The Educational Applications ofChomskyan Transformational Grammar

andHallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar

By Lea Rash

May 2012

1

The broad question of what human language is can best be answered by considering it as

a complex signaling system, which inspired the prominent linguistic theories of Noam

Chomsky and Michael Halliday, among others. In turn, their theories motivated them to

view second language teaching and learning in divergent and controversial ways. This

essay will first reveal the way some earlier theories of language affected Chomsky’s

innateness perspective. How these points of view spearheaded the system of

transformational grammar characterized by universal grammar will then be illustratively

discussed in order to demonstrate his rule-motivated approach. Likewise, the way prior

theories influenced Halliday’s in-context perspective leading to the conception of

systemic functional grammar will then be explained and pertinent examples offered. A

discussion of how each theory can successfully or unsuccessfully be applied to education

will close the essay.

Definitions and descriptions of human language have been philosophically debated and

re-defined throughout the ages (Bloor & Bloor, 2005). Language can be a general

reference to human and animal communication, or to the human ability to communicate

verbally, or to precise structures of language (Graddol, Cheshire & Swann, 2001).

During the twentieth century, structuralists and anthropologists contrived their own

unique definitions of the word. Ferdinand de Saussure, the “father of modern linguistics”

(Culler, 1976, p. 80), believed that language could never be entirely clarified (Bloor &

Bloor, 2005) and moreover that “language is not complete in any speaker” (Saussure,

1974, p. 14). A person’s inherited set of “signs”, or concepts and their representations,

was Saussure’s nascent structuralist realization of the language system, which he called

“langue”; a person’s use of that system was termed “parole” (Bloor & Bloor, 2005, p.

241).

Impressed with Saussure’s distinctions of langue and parole, Noam Chomsky (1965)

devised comparable dualities of “competence” and “performance”, which will be

discussed below. More importantly, he confronted the structuralist view of what

language is (whereby their only linguistic reality is a surface sentence structure) and he

posed a serious question for which structuralists had no answer: Why does language

2

possess endless possibilities for conveying innovative ideas and thoughts? Chomsky felt

that the only valid way to determine a language’s unseen principles was by looking for

clues beneath the surface (Campbell, 1982) to what CAN be said rather than what IS said.

Thus, if the gist of a sentence is not clear at one level, it will be at another level.

Chomsky saw that with a narrow grammar system and a finite set of terms, human beings

are quite capable of creating unlimited numbers of sentences, as well as those never

before uttered (Campbell, 1982), as part of the “creative aspect” of language (Fromkin,

Rodman & Hyams, 2003, p. 9). He somewhat paradoxically answered his question to

structuralists by basing it on a theory of structurally-dependent transformational grammar

that explains the ingeniousness and creativity of language in a mathematically precise

way (Campbell, 1982) while explicitly ignoring pragmatics and semantics (Bloor &

Bloor, 2005; Fromkin et al., 2003).

Transformational grammar contains three rule-governed elements, described below:

Morphophonemic rules tell us how to articulate morphemes, which is especially helpful

when there are multiple pronunciations since these hinge on a noun’s end-phoneme, for

example, pronunciations of end-phonemes in English plural morphemes: caps (/s/), cabs

(/z/), badges (/ əz/) (Fromkin et al., 2003, p. 277).

Phrase structure rules are doctrines of grammar that specifically and succinctly detail

grammatical units of syntactic properties. A phrase structure tree is the mechanism used

for depicting a speaker’s understanding of sentence structure in his language (Fromkin et

al., 2003).

For example:

English language: The man took the canoe = NP → Det N V NP (i.e. in English a Noun

Phrase can contain a Determiner + Noun + Verb + Noun Phrase).

Hixkaryana language: Canoe took person = NP → N V N

(adapted from Baker, 2001, p. 75).

