[Xmca-l] What Are Halliday's "Magic Gateways"?

[David Kellogg]

You know, nothing is quite as complicated as trying to be simple about
something complex. So Anthony wanted me to talk about a "threshold concept"
in Halliday, and even gave me chapter and verse about what this might
involve.

https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://tiny.cc/6qf1qz__;!!Mih3wA!UeTMSuYY3iGYNI80NGkgVW3vksPeX6xhNqXG1qffMzIs4RXePyHwgPaQtDiL036-cVpFhg$ 
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Halliday was, first and foremost, a teacher like you and me. That's why he
rejected the whole distinction between grammar and vocabulary, it's how he
ended up involved in the Chinese revolution, it's why he asked--and even
answered--teacherly questions like "How big is a language?" (depends on
where you are and where you are going, but it can be calculated) and "Does
Chomsky's distinction between surface and deep structure help you teach or
learn anything at all?" (no) and "What is 'difficulty' and how much of it
can we blame on the text rather than the child?" (it depends on how willing
you are to divorce the text from the child's understanding of it).

I think that precisely because he was a teacher like you and me, he
wouldn't have liked the concept of "threshold concept": a single "aha"
moment that retrospectively transforms the way you think about a whole
domain like language. Yet in another sense, precisely because he was a
teacher like you and me, he inisisted on free choice (yes, with consent!)
as the organizing principle of lexicogrammar ("grammar-and-vocabulary",
where the "and" is to be understood in a fully Spinozan way). So he sees
child development as a series of magic gateways--the differentiation of
meaningful choices, some of which are more meaningful than others. The most
meaningful one is not "that gateway"--the one you are looking back upon in
satisfaction--but "this gateway"--the one you find yourself on the
threshold of.  The magic is simply in the fact that you know that beyond
that gateway there are even greater gateways.

Or rather more delicate gateways. Halliday used to say that you can really
start anywhere when you are describing a complex phenomenon, so long as you
remember that beyond one degree of delicacy there are infinitely others. So
I think that the description I gave of the magic gateway here is adequate
at about eighth grade level, with two amendments:

a) The "iinterpersonal metafunction" is singular and not plural. Functions
like "Mood" are sub-functions of this single uber-function that is the
child's magic gateway into the whole of language. And of course beyond that
gateway lie other gateways, e.g. "Subject", "Finite", etc.  The same is
true of the "textual metafunction" (Theme, Rheme) and the "ideational
metafunction" (one of the very rare sources of disagreement between
Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan was that she insisted that there were really two
different ideational metafunctions, the logical and the experientail, while
Halliday preferred to see them as subfunctions of one).

b) The "who" (interpersonal), the "how" (textual) and the "what"
(ideational) are not the names of questions ("Who are you?", "How are you?"
and "What are you made of?"  are not three different metafunctions). They
are labels for the metafunctions, attempts by me to simplify a complex
terminology. But a name is just a gateway, and beyond each vague name there
must necessarily be a more delicate and therefore more definite one.


David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!UeTMSuYY3iGYNI80NGkgVW3vksPeX6xhNqXG1qffMzIs4RXePyHwgPaQtDiL035DfoBa0w$ 
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
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