Michael Alexander Kirkwood

Halliday
The scale-and-category grammar
theory
• This model referred to as systemic
grammar is based on the
existence of choice within
language (PARADIGMATIC AXIS).
• The essential idea is that at any
given place in a structure,
language permits choice , a choice
that may be extremely large or
quite limited.
 Example
• Henry and Mary /had /a/ baby /last /week
• He /saw /his/friend/ on/ Monday
• She /met/that/person /last/Friday
• They /noticed/an /intruder/ on/ Sunday

We can represent the choice by such

formula:
Nominal+V past +Determiner+Nominal+on/last
+X day
• Halliday lists a number of different
levels at which linguistic events should
be accounted for.
• The primary levels are
‘substance’ ,‘form,’ and
‘context.’
1. The substance is the material of
language: ‘phonic’ (audible noises) or
‘graphic’ (visible marks).
 • In this model , phonology contains
FOUR units
1. PHONEME: smallest significant sound in
english
2. THE SYLLABLE: combination of sounds
marked by one element of sound
prominence
3. THE FOOT: which mark the stress patterns in
an utterance
4. THE TONE: the intonation patterns in an
utterance
2. The form is the organization of the
substance into meaningful events. . . .
Form is further said to be, in fact, two
related levels (namely, grammar and
lexis),
3. The context is the relation of the form to
EXTRA LINGUISTIC features of the
situation in which language operates:
gesture, non-linguistic noises, number of
participants , time, place of occurrence
• An utterance could only be satisfactorily
explained if the context in which it
occurred was known:
• I am a doctor, said by a man in a casual
conversation with people he just met
( educated and intelligent person)
• I am a doctor, said by a man who came to
help a person who just had a heart attack
(referring to profession and there for
providing help)
•Meaning can thus be
seen to depend not
only on sounds, words
and structure but on
context as well.
• Lexis deals with study of words, their shape and
their ability to collocate with others.
• Grammar deals with the elements of a structure
and with the relationships between elements.
• EXAMPLE: in: the blue light and the light blue ,
both are phrases but in the first phrase blue
modifies light(headword or word of prime
significance) whereas in the second phrase,
light modifies blue (headword)
• We can represent this by such formula:
• The (m) blue(m) light(h)
• The (m) light (m) blue (h)
The Scale and Category
Grammar
Theory
 4 categories and 3 Scales are
proposed:
• Unit , Structure , Class and
System are the fundamental
primary Categories of the
theory of grammar
• All four are mutually defining,
logically derivable from each other.
 The 3 scales are:
1.The Rank scale,
2.The Delicacy scale
3.The exponence scale
The Categories
 1. UNIT
• Unit is defined as ‘the
category set up to account
for the stretches that carry
grammatical patterns’
(Halliday 1961: 251),
• In this model grammar contains
FIVE grammatical UNITS:
1. SENTENCE
2. CLAUSE
3. PHRASE
4. WORD
5. MORPHEME ( not character)
• AND THESE WERE RANKED FROM THE
LARGEST ( SENTENCE) TO THE SMALLEST
(MORPHEME)
• The units are arranged in a rank
scale in such a way that ‘going from
top (largest) to bottom (smallest) each
“consists of” one, or more than one, of
the unit next below (next smaller)’
• The scale is concerned with describing
English where the lowest rank is
morpheme, rather than character.
• Sentences are described according to
the categories referred to as SPOCA:
Subject, Predicate, Object,
Complement, Adjunct.
• When the basic elements of the
sentence had been described, the
aim was to establish SYSTEMS ( or
Networks) which accounted for their
form and their possible occurrences
• This was done by setting up
FEATURES which indicate that a
choice has to be made between
the selection of the past and non
past tense in english for example
as follows:
• Verb Phrase (VP) Past
Non-past
• A more elaborate system would take other factors
such as negation and tense as follows:

NEGATIVE
POSITIVE
VP
PAST
NON-PAST
• This technique of Scale and Category (Systemic)
grammar offers networks which make explicit the
relationships between all elements in a sentence
 2. Structure
• The pattern carried by the
unit is a structure, the
category set up to account
for an arrangement of
elements ordered in
“places”’
• Each place and each
element in the structure
of a given unit is defined
with reference to the unit
next below considered as
one item-grouping.
• According to Halliday (1961),
four elements are needed to
describe the structure of the
English clause, namely
subject (S), predicator (P),
complement (C), and
adjunct (A)
 EXAMPLE
• To account for the structure of the
group called nominal group, in a
sentence : I saw the house on the
corner ( I is one group, saw is another
group, the house on the corner is
another group called Nominal group ,
Halliday (1961: 257) uses the names
modifier (M), head (H), and qualifier
(Q).
• However, a structure described as
MHQ, cannot account in very fine
detail for the structure of a
nominal group, like, for instance
the house on the corner; it
accounts only for its primary
structure.
• The house on the corner
M H Q
• If we want to be more specific, we need
to employ another type of scale of
grammatical description, to which
Halliday refers as a scale of
delicacy, or depth of detail.
• This would, in this case, enable us to
specify, for instance, that M is realized by
a deictic, H by a headword, and Q by an
adverbial group,
• Rankshifted downward and
consisting of a preposition
and a nominal group, the
nominal group, in turn,
having the structure MH, M
being a deictic and H a
headword, and so on.
Such subsequent more
delicate differentiations
are stated as secondary
structures; at finer and
finer degrees of delicacy
 3. Classes
• Classes are defined by their
operation in the structure of the unit
next above.
• Primary classes stand in one-to-one
relations to elements of primary
structures, while secondary classes
are derived from secondary
structures.
 4. System
• System is the category set up to account for
‘the occurrence of one rather than another
from among a number of like events’ (1961:
264).
• At the ultimate level of delicacy of
grammatical description, the grammar will be
linked directly to the data, because the last
statement made will specify which item from
a given system (subsystem of a system)
actually appears in the text.
• The notion of ‘appearing in the
text’ is explicated in terms of a
scale of exponence, ‘which relates
the categories of the theory . . . to
the data’ (1961: 270),
• although, in most cases, grammar
must hand over to lexis, for the
final statement of exponence.