3

A transformational rule pertains to the core phrase structure of a sentence. It acquires a

fresh structure when it positions or introduces elements (Fromkin et al., 2003), as seen in

the following example of a modified “inverted” phrase structure tree diagram (Baker,

2001, p. 76) showing the transformational insertion of elements into what could

conceivably turn into an indefinite phrase. It illustrates Chomsky’s analysis of the

“unbounded, stimulus-free” (Baker, 2001, p. 223) and “limitless” feature of language

(Fromkin et al., 2003, pp. 136, 137):

NP

Det N PP

P NP

The girl Det N PP

with P NP

the bee Det N PP

in P NP

the bonnet Det N PP

with P NP

the honey Det N

on

the crumpet

(Source: My own example, adapted and modified from Fromkin et al., 2003, p. 137).

Chomsky’s incongruous fondness for both mathematics and the creative aspect of

language shows up in his “algorithmic syntax” (Campbell, 1982, p. 186) in the form of a

phrase structure rule string for the ‘girl with the bee’ sentence above. The sentence

demonstrates the expandability of language, for example that a Noun Phrase can contain

a Determiner followed by a Noun and a Prepositional Phrase, ad infinitum:

NP → Det N PP, PP → P NP, NP → Det N PP, PP → P NP, NP → Det N PP, PP → P

NP, NP → Det N PP, PP → P NP, NP → Det N

(adapted and modified from Fromkin et al., 2003, p. 137).

4

Chomsky’s theory has proved to be part of an English user’s competency because it is

intimately associated with the communicative role of language (Traugott & Platt, 1980).

His dichotomy of competence and performance (Fromkin et al., 2003; Graddol, et al.,

2001) came out of the hypothesis based on generative grammars that view language as

belonging to the mind (Graddol, et al., 2001) and affecting the process of how we think

(Traugott & Platt, 1980). Thus, an “ideal” native speaker-listener’s linguistic

competence is not a matter of experience (Campbell, 1982, p. 161) but involves

rationalist-inspired innate knowledge, referred to as “universal grammar” (Fromkin et al.,

2003, p. 20), which includes intuitive decisions about the suitability of grammatical

structures (Graddol, et al., 2001).

Grammar from Chomsky’s perspective is a constrained “anti-chance” device with no

built-in allowance for “freedom of choice” concerning the origin of the message

(Campbell, 1982, p. 165), making it as predictable as a mathematical calculation can be.

Universal grammar establishes an additional type of anti-chance mechanism on this

restriction in order for language to be learned naturally and effortlessly. In turn,

Chomsky’s competence depends on that individual being completely accurate, never

erring, and knowing his language flawlessly, while being removed from any situational

context. The person’s performance is what s/he actually does when s/he speaks or listens

(Traugott & Platt, 1980).

Up to this point, this essay has discussed Chomsky’s approach to language analysis and

the definitions involved. In the next segment the essay presents the perspective of

Hallidayan grammar and how, unlike Chomsky, Michael Halliday’s ideas about language

are based completely on in-context notions of meaning production (Graddol, et al., 2001).

These ideas can be traced back to the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1935) who

believed that language is an avenue for negotiating and maintaining social relationships

within an “actual context” (p. 9). In turn, Malinowski’s thinking played a large part in

J.R. Firth’s founding work (Bloor & Bloor, 2005) at the London School of Linguistics

(Graddol, et al., 2001). Firth (1957) argued that language is polysystemic and part of a

social process where one weaves nurture into nature. Halliday detailed his mentor Firth’s

5

ideas about system into complex networks (Bloor & Bloor, 2005) that strive to be all-

inclusive with an “extravagant” (Graddol, et al., 2001, p. 89) “labeling system” (Martin,

2004, p. 64).

The goal of Hallidayan lexicogrammar is semantic: to reveal how people utilize

(Halliday, 1985, xvii) “real” spoken or written (Graddol, et al., p. 90) language for

creating meaning (Halliday, 1985, xvii). Describing language as a “social-semiotic”,

Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFG) is “systemic” because language elements

are presented from “a set” of options inside a “system of meanings” (Feez, 1995, p. 5;

Bloor & Bloor, 2005, p. 1). It is “functional” because it shows us why and how people

employ language (Feez, 1995, p. 7).

