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The first analysis of French grammar to use the Hallidayan approach, this title looks at what constitutes language, and how it is used in real life. This is the first grammar of French to provide an overall account of the language from a systemic functional perspective. Alice Caffarel uses this approach to linguistics, pioneered by Michael Halliday, to provide a description of French grammar in terms of its meaning potential and realizations in structure. This grammar has been developed as a resource for discourse analysis (including the analysis of literary texts) and for understanding how French grammar makes meaning in different textual and contextual environments. One of the key aspects of this description is that it provides various perspectives from which to explore grammar as a meaning-making potential, from the system end and the text end of the cline of instantiation. This multi-perspectival approach brings out both the resources specific to particular registers and the resources general to the language. In addition, it provides multiple pathways for exploring how meaning (both first-order and second-order) is both construed and constructed by lexicogrammatical patterns in texts. This systemic functional approach to French therefore reveals a unique new perspective on one of the world's most widely used international languages. The book gives a comprehensive account of French grammar which is suitable for use by undergraduates, postgraduates and academics who wish to analyse texts of various registers, and researchers in systemic functional and French linguistics.
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A Systemic Functional Grammar of French Also available from Continuum: A Systemic Functional Grammar of Japanese Kazuhiro Teruya A Systemic Functional Grammar of Chinese A Text-based Analysis Eden Sum-hung Li A Systemic Functional Grammar of French From Grammar to Discourse Alice Caffarel With a foreword by M. A. K. Halliday continuum Continuum The Tower Building 11 York Road London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane Suite 704 New York, NY 10038 First published 2006 © Alice Caffarel 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 0-8264-6632-X (hardback) Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall Pour mes enfants, Yannick, Louis et Remi This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements viii Foreword ix Introduction 1 1 Systemic functional theory as a metalanguage for description 4 2 The grammar of ideation (1): logical metafunction 20 3 The grammar of ideation (2): experiential metafunction 57 4 The grammar of negotiation: interpersonal metafunction 120 5 The 'enabling' grammar: textual metafunction 165 English—French glossary of terms in systemic functional linguistics 198 References 203 Acknowledgements Thanks go to John Benjamins Publishing company, for permission to use material which first appeared: (i) in Ruqaiya Hasan and Peter H. Fries (eds), On Subject and Theme, A Discourse Functional Perspective (Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 1-49; (ii) in Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen, Kristin Davidse and Dirk Noel (eds), Reconnecting Language, Morphology and Syntax in Functional Perspectives (Amsterdam, 1997), pp. 249-96. Thanks also