Functions of Language - Volume 5, Issue 1, 1998

The lexicogrammar of every natural language is (among other things) a theory of human experience, a resource whereby experience is transformed into meaning. One of the most challenging areas of human experience is that of pain. If we investigate the grammar of pain in modern English, using evidence from a corpus, a short text, and paradigms of typical expressions in everyday speech, we find that pain is categorized in varying ways, as process, quality and thing, and construed as various different kinds of process. This variation constructs pain as a uniquely complex domain of experience, one that cannot be located within any simply defined region of semantic space.

Lexicogrammatical resources enable us to construct attitudinal stances not only toward interlocutors and audiences but also toward the ideational content of propositions and proposals. Seven semantic dimensions of evaluative orientations to propositions are identified and compared to those for clause modality. A sample corpus of newspaper editorials is used to illustrate the resources which realize these evaluative meanings in connected running text. Examples are also given of several interesting text-semantic phenomena that arise from the prosodic realization of attitudinal-orientational meanings in connected text, including attitudinal cohesion and syntactic, projective, and extended prospective and retrospective propagation of evaluative meanings. It is proposed that evaluative meanings should play a significant role in discourse analysis of social heteroglossia and individual and collective identity.

This study argues for a reformulation of the semiotic and characteristically linguistic construct of Duality of Patterning. Since the Duality principle was originally formulated, linguists have generally accepted the 'barrier' enshrined in Duality, said to separate the levels of Expression (in particular, its Phonological component) and Wording (Vocabulary and Grammar). However, there was always criticism of the strong formulations of Duality, some from precursors of functional models of language, notably Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG). On the other hand, although SFG has made a rich and original contribution to the understanding of intonation systems and has controversially defended a 'natural', permeable relation between Wording and Meaning, it has allowed the principle of Duality to be treated uncontroversially. There are also a number of flourishing misunderstandings about Duality, which this study will explain and rectify: its alleged bond with Arbitrariness and with 'meaningless' phonemes rather than contrastive phonetic features. In this study, Duality is characterised as a permeable relation rather than a strict barrier. Much evidence in natural languages and in the literature supports this less rigid view of Duality: Pike, Jakobson, Firth and, more recently, Halliday (1992) following Lemke (1984).