M.A.K. Halliday and Intonation in the Grammar of English

虽然零零星星从众多古今中外语音学家的观点学说里知道了不少有关英语语音语调、轻重长短的知识，但一直困惑，不知道一个句子摆在眼前的时候，是否也能够象做数学题一样，总有与之相应的公式可套，或者说有没有这样的公式可循。Michael A.K. Halliday 和 William GREAVES合著的这本Intonation in the Grammar of English, 我拿到手快两年了，几次试着读，却总也读不进去，因为对我，这本书里的生词实在太多了，书中提到的那些术语概念，我又一点儿基础都没有。几个月前再一次把它翻出来，硬着头皮，忽略掉所有不认识的字，囫囵吞枣地扫过一遍之后，竟然生出许多亲切之感。我虽然还不能理解这本书里讲到的许多技术细节，更谈不上有能力应用其中的一些理论，但我读着读着，就不禁会下意识地想起Theory of Computation, 想起automata，觉得这本书是对所有句子都给出了语音表达式的。

我的思维常常有点儿发散，有时联想走得太远，逻辑会乱，甚至离谱。我不太拿得准上面的联想和比喻是否有道理，加上我现在读这本书还是很吃力，而且才刚刚读了100页，也许凭直觉做出的判断并不准确呢？后来Billnet说这真是本好书，我接着又到网上做了点儿调查，心里才踏实了。

Billnet在前面的帖子里提到过这本书，不知道他是否有继续展开探讨相关话题的打算。我知道对已经掌握了Bill语调系列内容的人，如果不做这方面的研究或教学，可能对这些并不感兴趣；而那些需要知道、掌握这方面知识的人，又可能因为还没走到这里而不能马上领会并应用这些理论和规则。对于跟我一样属于后面一类的朋友，如果在能够彻悟之前多接触、了解一些有关理论，后面的路走起来应该能避免不少不必要的弯路。记得当初我刚刚到这里来读新概念II的时候，李唐认真提醒过我意群的重要性，还在这里示范了怎样划分意群。我想当时我并非没有懂，不过理解到一定深度却是很久以后的事；这时候再回头看，就想了：如果当初没有人这样提醒，恐怕现在还是浮在面上，半懂不懂呢！我知道象bill目前这样在这里讲语调，是一件很有点儿枯燥的事，因为（当时）能够得到的共鸣有限。不过以我的私心 -- 这个私是代表所有跟我一样还很需要这方面知识的人的 -- 还是希望老师能够讲下去，总有一天我们这些听众、学生里面会出几个能够提供有价值的反馈的人的！

Halliday在上个世纪四十年代曾经留学中国，在岭南大学和北京大学，分别师从王力和罗常培，学习汉语。其他有关Halliday的信息，可在网上搜得，或参考wiki联接：http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Halliday

对Intonation in the Grammar of English这本书的评论很多，我草草读过的几篇似乎有点儿好评如潮。有兴趣的朋友可以看看Ross Forman写的这篇，这是原连接：http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aral/article/viewFile/2024/2406，全文内容我抄过来放在这里：

 

Review by Ross Forman
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney

I nail my colours to the mast first. Meeting Halliday’s ideas on language in the early 1980s had an impact as profound as that of reading Greer on women, or Camus on outsiderness. And later, in teaching phonology and pronunciation, my central reference has remained Halliday’s 1970 work A Course in Spoken English: Intonation. It has been a tantalizing wait, then, for this new publication by Michael Halliday and William Greaves. But its development over the past ten years, which included extensive trialling with students in Canada and elsewhere, has fully paid off in the achievement of depth, clarity and integrity. This book represents a unique contribution to the scholarship of phonology.

One of the most powerful dimensions of systemic functional linguistics has been its recognition of the spoken features of rhythm and intonation (prosody) as grammatical. Thus, far from being simply paralinguistic, prosody serves to systematically realise meaning in all three metafunctions of language: Ideational, where language construes experience; Interpersonal, where it enacts relationships; and Textual, where it engenders discourse.

How does the current publication sit in relation to phonology worldwide; and in relation to the teaching/learning of L2 pronunciation? First, the field of phonology remains primarily centred upon the segmentals of speech, with attention in recent years additionally being extended to macro issues of language variety (English as a Lingua Franca) and speaker identity (see in particular the 2005 special issue of TESOL Quarterly, 39/3). However, prosody – in the middle, and in the centre, so to speak – remains relatively neglected, notwithstanding work in the Hallidayan tradition (for a summary see Greaves, 2007), as well as that of the Birmingham school. Second, while L2 pronunciation is repeatedly identified as an area of prime importance to learners and their teachers, the majority of existing materials inadequately or even wrongly present the prosodic features of English (a notable exception, dating from 1994, being Halina Zawadzki’s In Tempo). This new publication by Halliday and Greaves will make a major contribution both directly and indirectly towards that understanding of prosody which is fundamental to
effective teaching of the spoken features of English.

Intonation in the Grammar of English is in two main parts, with a third providing an analysis (coding) guide.

