Mathewson and Porter - Voice and Mood: A Linguistic Approach

Lexicons, Grammars, Reading Guides, History, Culture, and Background
MAubrey
Posts: 1090
Joined: May 6th, 2011, 8:52 pm
Contact:

Re: Mathewson and Porter - Voice and Mood: A Linguistic Approach

Post by MAubrey »

Jonathan Robie wrote: January 19th, 2023, 5:42 pm This part of Rachel's review went way over my head. Which is not surprising, since I have never really read Halliday and am very shallow in SFL. But could you flesh this out a little?

Has anyone explained voice and mood for NT Greek well using Halliday's SFL model? Could it be done better? What would that look like?
Rachel wrote:The book evinces little
attempt to explain SFL at a deeper level of theoretical intention or motivation.
Concepts and terminology are simplistically mapped onto Greek morphosyntactic
forms in a one-to-one fashion, losing SFL’s explanatory potential for the semantics
of Greek voice or mood. These changes appear driven by a desire to compensate
for the English focus in Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, but instead they
sacrifice important insights SFL has to offer for understanding language generally.
In the voice section, this behavior appears most clearly in applying Halliday’s
Ergative Model. Mathewson changes definitions and applies terms at will, with little
regard for Halliday’s underlying goals, including terms like “medium,” “range,” and
“ergative.” SFL’s “medium” is used to define the role of the subject for all middle
and passive verbs (p. 52). “Range” is equated with the object of all transitive middle
verbs (p. 66). He reverses Halliday’s definition of “ergative” entirely, with little ex-
planation or justification. He then assigns it to all middle verbs (pp. 29–31, 38),

thus, jettisoning insights from SFL’s notion of ergativity as describing interactions
between certain (semantic) process types and how participant roles are realized in
discourse (M. A. K. Halliday and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen, Halliday’s Introduc-
tion to Functional Grammar [New York: Routledge, 2014], 336–54).

Mathewson’s reversal of Halliday’s “ergativity” creates trouble for NT stu-
dents and scholars studying SFL, to say nothing of other linguistic traditions. Halli-
day’s own nonstandard use of “ergative” has already received decades of critique.
Actually, yes. Fletcher's dissertation that Mathewson himself refers to is a good account of Greek within the SFL model. I have a copy, but I can't share it. But Mathewson, while on the one hand praises Fletcher, consistently diverges from it away from standard SFL. Fletcher uses all these terms the way they normally mean in SFL and presents a good analysis. Mathewson regularly changes definitions with little explanation, much less justification. As a result, he misses all the places where Fletcher does a good job. Fletcher's analysis is broadly in line with Rachel's.

That said, there's a reason I do not recommend SFL to people. SFL does have some fascinating strengths and my lack of recommendation is not because it's a bad framework, but because it isn't a framework that plays well with other frameworks. If you learn RRG or Construction Grammar, or Simpler Syntax, LFG, HPSG, etc, you can fairly easily navigate from one to the other.
Mike Aubrey, Linguist
SIL International
Koine-Greek.com
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Mathewson and Porter - Voice and Mood: A Linguistic Approach

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: January 19th, 2023, 5:42 pm Has anyone explained voice and mood for NT Greek well using Halliday's SFL model? Could it be done better? What would that look like?
I doubt one can. Rachel put her finger on the fundamental problem:
Aubrey 2022:577 wrote:Further, the voice definitions themselves suggest meaningful contrasts, given
their binary features (+/–), but a lack of external motivation leaves them either too
rigid to deal with language data or too vague to be useful.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Eeli Kaikkonen
Posts: 611
Joined: June 2nd, 2011, 7:49 am
Location: Finland
Contact:

Re: Mathewson and Porter - Voice and Mood: A Linguistic Approach

Post by Eeli Kaikkonen »

I have access only to the publisher's preview.

Mathewson says:
Allan also appears to suggest that the active voice can be “laid aside”
in contexts that indicate subject-affectedness, so that the meaning
of the active voice is neutralized in some contexts and with some
verbs. 32 This creates ambiguity as to what the voice endings would
actually convey, if context can override them
But Allan says in his original dissertation in p. 13:
The meaning of the middle voice was characterized as a marked coding of a
departuree from the prototypical transitive event. Now the question arises as to the meaning
off the active voice. Can we simply conclude that the active voice designates the absence
off subject-affectedness in opposition to the middle voice? I will argue here that this
conclusion cannot be drawn. Instead, the active voice must be taken as the unmarked
member of a privative opposition. In other words, the active voice is neutral as to the
semantic feature of subject-affectedness.
To me this appears to suggest that Mathewson doesn't understand what Allan thinks.
Post Reply

Return to “Books”