With SFG, “text” (spoken or written language) is analyzed according to structural ranks:

the “word”, the “group” (comparable to “phrase”), and the “clause” (not “sentence”)

(Graddol, et al., p. 90). Halliday explains that “…it is the larger units that function more

directly in the realization of higher-level patterns…. [If] we want to explore how

semantic features are represented in the grammar, we look primarily at the structure of

the clause” (Halliday, 1985, p. 21). To convey ideas and social relationships between

people, labels are used. The “ideational” (a.k.a. “experiential”) function of meaning has

an accompanying contextual aspect called “field”, and both refer to the subject matter or

activity type. The “interpersonal” function has a contextual aspect called “tenor”, and

both refer to those involved in the spoken or written exchange. The “textual” function

and its contextual aspect “mode” take care of the cohesiveness of a text as well as the

ideational and interpersonal functions of meaning (Graddol, et al., p. 90), which are

“meshed” within the clause to signal that communication has taken place (Bloor & Bloor,

2005, p. 10). One can evaluate the textual element of meaning once the “theme” and

“rheme” have been recognized (Graddol, et al., 2001, p. 91).

Usually the first constituent in Halliday’s clause in English is the theme (Graddol, et al.,

2001, p. 91), which stretches from a point up to and embracing the first ideational

component (i.e. the “participant” (subject), “process” (verb) or “circumstance”

6

(prepositional phrase) (Halliday, 1994, p. 144). The clause’s remaining part is the rheme

(Graddol, et al., 2001, p. 91).

My improvised example, below, shows how SFG analyzes the context of text:

Thomas James read newspapers slowly while at the Chedi Club. But he had learned to

read people quickly.

Thomas James (actor participant) read (material process) newspapers (goal

participant) slowly (circumstance) while at (adjunct) the Chedi Club (actor

participant). But (adjunct) he (actor participant) had learned (material process) to

read (mental process) people (goal participant) quickly (circumstance). [Note the

difference of processes for the word ‘read’.]

Interpersonal Theme: Thomas James Rheme: read newspapers slowly while at the

Chedi Club. Textual Theme: But Interpersonal Theme: he Rheme: had learned to

read people quickly.

Field (subject matter): newspapers, the Chedi Club

Field (activity type/transitivity): read, had learned, to read

Tenor (social roles and relationships): Thomas James, he, people

Mode (cohesiveness of text): slowly, while at, but, quickly

(Terms: Graddol et al., 2001, pp. 90, 92; Mangubhai, 1991, pp. 16-21. Example: My

own, 2010).

So far this essay has discussed the Chomskyan and Hallidayan descriptions of what

language is and how to best analyze it from their perspectives. The next part of the essay

will consider the feasibility of using Chomsky’s approach in the teaching and learning of

English as a second language.

7

While Chomsky’s principles of transformational grammar are directly attuned with the

thinking of modern psychology, it is Chomsky’s universal grammar that has helped

educators recognize how children acquire language, what language ability is, and how the

mind seems to discern more than it is taught (Campbell, 1982). Because a child

possesses an innate language “template” and because the phases of language growth are

consistent for all languages, a youngster learns his native language with little effort and

understands features of his language’s grammar that he has no knowledge of (Fromkin et

al., 2003, pp. 348-349, 390). Chomsky thus contends in his “poverty of the stimulus”

theory that there is a chasm between the “impoverished” linguistic stimuli a child

receives and the abundant linguistic knowledge that he acquires (Fromkin et al., 2003, p.

348; Campbell, 1982, p. 168), with universal grammar being the hidden link connecting

them.

Based on this, Chomsky believes that knowledge eclipses experience (Campbell, 1982).

