The Construal of Experience Across Languages: Beyond English Grammatical Accounts
Experiential Grammar in Systemic Functional Linguistics - Assumptions and challenges - Beatriz Quiroz
Beatriz Quiroz [+]
Departamento de Ciencias del Lenguaje, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
Description
This chapter reviews descriptive generalisations in SFL that are relevant to the account of experiential grammar across languages. The discussion is framed within work on SFL Language Typology, as developed from the early 90s to date. First, the distinction assumed in SFL between theoretical and descriptive orders is addressed. Next, convergence and divergence across languages is discussed in terms of key descriptive generalisations emerging from the SFL account of a number of languages. The chapter then discusses the nature of experiential ‘probes’ across languages, including metafunctional diversification, the varying contribution of resources along the rank scale, and some of the complementarities and/or tensions that may be relevant – as in the conceptualisation of models of participation (e.g. transitive/ergative in English; centrifugal/centripetal in Tagalog), and of orbital/serial structuring of experiential features. The above discussion draws on work specifically addressing experiential cryptogrammatical patterns in Spanish (Quiroz, 2013), Tagalog (1996, 2004), Pitjantjatjara (Rose, 1996, 2001), among other languages. Theoretical, descriptive and methodological challenges for ongoing and future work across languages are explored towards the end of the chapter