Part 1, chapters 1–4, is concerned with the study of speech sounds. It explores the acoustic dimension of speech; describes its prosodic organisation; and specifies the role of intonation within the lexico-grammar of English. The descriptive insights offered by computer-based instrumental analysis are indeed impressive, and are laid out here in remarkably clear fashion. But I also liked the caveat (p. 5) that human perception of speech sounds is still foundational to analysis; and would note that such awareness is not often easily developed by language teachers, particularly perhaps when that language is ‘their own’.

Part 2, chapters 5–7, expands on the three systems of Tonality (taking the form of Tone Groups), Tonicity (placement of the Tonic), and Tone (melodic contour). These ‘3 Ts’ are used to analyse the functions of intonation in each of the three metafunctions, beginning with Textual, and working through Interpersonal to Ideational. Each chapter proceeds to set out principles and examples with unalloyed clarity of meaning. A minor issue rests with the actual terms, which although transparent to those who know them, often, due to phonetic similarity, represent a source of confusion for students. The section dealing with the Textual metafunction shows how the tone group (in ‘the sounding’), maps onto the clause (in ‘the wording’) as the unmarked option, the latter which is suggested to constitute 60% of ‘continuous dialogue’ (p. 101). The role of the Tonic is fully demonstrated, and the semogenic power of Theme/Rheme in relation to Given/New is illustrated with examples of unmarked and marked options. There is a nice metaphor of the engendering of text as a current alternating between ‘known’ and ‘unknown’. A little more explanation of the occurrence and impact of ‘silent beats’ would be welcome here, as this is another feature which often proves challenging to student
perception (and one which is vital to fluency – see Szczepek Reed, 2006).

The next section on intonation in Interpersonal meaning explores systems of mood and modality through the four major speech functions of statement, question, offer and command (with a reminder that commands include requests), demonstrating again both unmarked and marked options, as Tone (in the sounding) plays ‘with’ or ‘against’ Mood (in the wording). One example is reproduced below (p. 113). It illustrates a marked option,
where we have a statement realised in the lexico-grammar as declarative mood, and co-realised in the prosody as a rising tone (Tone 2). The communicative outcome is ‘a challenge’, for in a productive tension of meanings, it is always intonation which wins out.

// 2 ^ no I*/ haven’t / got the / tickets //
(Tone Group is marked by double slash; feet by single slash; Tone by Arabic numeral;
silent beat by caret, and Tonic syllable by bold font + preceding asterisk.)

Halliday and Greaves then build upon earlier work in illustrating seven primary tones: five ‘simple’ tones, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5; two ‘compound’ tones of 1–3 and 5–3 (the addition of the hyphen a useful guide to the pronunciation of ‘one-three’, ‘five-three’). There is not much space for discussion of dialect differences, but it is correctly noted that the high rising terminal (Tone 2) is becoming the unmarked option for a statement among some speakers in Australia and New Zealand.

In exploring the role of intonation in the Ideational metafunction, we meet the corealisation of logical relations across clauses (rather than in the realisation of transitivity, the latter in which intonation plays no part). Intonation beyond clause-complex, ie in ‘paragraph’ type stretches, or ‘Paratones’, is not dealt with here (but see, for example, Tench, 1996).

A microtext of a Radio chat show is analysed acoustically, phonetically and semantically, with rich results. As the authors note: ‘The listener is always processing at all strata at once, and it seems to us desirable for the analyst to do the same’ (p. 163).

Chapter 7 is mainly concerned with illustrating the 19 ‘secondary’ tones of English, which represent more delicate exponents of the 7 primary tones. The authors here provide counter-examples through ‘Tone substitution’ in order to illuminate meanings. As Halliday and Greaves note, there is further work to be done in describing what we might call ‘tertiary’ tones: this is an exciting prospect, and one in which technology will prove an asset. This section is a particularly welcome addition to the literature: nowhere else, to my knowledge, are the systems described with such insight and elegance. An appendix to this section analyses a series of spoken texts, both Australian and British.

The third part of the book, a brief Analysis Guide, serves to describe the SFL model in an economical way. There is a coda to that section which could possibly assist the reader better if transposed as an introduction.

The book comes with a CD-ROM which provides video extracts from Anne Thwaite’s Language in Contexts (Thwaite 1997), audio clips, and a digital version of the print text itself. The video clips naturally embody context of situation and culture; their richness may remind us of the constraints of working with monomodal texts in this field. Audio clips also provide an interesting range of voices and dialects. The speakers in the latter are not credited but certainly include both Halliday and Greaves, a fact which might be of interest to readers.

The book is clearly signposted and pleasantly laid out. An index would have been useful; as would headers/footers to remind us of chapter number and chapter section. I consider this to be a landmark study. The fusion of human and technological perception with grammatical analysis – and always, the ‘return to the data’ – results in an exceptionally lucid and scientific work. I believe it will provide a source of insight to linguists and language teachers for many years to come. There is another recent publication which has applied Hallidayan prosodic analysis directly to the field of second language teaching and learning: John Wells’ English Intonation: An Introduction (Wells 2006); and this, I suggest, could well serve as a companion to the present volume.