Chapter 2 – Text and conceptual meaning

Activities and comments

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(Activities that are asterisked are particularly useful for discussion in class, in which case multiple copies or PowerPoints of the text could be produced.)

Activity 12

If you or anyone in the class speaks a non-European language, compare the different vocabulary for family members available in English and the other language. Is there one word that exactly conveys the meanings of the word brother ‘male sibling’ or uncle ‘brother of mother or father’? If you speak French as well as English, consider whether there is any precise equivalent for the meaning of the words chair or brown in French.

Activity 13

  1. Two men were killed when the stolen police motorcycle they were riding was involved in a crash with an unmarked police car.
  2. Police murdered two 17-year-olds on a motorcycle by ramming them with their unmarked police car.
  3. Two youths killed themselves by driving their motorcycle into an unmarked police car.

In which of the reports A–C are we most inclined to blame the police and sympathise with those who die? And in which do we shift responsibility for the event onto the victims? What aspects of the language (grammar and vocabulary) create these differences in assigning responsibility and creating sympathy?

*Activity 14*

Try to find examples of the invention of labels for such classes of people in ads or popular newspapers. Can you invent any parodic terms?

Activity 15

Discuss how the extract from the following letter in the Telegraph uses categorisation of migrants to urge the government to help refugees from Syria. Are there any other interesting or important categorisations apparent in the letter? You might consider the word ‘crisis’. Is it possible to challenge any of these categorisations?

(1) SIR – Julia Hartley-Brewer’s lively article does not mention that lawyers, including retired judges, are in a good position to comment on the Syrian refugee crisis. We are aware of this country’s international obligations under the Refugee Convention and we have practical experience of its operation.
(2) The Convention was agreed to meet the grave humanitarian crisis after the Second World War. It is concerned, not with economic migrants, still less with freedom of movement within the EU, but with giving refuge to people whose lives have been made intolerable by persecution at home.
(3) Since 1945 we have given asylum to refugees from all over Europe and beyond, including Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, and to the Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin.
(4) The present crisis is the worst for 70 years, and it has been made worse by the EU’s Dublin Accord, under which asylum-seekers must apply in the first member state that they reach. This imposes an unfair and insupportable burden on Italy, Greece and other member states in south-east Europe.
(5) The Dublin Accord has already broken down. Our open letter urges the Government to do much more to address this crisis.

Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe
London SW1

(www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/11934423/Letters-History-does-not-provide-an-argument-against-staying-in-the-EU.html, retrieved 16 October 2015)

Activity 16

Make a list of adjectives that you associate with any three of the following nationalities: Italian, Jamaican, Mexican, Swedish, Hongkongese, American. To what extent are these qualities the result of first-hand experience, and to what extent are they second-hand? If second-hand, where do you think they come from?

*Activity 17*

Look at a recent copy of a tabloid newspaper. List the vocabulary used to describe women and compare it with the vocabulary used to describe or categorise men. You might look both at adjectives, and the classes to which women are assigned, e.g. Hillary Clinton is an exceptional (adjective) politician (class). What differences do you perceive in the portrayal of the sexes?

Activity 18

Look at the following vocabulary, which depicts humans as food. Are these words used equally of men and women? You may need to use a dictionary, such as the COBUILD English Dictionary.

Nouns: cookie, tart, eye-candy, arm-candy, crumpet, sugar, honey, sweetie, cheesecake, mutton dressed as lamb
Adjectives: tasty, dishy, insipid, refined, sour, bitter

Activity 19

Look at the sentences below and decide what processes the bolded verbs represent. In material processes what things or people are the actors and affected? In mental processes who are the thinkers and the experiencers of emotion, and what thoughts or feelings are they experiencing? In verbal processes who are the sayers?

  1. Rebel Syrian group sets up government in exile.
  2. Angelina Jolie to be witness in News Corp hacking case.
  3. She disgusts me.
  4. Iraq denounces world population conference.
  5. Japanese parents reconsider cram school system.
  6. I was given a present by John.
  7. I love the present.
  8. He said she should be more careful.

Activity 20

The following text is part of an advertisement for a perm. The text has been modified to avoid copyright problems, substituting the product name with ‘X’. It appeared in the magazine Good Housekeeping, and the visual accompanying the text depicts a woman running her fingers through long, black, curly hair.

Try to apply the type of grammatical analysis demonstrated above to this text. The verbs representing processes have been underlined to help you. We have also unpacked the more complicated clauses and put them in brackets. Analyse these too, giving you 14 analyses in all.

If you need guidance in the analysis, ask yourself the following questions:

A. Which six verbs represent actions, material processes? Who are the actors in these processes? Which things or people are affected, if any? Who or what is represented as most powerful in this text? Who or what are least powerful?

B. Which five verbs represent mental processes? Are these of perception, emotion or thought? If the experiencers (perceivers, thinkers and emoters) are identified, who are they? In cases where they are not identified, can we supply them easily?

