Edward Mcdonald

The Compleat Wordsmith / 老馬文通

The concept of group in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is more complex than its equivalents in other theories of grammar or syntax for a number of reasons. 1 It is not an autonomous structural notion, but rather is understood as the realisation of systemic features – that is, the syntagmatic combinations recognised in the group, as in other...

In the Anglophone sphere, according to popular and most academic understandings, the term “ideograph” is regarded as an unproblematic synonym of 漢字 hànzì ‘Chinese character.’ On graphological grounds, i.e. as applied to writing systems, it can easily be shown that the concept of “ideograph” is both theoretically incoherent and practically unfeasibl...

In the eyes of early modern European scholars, Chinese was commonly regarded as a “lacking” language: lacking its own grammatical tradition or “grammatics”; lacking the complex morphology of the classical European languages; even lacking its own “parts of speech” or word classes. In the late 19th century Ma Jianzhong created a grammatics for Chines...

Aristotle famously defined writing in a way that made it dependent on speech; and Saussure, in mapping out a place for language as part of a new field of ‘semiology’, has been seen as continuing this so-called ‘logocentric’ bias in Western thinking about signs. Kress, by contrast, in defining a new field of ‘social’ semiotics, emphasizes the differ...

Social semiotic approaches to multimodality have tended to take language as the model for other modalities even when their professed aim is to move away from it. This kind of “linguistic imperialism” causes problems for theorising the relationship between the two basic semiotic planes of expression and interpretation in different modalities, and ho...

The current chapter deals with something that first became a live issue in the European tradition among French and German grammarians of the eighteenth – nineteenth centuries as they struggled to develop a new kind of grammatical unit, intermediate between the “word” and “sentence” of the Latin tradition, which they initially called groupe des mots...

The exclusivist ideology characterizing the Chinese writing system as “ideographs” was constructed in the West, and later reimported into China where it influenced popular and nationalistic understandings of the characters. For the West, the Chinese script held out the promise, embraced particularly eagerly by the literary and artistic worlds, of a...

Debates on the nature of the Chinese writing system, particularly whether Chinese characters may or may not legitimately be called “ideographs,” continue to bedevil Chinese studies. This paper considers examples of what are referred to as “discourses of character fetishization,” whereby an inordinate status is discursively created for Chinese chara...

If music is treated as a kind of ‘language’, then it makes sense for musicology to borrow from linguistics in order to define exactly what sort of a ‘language’ music is. However, not only does this avoid the challenge of defining music on its own terms, it also brings across a whole lot of unnecessary historical baggage. Through a close analysis of...

Background in singing voice. Singing performance involves the expression of musical and linguistic features of a complex musico-verbal text (Callaghan & McDonald 2002) through vocal tone and word articulation. Western classical singing follows the basic maxim of the Italian tradition of vocal pedagogy "One sings as one speaks", and classical singer...

If music is treated as a kind of 'language', then it makes sense for musicology to borrow from linguistics in order to define exactly what sort of a 'language' music is. However, not only does this avoid the challenge of defining music on its own terms, it also brings across a whole lot of unnecessary historical baggage. Through a close analysis of...

While most scholars seem to agree with Tsao (1990) as to the inadequacy of the notion of "sentence", as traditionally defined in Indo-European languages, for the analysis of Chinese, two opposing trends have emerged in defining the basic grammatical units for Chinese. On the one hand, Tsao himself extends the study of grammar into its discourse con...

This paper traces the history of language reform over the last century in China from the point of view of the «patriotic» school of Chinese Cultural Linguistics. On many issues, this school takes stands which are out of keeping with the traditional concerns of language reform, but which nevertheless reflect wider ideological currents in Chinese soc...

This article presents an outline functional grammar of Chinese based on the framework presented in M.A.K. Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar. The description is divided into five areas for teaching purposes (only the first three of which are treated here), covering basic clause structure, additional elements, clause marking, clause compl...