functional grammar

 

GENRE AND GRAMMAR, TEXT AND CONTEXT

GRAMMAR 

What do you think when you hear the word ‘grammar’? As a student in school you may have thought of it as a set of exercises to get right in English class. Now, as a person who is studying language in some depth, you will find that grammar is much more.

What is Grammar? 

Grammar is a theory of language, of how language is put together and how it works. More particularly, it is the study of wordings. What is meant by wording? 

Why Grammar? 

Why do we need to know about grammar? We need a theory of grammar or language which helps us understand how texts work. As teachers we need to knowhow texts work so we can explicitly help learners learn how to understand and produce texts – spoken and written in various contexts for various purposes.

Traditional Grammar 

Traditional grammar aims to describe the grammar of standard English by comparing with Latin. As such, it is prescriptive. Students learn the names of parts of speech (nouns, verbs, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives), parse textbook sentences and leanr to correct so-called bad grammar. Writers are taught, for example, not to start sentences with ‘and’, to make sure the subject agrees with the verb (time flies – not time fly – like an arrow), to say ‘I did it’ and not ‘I done it’. 

Formal Grammar 

Formal grammars are concerned to describe the structure of individual sentences. Such grammars view language as a set of rules which allow or disallow certain sentence structures. 

functional Grammar 

Functional grammars view language as a resource for making meaning. These grammars attempt to describe language in actual use and so focus on texts and their contexts. They are concerned not only with the structures but also with how those structures construct meaning. 

Context of culture 

Determines what we can mean through  Being ‘who we are’  Doing ‘what we do’  Saying ‘what we say.

Context of situation 

Can be specified through use of the register variables: field, tenor and mode. Field refers to what is going on, including  Activity focus (nature of social activity)  Object focus (subject matter).

GENRE 

When you read the incomplete McDonald’s text, You were able to reconstruct the field, tenor and mode of that text. You also figured out that it was an advertisement. That is, you understood the purpose of that text. Advertisements are a particular text-type, or genre. A genre can defined as a culturally specific text-type which results from using language (written or spoken) to (help) accomplish something.

DOWLOAD