C. Which two verbs represent relational processes or states? Who/what are being described or categorised?

D. Which verb represents a verbal process? Who does the speaking and who do they speak to?

E. What explanation can you give for these patterns in the text, i.e. how are women, hairdressers, and the product represented? What might be the underlying ideological explanations?

  1. Feel the difference X makes.
  2. [X makes a difference]
  3. X is a perm for you to enjoy.
  4. [you enjoy a perm]
  5. It gives your hair a superb feel and a new vitality.
  6. As your hairdresser perms in X
  7. every single hair receives a thorough beauty treatment through its   conditioning agent Y.
  8. Just imagine the difference.
  9. Your hair not only has vitality--lasting body, bounce and curl,
  10. but [your hair] also shines with a soft natural silkiness that feels as good  as it looks.
  11. [a soft natural silkiness feels good]
  12. [a soft natural silkiness looks good]
  13. So ask your hairdresser for X.
  14. Because only he can add that finishing touch of brilliance to your hair style  with X.

(Good Housekeeping May 1987, p.133)

Activity 21

Take the following passage and turn the underlined verbs into the passive, putting the actors into a by phrase. This will mean making the object of the sentences (italicised) the subject of the passive clause.

As always bad events usurp the news agenda, and as I write in the comfort of my home, the New Orleans catastrophe fills the television screens and front pages. Horrific though it was, it distracts us from the more extensive suffering caused by the tsunami in December 2004, that disastrously splashed across the bowl of the Indian Ocean. That awful event starkly revealed the power of Earth to kill.

In what cases could the actor in the by phrase be omitted?

Activity 22

  1. Look at the following passage about children’s learning and identify the nominalisations in the underlined clauses. There are at least ten but you should be able to find eight. Then give the verb or adjective which has been nominalised.

We agree that all children need to succeed; but do we mean the same thing? My own feeling is that success should not be quick or easy, and should not come all the time. Success implies overcoming an obstacle, including, perhaps, the thought in our mind that we might not succeed. It is turning ‘I can’t’ into ‘I can and I did.’

We ought to learn, beginning early, that we don’t always succeed. Life holds many more defeats than victories for all of us. Shouldn’t we get used to this early? We should learn, too, to aim higher than we think we can hit. ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ What we fail to do today, we, or someone, may do tomorrow. Our failure may pave the way for someone else’s success.

  1. Combine the following pairs of sentences by nominalising the underlined verb or adjective. In some cases you will have to add the verb (if you like, try the one provided in brackets). e.g.:

If you word-process at the keyboard for long periods this stresses your eyes and wrists. It is very exhausting (leads to) → Word-processing at the keyboard for long periods leads to stress of the eyes and wrists and to exhaustion.

  1. People applauded. The play ended. (follow)
  2. John ate the banana skin. This shows he is stupid.
  3. We stayed in Switzerland. It was wonderful.
  4. The jury agreed with the judge. He suggested that I was guilty.
  5. The mountains are cool. When moist air goes over them it condenses. (cause)

*Activity 23*

Try rewriting sentences 12–15 of the news report below, ‘Iraqi Sunni protest clashes in Hawija leave many dead’, in order to apportion agency and responsibility more clearly. This might mean de-nominalising the underlined words and de-passivising the italicised clauses. You can discuss the changes you have made, using the appropriate terminology, and say what differences in meaning the changes make

Iraqi Sunni protest clashes in Hawija leave many dead (1)

More than 20 people have been killed in clashes between security forces and Sunni Arab protesters in northern Iraq, officials say (2).

Violence erupted when security forces raided an anti-government protest camp in Hawija, near Kirkuk (3).

Two Sunni ministers said they were resigning in protest over Tuesday's raid (4).

It was the worst violence between security forces and Sunni protesters in recent months (5).

Tens of thousands of Iraqis in Sunni-dominated areas have been protesting against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, accusing his government of discriminating against them (6).

The government denies the accusations and says that protesters have been infiltrated by militant groups (7).

Hawija has been under siege since Friday when an Iraqi officer was killed in clashes with protesters (8). Residents refused a demand to hand the suspects over (9).

A final attempt at mediation broke down on Monday night and troops were sent in at dawn, the BBC Arabic's Rafid Jaboori reports from Baghdad (10). The government claimed its forces came under attack and had to respond (11).

The defence ministry said 20 'gunmen' and three officers were killed, while other officials said that as many as 27 people had died (12).

After the raid, Sunnis briefly seized control of three checkpoints near Hawija before the army, reportedly using helicopter gunships, retook them (13). A number of further deaths were reported as the checkpoints were attacked (14).

In Hawija, the army cleared the square where the protest camp had been set up, burning tents, Reuters news agency reported (15).

