The discourse semantics of attitudinal relations: continuing the study of lexis

Reactions to judgements of one's own vs other's behavior/character

As Table 9 in effect acknowledges, the lexical items negotiating feeling in this region of meaning can arguably be double-coded as inscribing both affect and judgement. The possibility of blending thus acknowledged, it is important to note that these items generally fit snugly into our most effective colligational frame for affect and are out of place in our most effective one for judgement; it is this patterning that underlies the inscribed affect, invoked judgement analysis suggested in Martin & White 2005: 68):

I felt angry that I did that.affect

I felt guilty that I did that.

It was brave of them to do that. judgement

*It was guilty of them to do that.

Reviewing this exercise, a number of points arise from the proposals encoded in Tables 7, 8 and 9 -- many of which call Malinowski's comments on the `gaps, gluts and vagaries' of Trobriand Island gardening terminology to mind (1935: 65). As far as `gaps and gluts' are concerned, the feelings at play here are overwhelmingly negative; pride is arguably the only `feel good' reaction we negotiate about our achievements or others. Beyond this, as far as negative reactions are concerned, the cells in Tables 7, 8 and 9 are populated very differently -- some with few realisations and others with several (the more populous cells of course call out for further exploration, probably along the lines of that modeled in Figures 9, 10 and 11 above). The teleological orientation of the affect category [dis/satisfaction] perhaps explains some of the skewing, since it deals with emotions arising from participation in one or another activity sequence. But a more general account of `gaps and gluts' is well beyond, and perhaps forever beyond, our understanding of the contextual history of the lexical items involved. Perhaps a corpus revealing the ontogenesis of this region of meaning could give us a glimmer of understanding; but as noted above, corpora monitoring language development are currently prohibitively costly to assemble.

As far as `vagaries' are concerned, the doubts I raised above about the placement of lexical realisations in Table 9 indicate the usefulness of a topological perspective alongside a typological one -- since realisations can then be positioned along clined axes (e.g. as reacting to a greater or lesser extent to [normality], [capacity], [tenacity] and so on). That said I have not attempted a topological display for the meanings at stake in this region, in part because my account is a partial one, and in part because, in spite of this, there are several simultaneous axes already in play (i.e. types of affect, positive or negative, in relation to one's own behavior or that of others, in relation to kinds of judgement) -- and I have no principled basis for privileging one or another of these axes in the kind of displays presented in Figures 9--11 above (where the privileging was equally arbitrary). As noted above, this is not a theoretical issue; a topology is in principle an `x'-dimensional space. Rather the problem is representational. What is needed perhaps is a form of electronic representation which allows different axes to be foregrounded, in effect affording multiple windows of perspective on the complex agnation involved. This would rework the arbitrary privileging of axes in Figures 9 through 11 as a question of perspective, in relation to a discourse analyst's concerns. For recent developments in representation moving beyond the affordances of a 2-dimensional diagram on page or screen see Almutairi 2013, Zappvigna 2011.

The multidimensionality involved here recalls van Leeuwen's work on what he calls parametric systems (van Leeuwen 2009, Martin 2011) -- semiotic resources involving a number of simultaneous systems, consisting of two terms, which are graded in relation to one another. In his work on voice quality, colour and typography the systems tend to freely combine, and so a typological representation such as that introduced in Fig. 3 above is appropriate. The `gaps and gluts' of lexical realisations means however that a representation of this kind overgeneralizes the meanings involved, proposing too many feature combinations that don't get realized and not providing enough delicacy for combinations that do. In this regard it is instructive to reflect on the complexity of the wiring in Hasan's 1987 lexis as delicate grammar initiative (e.g. her Fig. 4.2) where the possibilities afforded by simultaneous systems are all constrained with complex left-facing wiring so that only lexicalized meanings are realized.

A GRAMMARIAN'S VISION (AND BEYOND)

In this paper we have explored some of the issues arising from what Halliday 1961 has characterized as the grammarian's dream of formalizing lexis as delicate grammar. As far as attitudinal lexis is concerned we have in fact shifted our focus from lexico- grammar to discourse semantics, in order to generalize across the range of systems enacting attitude -- from the grammarian's dream to a discourse analyst's nightmare.

Why nightmare? My hunch is that the bad dreams derive in part from grammarians' vision of the nature of SFL as an L1. SFL's conceptual architecture is basically derived from work on grammar -- on axial relations (the particular complementarity of system and structure engineered by Halliday and his colleagues in the 1960s) and the conception of rank, metafunction and stratification arising directly from SFL's distinctive privileging of paradigmatic relations (for foundational papers see Halliday & Martin 1981). Representation was a key part of this enterprise, with system networks evolving as a formalization of systemic relations -- canonically for English clauses and verbal groups. Critically a tradition of cryptogrammatical reasoning (Davidse 1998) evolved which gave rise to networks cross-classifying a small number of more general systems (e.g. PROCESS TYPE and AGENCY, MOOD and POLARITY, or THEME and INFORMATION) and then extending these systems and their interactions in delicacy until relevant structural distinctions had been accounted for. Lexical insertion rules did arise as part of this process, for closed system items such as English do; but for the most part the formalization of lexical relations was positioned as a second step, dependent (in delicacy) on the general grammatical relations just reviewed.

One result of this is that a robust tradition of reasoning about lexical relations has not developed in SFL; there is nothing comparable to the decades of cryptogrammatical reasoning about grammatical relations in English and other languages. And uncertainty about how to motivate distinctions undermines our work on lexical relations whether we attempt to formalize these as delicate grammatical or discourse semantic oppositions. Work in corpus linguistics has shown us one possible path forward, as illustrated from Bednarek 2008 above; but corpora aren't anywhere near big enough at present to support the kind of fine-grained analysis we need. We know that we have to think relationally, and that the meaning of a word is its relationship with other words. But in the absence of corpus evidence, we don't know how to argue for one kind of relation or another, and for one kind of relation among relations or another. Clearly we need to move beyond a grammarian's vision of SFL; but how can we best prod our L1 to evolve?

As implicated in this paper, and the work inspired by Martin & White 2005, the development of L2s addressing lexical relations will be a critical part of this process -- especially where the L2s are designed for text analysis (and especially where the text analysis is oriented to social problems arising in fields such as educational, clinical or forensic linguistics). For attitudinal relations, topology appears to be a more promising form of representation than typology -- since there are so many relevant axes to consider and so many of them are clines. This reflects perhaps the sense in which lexical relations are a qualitatively different kind of phenomenon than grammatical ones. Lexis after all fine-tunes the meaning potential of a culture; there are many more lexical distinctions than grammatical ones. And lexis is also at a culture's cutting edge; words come and go as social practices ebb and flow. So the gaps, gluts and vagaries that currently frustrate our SFL L1 in fact afford our culture. We need to embrace this challenge, not hide from it -- continuing to develop L2s that confound our L1. Otherwise most of the fine-gained meaning potential of a culture will remain untheorised. As functional linguists and semioticians, we need our L1 to do better than that.

Appendix 1: Judgement systems

Table 10

Judgements of social esteem

Table 11

Judgements of social sanction

© J R Martin, 2017

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