3.2.1 Metafunction
According to Halliday & Matthiessen(1999:7),being functionally diverse,the content plane of a natural language extends over a spectrum of three distinct modes of meaning:ideational,interpersonal and textual.These highly generalized functions of the linguistic system are referred to as metafunctions.Table 3.3 is the general summary of the three metafunctions and their grammatical reflexes.
Table 3.3 Metafunction and their reflexes in the grammar(Halliday & Matthiessen,2004:61)
续表:
Seen from Table 3.3,the ideational metafunction of language functions to construe human experiences,comprising an experiential component and a logical component.Actually,the word“construe”is used to suggest an intellectual construction.What’s more,the favored structural type of experiential metafunction is segmental structures while that of logic metafunction is the iterative.
According to Halliday & Matthiessen(1999:511),experiential metafunction represents“the processes themselves”and logical metafunction represents“the relations between one processes and another”and concerns the topics including who’s doing what to whom,where,when,why and how.The grammar construes the experience of change in the form of“a process configuration”(Halliday & Matthiessen,1999:512),comprising a process,participants and the attendant circumstances.The fundamental element of grammar is the system of transitivity,which construes the world of experience into a set of process types:material,mental,relational,behavioural,verbal and existential(Halliday & Matthiessen,2004:171).
Apart from the experiential part of the grammar’s ideational resources,language can construe human experiences by the logical relation.Being different from experiential system in the ideational metafunction,the parts in the logical world are elements“standing to each other in a potentially iterative relationship and each element represents an entire process”(Halliday & Matthiessen,1999:520).Expansion and projection are two kinds of logical relationship.Expansive clauses comprises three ways to expand processes:elaborating,extending and enhancing.Among the three modes,conjunctions play an important role.Comparatively,in projection,one process construes another which is“the representation of what someone says or thinks”(ibid.,1999:521).Thus,the types of process in the projective type are verbal and mental.
Interpersonal metafunction is concerned“with enacting interpersonal relations through language,with the adoption and assignment of speech roles,with the negotiation of attitude,and so on”(ibid.,1999:7).Table 3.3 above shows that interpersonal metafunction corresponds to the clause as exchange,with the prosodic structure as the favored type.In interpersonal dimension,the mood system is the grammatical resource for realising an interactive move in dialogue,either as a proposition by exchanging information or as a proposal by exchanging goods and services.According to Martin,Matthiessen & Painter(2010:58),Subject,Finite and Residue are important elements in the system of mood.Modal Adjuncts,in their summary(Martin et al.,2010:59),add meanings related to the mood element:polarity and modality(e.g.,perhaps,probably,certainly),temporality(e.g.,already,soon,yet)and intensity(e.g.,hardly,actually,merely).
The third metafunction is textual metafunction,which plays a necessary role in organizing the discursive flow and creating cohesion and continuity as the discourse moves along.As Table 3.3 shows,textual metafunction appears as an enabling or facilitating function with culminative structure as the favored type and comprises a further set of resources which construe clauses and clause complexes into longer stretches for creating cohesion,with Theme and Rheme as two crucial elements(Halliday & Matthiessen,1999:530).These resources are reference,ellipsis,conjunction and lexical cohesion(e.g.,Halliday & Hasan,1976;Halliday & Matthiessen,1999),among which conjunctive resources is closely related with CMs in the dissertation.
Based on the above introduction,it can be observed that the ideational and textual metafunction of the conjunctive resources,i.e.,conjunctions in various logical-semantic relations and conjunctive devices as a source of cohesion,receive more extensive attention.This dissertation,however,points out that conjunctive markers can also play their role in the interpersonal system,by negotiating social relations,interacting with the participants,expressing their feelings and assessments.