Activity 24

Look at the images below and identify the ideational meanings or processes represented through them:

A) conceptual classificational

B) narrative actional non-transactional process

Quiz

Further Reading

Further reading for Chapter 2

  1. Perhaps the best introduction to the Whorfian hypothesis is to go back to the original and read Whorf’s ‘An American Indian Model of the Universe’ and ‘The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behaviour to Language’ both in Language, Thought and Reality. Though his hypothesis has gone out of fashion in mainstream North American Linguistics, with its emphasis on universals of language (cf. Pinker’s superficial rejection on pp. 59-66 of The Language Instinct) there have been more or less successful attempts to defend, explain or reclaim the hypothesis by John Lucy and Penny Lee. There is a sympathetic account by George Lakoff in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Guy Deutscher’s article in The New York Times ‘Does Your Language Shape How You Think?’ and his more extensive book, Through the Language Glass, are interesting and provocative.

    • Deutscher, G. (2010). Does your Language Shape How You Think?. Nytimes.com. Retrieved 25 October 2015.
    • Deutscher, G. (2010). Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in other Languages. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co.
    • Lakoff, G. (1990). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Lee, Penny (1996), The Whorf Theory Complex — A Critical Reconstruction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
    • Lucy, John A. (1992), Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    • Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: Morrow.
    • Whorf, B. L., Carroll, J. B., Levinson, S. C., and Lee, P. (2012). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (2nd ed.). Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

  2. Fowler gives a useful account of how vocabulary is used to describe women in newspapers in Language in the News chapter 6, ‘Discrimination in discourse’. Sara Mills’ Feminist Stylistics (chapter 4) also provides interesting strategies on how to analyse at the level of the word.

    • Fowler, R. (2013). Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.
    • Mills, S. (1995). Feminist Stylistics. London: Routledge.

  3. The grammatical details of process types, participants and transitivity can be found in Halliday and Matthiessen chapter 5, Eggins chapter 8, Downing and Locke chapter 4 or the more elementary treatment in Butt et al. chapter 3.

    • Butt, D., Fahey, R., Spinks, S., & Yallop, C. (2000). Using Functional Grammar: An Explorer's Guide. National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquarie University, Sydney.
    • Downing, A. and Locke, P. (1992). A University Course in English Grammar. New York: Prentice Hall.
    • Eggins, S. (2004). An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics (2nd ed.). New York and London: Continuum.
    • Halliday, M. A. K. and Matthiessen, C. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.). London: Hodder.

  4. Deirdre Burton’s ‘Through Glass Darkly: Through Dark Glasses’ is a classic feminist analysis of transitivity patterns in an extract from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. It demonstrates the passivity of the patient undergoing electric shock therapy and her subjection to the intentional actions of the doctor and nurse. Goatly in ‘What does it feel like to be a Single 20something Female Singapore Graduate’ applies transitivity analysis to a newspaper column and relates the analysis to the ideological position of women in Singapore. This is useful reading for South-East Asian students, who could well substitute this for the analysis of the Candy Crush Saga feature. Another alternative analysis, from the 1st edition, is available in the supplementary material on this web-site.

    • Burton, D. (1982). ‘Through Glass Darkly: Through Dark Glasses’. On stylistics and political commitment – via a study of a passage from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. In Carter, R. (ed.) Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics. London: Allen and Unwin, pp.195-214.
    • Goatly A. (1999). ‘What does it Feel Like to be a Single Female 20something Singapore Graduate?’ In Chew, P. G. L. and Kramer-Dahl, A. (eds.). Reading culture: Textual practices in Singapore. Singapore: Times Academic Press.

  5. Chapter 4 of Simpson’s Language, Ideology and Point of View and Mills’ Feminist Stylistics, chapter 5, show how transitivity analysis can be applied to literature, and Fowler, pp. 70-80, to news headlines. The final, new chapter, of Hodge and Kress’s Language as Ideology includes an incisive analysis of the media coverage of the Gulf War.

    • Fowler, R. (2013). Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.
    • Hodge, B. & Kress, G. R. (1993). Language as Ideology (2nd ed.). New York and London: Routledge.
    • Mills, S. (1995). Feminist Stylistics. London: Routledge.
    • Simpson, P. (2003). Language, Ideology and Point of View. London: Routledge.

  6. ‘Life as a Noun: Arresting the Universe in Science and Humanities’. Goatly disputes some of his value judgements in ‘Green Grammar and Grammatical Metaphor’.

    • Goatly, A. (1996). ‘Green Grammar and Grammatical Metaphor, or Language and the Myth of Power, or Metaphors we Die by’. Journal of Pragmatics, 25(4): 537–560.
    • Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd edn). London: Hodder.
    • Martin, J.R. (1989). Factual Writing: Exploring and Challenging Social Reality (2nd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • Martin, J.R. (2003). ‘Life as a Noun: Arresting the Universe in Science and Humanities’. In M.A.K. Halliday and J.R. Martin, Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. London: Falmer Press, pp. 242–285.

Supplementary material