He may talk of the need for language learning to occur in a suitably nourishing and

motivating environment (Chomsky, 1988), but this falls short of specifically stating that

there is a need for “practice” and the nourishing “experience” of talking. By

downgrading experience, Chomsky underrates the intricacy of language, and, in turn,

underrates the intricacy of the mind (Campbell, 1982, pp. 173, 184).

It is by studying language separately from its use in context that enables predictions about

language structure to emerge easily and illuminatingly (Campbell, 1982). Nevertheless,

it is doubtful that Chomsky’s universal grammar (Bourke, 2005), based on the innateness

principles of grammars in all languages (Fromkin et al., 2003) could ever be commonly

employed as a teaching method (Bourke, 2005) because competence cannot be generated

by analyzing sentences removed from their communicative context (Graddol, et al.,

2001). It is exactly because “language does not wear meaning on its sleeve” that

situational context is so important. It is not enough to simply “throw in the dictionary”

when interpreting language as Campbell suggests we do in his support of Chomsky.

Even the communicative “noise” Chomsky disparages, particularly in the ideal native

speaker (e.g. “slips of the tongue”, “ers”, “uhs” and “ahs”, etc.), conveys individual

8

messages of importance. Chomsky, however, is more concerned with the message in its

entirety (Campbell, 1982, pp. 96, 161, 162, 169, 185).

An account of language that entails using the native speaker’s “intuition” as information

may be questionable to linguists (Lyons, 1981, p. 44), such as Michael Halliday.

Halliday affirms that a principle using intuition as its premise cannot come to grips with

the grammatical complexity of spoken language. This manifests itself when compiling

data, as Halliday himself realized when he witnessed an unplanned classroom discussion

among some fairly fluent foreign students, which he describes here:

…I was struck by a curious fact. Not only were people unconscious of what they

themselves were saying; they would often deny, not just that they HAD said

something I had observed them to say, but also that they ever COULD say it. For

example, I noticed the utterance ‘it’ll’ve been going to’ve being tested every day

for the past fortnight soon’ where the verbal group ‘will have been going to have

been being tested’ makes 5 serial tense choices: present in past in future in past in

future, and is also passive (Halliday, 2002, p. 325).

Ultimately, it is Chomsky’s own disclosures that speak loudest “…it is quite apparent that

a speaker’s self-reports and viewpoints about his behavior and his competence may be in

error” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 8). Years later, he also refuted that his generative

transformational grammar was applicable to schools teaching the English language

(Christie, 1994; Bourke, 2005). Despite this, some linguists still implement Chomsky’s

phrase structure rules and tree diagrams even though the metalanguage is considered

uncommon (Bourke, 2005).

If Chomsky’s transformational grammar is ever widely implemented, it could make what

is already complicated even more so (Bourke, 2005), although it does lend itself well to

demonstrating language systems (Hudson, 2004). Its tasks aimed at students tend to be

so “rule-driven” (Christie, 1994, pp. 105, 110) and focused on written sentence structure

that they exclude authentic language, the meaning, the overall text, and any distinctions

9

between written and spoken language. This is particularly significant for lagging students

who struggle with written language skills, especially the academically-esteemed narrative

genre (Feez, 1995).

Up to now, this part of the essay has discussed the practicability of using Chomsky’s

approach in the teaching and learning of English as a second language. The essay will

turn now to the viability of using Halliday’s approach, which recognizes the human

“social” reality (Christie, 1994, p. 109) involved in language use, and also helps learners

perceive how characteristics of their day-to-day grammar shape their thinking (Halliday,

2002). Sustained by advancements in psychological doctrine (Christie, 1994), an

exceptionally vital feature of SFG is the way communicative information is enhanced

(Bloor & Bloor, 2005). It thus not only offers a frame of reference for the scholastic

examination of language and potential construction and deconstruction of text and

meaning, but it can also supply paradigms of learning and needed skills while unifying

the approach to curriculum design and pedagogy. SFG facilitates clear and precise

information about language for an instructor (e.g. with its “curriculum genre” or

teaching-learning cycle methodology (Feez, 1995, p. 9; Christie, 1994, p. 118)), while

assisting the guidance of students and the direction of a student’s literary performance

(Christie, 1994) in putting together experience and meaning. A learner can dynamically

demonstrate his or her language ability not only through the language but also in relation

to it (Feez, 1995), thereby establishing an individual’s cognition of the world (Halliday,

1981).

