Hasan’s Semantic Networks Revisited: a Cantonese Systemic Functional Approach
Andy Ka-chun Fung · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2016
In systemic functional linguistics (SFL), Ruqaiya Hasan and her colleagues have placed much emphasis on the stratum of semantics. Such emphasis reflects her view that the study of meaning is indeed a central aspect of SFL, and theoretically shares the same status as the study of lexicogrammar. For Hasan, semantics and lexicogrammar are ‘two sides of the same coin’ (Hasan et al., 2007, p. 699). That is to say, without lexicogrammar, meaning could not be manifested in our human social practices; and by the same token, without meaning, lexicogrammar would have no reason for existence in human language (Hasan et al., 2007; Hasan, 2010). Systemic functional semantics, in Halliday’s (2009, p. 82) words, is considered to be a separate stratum in the model of language — the ‘linguistic inter-level to context’ (Matthiessen, 1993, p. 227) (see e.g. also Halliday, 2009; Hasan et al., 2007; Hasan, 2010). There are various points of departure concerning semantics in SFL literature: (1) stylistic analysis, particularly the study of literary text (e.g. Butt and Lukin, 2009), (2) computational linguistics, with a particular focus on text generation parsing (e.g. Mann, 1984; Mann and Matthiessen, 1985; Matthiessen, 1988; Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999), (3) sociological linguistics and semantic variation (e.g. Halliday, 1973; Turner, 1973; Hasan, 1983, 1996; Hasan and Cloran, 1990 [2009]) and (4) the collaborative and interactive exchange of dialogue (e.g. Halliday, 1984; Martin, 1992; Matthiessen, 1995; Eggins, 1990; Eggins and Slade, 2004). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.