Page 367 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 28: Transformational Generative Grammar

Sentence, according to Halliday, is distinct from other units because if the order of sentence in a text Notes
is changed, the text loses its meaning, but it the units below the sentence are re-ordered, we either get
an impossible sentence or the meaning of the sentence is changed. For example, if the word order of
the sentence —The boy will help the girl—is changed, we may get
a Will the boy help the girl ?
b Will the girl help the boy ?
c* The girl help the boy will.
d* The boy help the girl will.
e* The will help boy girl. etc.
Since sentence is the unit with which language operates in situation, Halliday calls it the lowest non-
disorderable unit. Traditional grammarians treated word as the unit of main interest and early
structural linguists focused their attention on morphemes. But the recent tendency is to concentrate
on the sentence which is the maximum unit of language besides the paragraph.
Sometime the units follow one another in simple sequence. For example, the second clause begins
when the first ends as in the sentence (1) above. The exponents of this type are called segmental.
There are also cases where they occur one inside the other or overlap one another. For example, in the
word teeth we have two mophemes namely ‘tooth’-’plurality;’ but one cannot find in this case where
one ends where the other begins. This is a case of fusion. But when the upper unit becomes a part to
the lower unit we call it a case of rank-shift. For example, a clause becomes a part of group, it is a case
of rank-shift. In the sentence ‘the book she gave me is hers’, the clause ‘she gave me’ has been rank-
shifted and has been made to work as a part of the group, and is functioning as a post-head modifer
in the structure of the subject noun phrase. Hence, we have an example of rank-shift. We should
remember at this stage that discontinuity is different from rank-shift. In discontinuity the upper unit
does not become a part of the lower unit; it only occurs at a remote place in the same hierarchy, e.g.
He called Mohan up, ‘call’ and ‘up’ are discontinuous elements.
Structure accounts for “the various ways in which an occurrence of one unit may be made up out of
occurrence of the unit next below it”. Sentence structure, in English for Example, is an organization
of clause classes, clause structure, for example, is an organization of phrase classes, phrase structure
of word classes, and word structure of morpheme classes. Each element of structure of a unit is said
to be realized by a class of the unit next below. For example, the element ‘subject’ is realized by the
class nominal phrase. Classes are subdivided into choice classes which constitute systems. For example,
transitive and intransitive, active and passive of transitivity and voice respectively.
The choices one has at one’s command, are not always limitless. When one has only a limited number
of possibilities to choose from, one is in the domain of system. The sets of possibilities in the system
are called the terms. For example one can identify a place in a particular structure in English where
the only words that can occur are ‘who’, ‘whose’, ‘which’ and ‘what’. In such a condition these four
items form a system.
So in the revised version of Halliday’s grammar known as Systemic grammar, the basic concept is
that of ‘system’, which means ‘a set of options or choices together with an entry condition, such that
if the entry condition is satisfied one option from the set must be selected. To each of these options is
attached a realization statement showing the mechanisms by which these choices are realized in the
language. The grammar itself takes the form of a series of ‘system net-works’. It has therefore come to
be called systemic grammar.
The aim of systemic grammar is not only to demonstrate our actual use of language but also, and
importantly, to predict what choices we can make and show to what extent these choices are
contextually conditioned. ‘Halliday regards an act of speech as a simultaneous selection from among
a large number of interrelated options. These options represent the ‘meaning potential of language.’
Some of such options are generalization or particularly, repetition or addition, a statement or a question,
etc.
Systemic grammar has two components : systemic and structural. The systemic component details
the choices and combinations of possible choices. The systemic component, in fact, is the deep grammar

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