Only later on in a child’s life and in the teenage years does the skill to compress

information materialize (Christie, 1994) by using techniques of nominalization or what

Halliday calls “grammatical metaphor” (Bloor & Bloor, 2005, p. 213). This skill allows

the student improved “rhetorical organization and increased lexical density” by forming

nouns from verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and conjunctions (Eggins, 2004, p. 95).

Nevertheless, a teacher may still find it difficult to identify specific dissimilarities

between coherent and poorly written texts. The result is that when a teacher leaves a

10

comment to “write more clearly”, no useful knowledge is imparted to the learner (Bloor

& Bloor, 2005, p. 227).

From this standpoint, Halliday’s aim is to broaden a child’s language and the language’s

functional possibilities (Hudson, 2004). Since it is the use of intricate clause structures

that assist the clarity of text (Bloor & Bloor, 2005), Halliday draws on “theme analysis”

to demonstrate a clause’s informational conspicuousness (Martin, 2004, p. 68). In this

way, the divergent writing abilities of learners may be spotted. For instance, a sixteen-

year-old would usually employ extended themes (Bloor & Bloor, 2005) and metaphors

(Campbell, 1982) to convey information, while a child half that age would normally be

unskilled as a writer and use short, simple themes (Bloor & Bloor, 2005) that are more

speech-like (Christie, 1994). Meanwhile, in spoken English, non-native English speakers

tend to use separate independent clause structures and less than half the number of

relative clauses that native speakers do, which makes the information they impart in their

delivery less understood (Bloor & Bloor, 2005). A yardstick for measuring improvement

in these types of students then is greatly assisted by using systemic-functional grammar

(Bloor & Bloor, 2005).

In addition, by teaching learners a new register in Standard English, they will be able to

make fresh manipulations of the language (Hudson, 2004), characterized by aspects of

the situational context: field, tenor, and mode (Feez, 1995). Even young children are

capable of differentiating between registers (Biber & Conrad, 2004) and genres (Christie,

1994). Examples of registers include conversation, academic, fiction and news (Biber &

Conrad, 2004). Examples of genres include essays, business letters, reports, stories

(Bloor & Bloor, 2005) poetry, plays, letters, diaries, etc. Halliday’s genre analysis

supports language skills instruction, especially writing (Bloor & Bloor, 2005), notably

because genres are structured in predictable ways to create particular meanings and to

help with understanding and remembrance (Graddol, et al., 2001).

Although Bourke claims that there is no apparent division involving systemic functional

grammar’s approach to speech or writing (Bourke, 2005), Christie and Feez disagree,

stating that SFG makes a clear distinction between them by supplying two very different

11

grammars and discourse structures (Christie, 1994; Feez, 1995). In fact, SFG makes

possible a meticulous examination of the two forms that can be effectively constructed

with other learners or be centered on an individuallearner.

Bourke goes on to point out that Halliday’s SFG metalanguage may be too “ambiguous”

with confusing overlaps of process meanings, and “too full and too rich” to be

successfully utilized in the classroom by instructors and students. In addition, teachers

themselves have called it “complex”, “messy” and “lacking simplicity” (Bourke, 2005,

pp. 93, 94).

Despite these various criticisms of Hallidayan lexicogrammar, Bourke feels that SFG not

only offers the required foundational basis for teaching the language but that it also

promotes a “sensitization” of processes that aids the learner in “out-performing” his

innate grammar (Bourke, 2005, p. 91). What’s more, SFG is a versatile means of

assisting language learners to read, write, hear and speak more successfully in all the

diverse registers and genres (Martin 2004) that educational systems require knowledge

of.

