John Benjamins Publishing Company


  Functional Descriptions.
  Theory in practice.
  HASAN, Ruqaiya, Carmel CLORAN and David G. BUTT (eds)

  (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, No. 121)

  1996. ca. 250 pp.
  1-55619-575-3        Hb
  90 272 3624 0        Hb

                   *** Description ***

  This volume focuses on the relation between theory and description
  by examining aspects of transitivity in different languages.
  Transitivity -- or case grammar, to use the popular term -- has
  always occupied a centre-stage position in linguistics, not least
  because of its supposedly privileged relation to states of affairs
  in the real world. Using a systemic functional perspective, the
  ten papers in this volume make a contribution to this scholarship
  by focusing on the transitivity patterns in language as the
  expression of the experiential metafunction. Through a study of
  different languages -- English, Dutch, German, Finnish, Chinese
  and Pitjantjatjara -- the contributors provide functional
  descriptions of the various categories of process, their
  participants and circumstances, including phenomena such as
  di-transitivity, causativity, the get-passive, etc. With the
  relation between theories and descriptions running through the ten
  chapters of this volume as sometimes an overt and sometimes a
  covert theme, the chapters point to the nature of the linguistic
  fact which is linked ineluctably on the one hand to the nature of
  the theory and on the other to the speakers' experience of the
  world in which they live.

  The majority of papers included in the volume derive from the 19th
  International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University.

                   *** Contributors ***

  Contributions by: Kristin Davidse: Ditransitivity and Possession;
  Liesbeth Degand: Causation in Dutch and French: Interpersonal
  aspects; Angela Downing: The Semantics of Get-passives; M.A.K.
  Halliday: On Grammar and Grammatics; J.R. Martin: Metalinguistic
  Diversity: The case from case; Christian Matthiessen & Christopher
  Nesbitt: On the Idea of Theory-neutral Descriptions; Edward
  McDonald: The Complement in Chinese Grammar: A functional
  reinterpretation; David Rose: Pitjantjatjara Processes: An
  Australian experiential grammar; Susanna Shore: Process Types in
  Finnish: Implicate order, covert categories, and prototypes;
  Gordon Tucker: So Grammarians Haven't the Faintest Idea?:
  Reconciling grammar and lexis in a systemic functional model of
  language.

.