I ATEN’T DEAD

This Functional Grammar module is slowly killing me, however. It’s not that it’s a grind (though it is); it’s not that it’s difficult to grasp (though it is that too); it’s that there’s a small, nagging, instinctive part of me that can actually see the value of this, but I can’t get that bit to function properly.

So many of the ideas present in SFG chime with weaknesses I see in my students’ work time and time again, but I don’t know how to make it applicable. And here’s the thing: I’m a pretty smart, well-educated, native English speaker receiving specific tuition in this from a top-tier institution and yet I’m getting almost overwhelmed by the detail. How are my kids meant to cope? How, more to the point, can I make it work for them? I’ve been plugging away in the hope that it’ll all come together when I actually have to apply it wholescale for the assignment, but the expected epiphany remains stubbornly unepihanized.

Gyah. Back to the grindstone.

Functional Grammar Three

Again, a nicely practical unit so not too much to say. However, the claim that we can identify sets of items by ‘focusing on the similarities they share and ignoring the differences,’ seems to warrant a little discussion. The question is which differences, between which items?

Adverbs, for example, seem to be largely defined by what they are not (the ‘rag bag category’, and from what I can remember from the more psychologically orientated literature (cf. Lexis) and semiotics seems to suggest that we organize categories entirely in reference to other categories. Groups are not defined so much by internal similarities, but by their differences to externalities: by what they are not, in other words. Vive la diffarance!

Functional Grammar Two

16MB of RAM!

Functional Grammar One

This is either going to be utterly fascinating or massively grating, nothing in between.

I should probably say a little more than that, so let’s try this – is it just me, or does the tripartite conception of Experiential, Interpersonal, and Textual meanings not seem pretty similar to Peirce’s three elements of the sign (Object, Interpretant, and Representamen respectively)?