In the final analysis, the choice of language method is a matter of personal discretion. A

teacher’s inclination will reveal itself in the preference for either a cognitional or a

contextual approach to language. Accordingly, this means selecting the intuitional or

experiential, the mathematical or the representational, the constructural or the

communicational, the plain or prolific, the ideal or the real. This essay has argued that

the question of what human language is and how it can be better understood and applied

to education can be answered by looking critically at the debatable but relevant theories

of Noam Chomsky and Michael Halliday and carefully weighing the many pros and cons

of each system.

12

References

Baker, M.C. (2001). The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar.

New York: Basic Books/Perseus Books Group.

Biber, D. & Conrad, S. (2004). Corpus-based comparisons of registers. In C. Coffin,

Hewings, A. & K. O’Halloran (Eds.), Applying English grammar: Functional and

corpus approaches (pp. 40-56). London: Arnold/Hodder Headline Group.

Bloor, T. & Bloor, M. (2005).  The Functional Analysis of English: A Hallidayan

Approach. London, UK: Hodder Arnold/Hodder Headline Group.

Bourke, J.M. (2005). The Grammar we teach. Reflections on English Language

Teaching 4(2005), 85-97. Retrieved from:

www.nus.edu.sg/celc/publications/BourkeVol4.pdf

Campbell, J. (1982). Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life. New

York: Simon & Schuster.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and the problem of knowledge: The Managua lectures.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Christie, F. (1994). Developing an educational linguistics for English language

teaching: A systemic functional linguistic perspective. Functions of Language, 1(1),

95-127.

Culler, J.D. (1976). Saussure. Sussex: Harvester Press.

Eggins, S. (2004). An introduction to systemic functional linguistics (2nd ed.). London:

Continuum.

13

Feez, S. (1995). Systemic functional linguistics and its applications in Australian

language education: A short history. Interchange, 27(28), 5-10.

Firth, J.R. (1957). Papers in linguistics 1934-1951. London: Oxford University Press.

Fromkin, V., Rodman, R. & Hyams, N. (Eds.). (2003). An Introduction to Language (7th

ed.). Boston, MA: Heinle/Thomson.

Graddol, D., Cheshire, J. & Swann, J. (2001). Describing Language (2nd ed.).

Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1981). Three aspects of children’s language development: Learning

language, learning through language, learning about language. In Y.K. Goodman,

M.M. Haussler, and D.S. Strickland (Eds.), Oral and written language development:

Impact on schools. Proceedings from the 1979 and 1980 IMPACT conferences (pp. 7-

19). Urbana, IL: International Reading Association and National Council of Teachers

of English.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward

Arnold.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1994). Some grammatical problems in scientific English. In C. Coffin,

A. Hewings, & K. O’Halloran (Eds.) (2004), Applying English grammar: Functional

and corpus approaches (pp. 77-99). London: Arnold/Hodder Headline Group.

Halliday, M.A.K. (2002/2005). On grammar. N.Y.: Continuum.

Hudson, R. (2004). Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa). Journal of

Linguistics, 40(1), 105-130.

14

Lyons, J. (1981). Language and linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Malinowski, B. (1935). The language and magic of gardening. London: George Allen &

Unwin.

Mangubhai, F. (1991). An introduction to Halliday’s functional grammar. Unpublished

paper.

Martin, J.R. (2004). Grammatical structure: What do we mean? In C. Coffin, H.

Hewings, & K. O’Halloran (Eds.), Applying English grammar: Functional and

corpus approaches (pp. 57-76). London: Hodder Arnold/Hodder Headline Group.

Saussure, F. de (1974). Course in general linguistics. London: Fontana-Collins.

Traugott, E. & Pratt, M. (1980). Linguistics for Students of Literature. New York:

Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc.

15