991:47). There are 3 parts of lexis: abstraction, technicality, and metaphor.
b. Grammar
Grammar is a lexical density. Grammar devided into two semiotic resource of grammar. First, Lexical grammar is calculated by counting the lexical items or content words of the clauses ignoring functional words (grammatical items). Second, Complexity of clauses and groups.
c. Cohesion
A semantic relation between an element in the text and some other element that is crucial to the interpretation of it (Halliday & Hasan, 1976:8, Halliday, 1985a:288).
d. Activity Sequence, Text Structure, and Genre
Genre is “a social process which carries a social function” (Riyadi, 1994). There are 8 types of genre, namely recount, description, report, procedure, explanation, exposition, discussion, and exploration.
2. Tenor
Tenor refers to the negotiation of social relationship among participants. Within register, it is the projection of interpersonal meaning. It mediated these relationships along three dimensions: a) status (the relative position of interlocutors in a culture’s social hierarchy), b) contact (concerned with the degree of involvement among interlocutors, c) Affect (the “degree of emotional charge” in the relationship between participants.
3. Mode
According to Halliday, mode refers to what part of language is playing, what the participants are expecting the language to do for them in the situation: the symbolic organization of the text, the status that it has, and its function in the context, including the channel and also the rhetorical mode, what is being achieved by the text in terms of such categories as persuasive, rhetorical didactic, and the like.
C. Lexicogrammar
Lexicogrammar refers to words in grammatical structure, its macrofunctions: the meaning they organize, the system they use and the forms which their options take” (Bell, 1991:120). The three macrofunctions are:
1. Ideational Meaning
It is express cognitive meaning and draws on the system and networks of transitivity which convey the user’s experience of the external experience (experiential meaning) and of the internal experience (logical meaning).
· Nominal Group, is an experiental structure which has the function of a class of a thing and some category of membership within the class.
· Adverbial Group, is an adverb which is accompanied by the modifying such as rather.
a. Experiential Meaning
This external world of senses is realized through transitivity that functions as the representation of a process. It specifies the different types of process and the structure by which they are expressed through three components, namely, participants, process, and circumstances.
1) Types of Processes and Their Participants
· Material Process
· Mental Process
· Behavioral Process
· Verbal Process
· Relational Process
· Existential Process
2) Circumstances
· Extent (Spatial and Temporal)
· Location (Spatial and Temporal)
· Manner (Means, Quality, and Comparison)
· Cause (Reason, Behalf, and Purpose)
· Accompaniment (Comitative & Additive)
· Matter
· Role
b. Logical Meaning
In term of internal experience of mind or logical meaning, language expresses our logic. In SFL, clauses are divided into simple and complex clauses. There are two types of relation between clauses, namely:
1) Interdependency relation: the relation of modifying in which one element modifies another. This modifying is divided into two: Hypotaxis and parataxis (the relation between two like elements of equal status, one initiating, and the other continuing).
2) Logico-semantic: The relation holds between a primary and a secondary member of a clause complex. There are two kinds of them, namely expansion and projection.
2. Interpersonal Meaning
The interpersonal meaning expresses speech functional meaning by drawing on the systems and networks of MOOD. The function of it is to create sentences which carry the cognitive and logical content of propositions and display the speaker’s relationship with others to whom the messages are being addressed (Bell, 1991: 121). In lexicogrammar, the interpersonal meaning is realized in:
a. MOOD System
The function of MOOD system is “to structure sentences (more correctly, ‘clauses’) which ‘count as’ speech acts which facilitate social exchanges” (Ibid, p.134). Mood structure consists of two constituents: Mood (tells about giving and demanding and consists of two parts: Subject and Finite) and Residue (consists of Predicator, Complement, and Adjective).
b. Modality System
According to Halliday, modality refers to the area of meaning that lies between yes and no the intermediate ground between positive and negative polarity. There are two types of modality: Modalization (the proposition modality (indicative type) used in a clause to provide information) and Modulation (the proposal modality (imperative type) in a clause to express a command or exchange).
3. Textual Meaning
The textual meaning which is predicted from the mode of discourse expresses “discoursal meaning by drawing on the systems and networks of theme to create and realize utterances (or texts) in actual communicative events.” Theme is the point of departure where the speaker points the emphasis of his meaning on.
· Textual theme relates the clause conjunctively to what has done before. It occurs in a text which is reflective, constructing experience.
· Interpersonal theme expresses the writer’s attitude to what he is saying. It consists of modal themes, the finite verbs and vocative elements.
