Not Only At The Level Of Single Words But Also More Interestingly

By Author: emaly su
Total Articles: 235
Comment this article

The number of jewels Cartier Pasha Replica are irrevelant with watch precision or reliability. Jewels Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Watches are there to offer a low-friction surface at key points in the design.

I will now concentrate on what can be called 'meaningful form'. That both form and meaning should be given adequate attention is true, but one can go one step further and make learners aware that these two aspects of language are often merged together.

Widdowson (1998) questioned the dichotomy form-meaning, arguing that so-called grammatical words such as 'this', 'that', and 'the' do in fact possess semantic meaning. This dichotomy can be questioned not only at the level of single words but also, and more interestingly, when larger structures are considered. At the level of the clause, the blend of form and meaning becomes more sophisticated, especially when it manifests itself in patterns throughout entire texts.

The strong ...
... interconnection between form and meaning is central in functional grammar (Halliday 1985) (from now on EG), whose greatest contribution to applied linguistics has been a shift from a view of language structure as a kind of container for meaning to one which considers what language structure does, i.e. its functions.

The Hallidayean conceptual framework has been the basis of virtually all subsequent study on the ideological aspects of language (see, for example, Hodge and Kress 1993; Simpson 1993; Fairdough 2001) and it is in these re-elaborations and applications that the link between form and function has been more evidently construed. Here, grammar is seen essentially as a system that allows language users to make conscious choices about how to encode and convey different meanings, representations of reality, and points of view.

However, EG is so vast and, in many ways, so deeply revolutionary, that its notions are still being unpacked and its actual practical impact still relatively uneven. While certain areas of language analysis, such as critical discourse analysis, have drawn heavily from EG concepts, others— language pedagogy above all—have so far had a relatively more uneasy relationship with them.

One of the aspects of EG that has most often been exploited in the analysis of language and ideology and least in language pedagogy is the system of transitivity.

Traditionally, and even within a focus-on-form approach, the difference between transitive and intransitive uses of verbs does not receiv much attention, while the active voice and the passive voice are often treatei in terms of equivalent meanings realized by different forms.

In addition, passive constructions are often discouraged as slightly unnatural. So, for example, sentences like:

The whole state elected the governor, should be preferred to

The governor was elected by the whole state.

This treatment of grammar, even when it stems from communicative tasks sees form as essentially distinct from meaning. Indeed, one of the tenets of C LT is that what students say or write is more important than how they say il or write it.

Normally, a transitive verb is defined as a verb which takes a dired object; an active construction as one where the grammatical subject is the agent of an action; a passive construction as one where the grammatical subject is the object of an action.

But the semantic meaning of these categories tends to be disregarded. Grammar, therefore, is usually seen as a neutral aspect of language, which has very little to do with the expression of ideas.

In contrast, in an FG approach, transitivity is concerned with the ways in which Actor (the doer of an action), Process (the verb), and Goal (the object affected by the Process) can be interrelated by the language user in order to convey (sometimes drastically) different representations of particular facts.

As will become clearer in the rest of this article, FG argues that the clause 'the police shot the demonstrators', for example, does not have the same meaning as 'the demonstrators were shot by the police'. In this sense, grammar ceases to be purely a matter of accurate forms but acquires semantic value. And transitivity ceases to be solely about verbs that can or cannot take direct objects but becomes a linguistic framework to express ideology.