Masarykova univerzita Filozofická fakulta Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky Magisterská diplomová práce

2.2 The interpersonal function

The second component or function of language in the Hallidayian conception is the interpersonal function, defined by Halliday as “the grammar of personal participation; it expresses the speaker’s role in the speech situation, his personal commitment and his interaction with others” (Halliday, 1973: 99). This function:

function of language, language as doing something. This is the component

through which the speaker intrudes himself into the context of situation, both

expressing his own attitudes and judgements and seeking to influence the

attitudes and behaviour of others” (Halliday, 1978: 112)

Interpersonal meanings can be perceived as author’s “communication of a particular attitude or stance towards the utterance and/or the content of the utterance, or a subjective evaluation of the utterance” (Hopkinson, 2008: 70).

There are two basic types by which the interpersonal function can be seen: the system of appraisal and the system of modality. Appraisal includes the following elements: attitude (expressing affect—positive and negative feelings, judgement—of character, appreciation—of values) and graduation (expressing force—intensification, focus—accuracy/sharpening/softening, e.g. “exactly” or “a kind of”); modality includes modalization (probability—how probable?, usuality—how usual?) and modulation (obligation—how obliged?, inclination—how inclined?) (Kamenická, 2007a: 44, 51-54).

Similarly like in the case of experiential and logical explicitation, interpersonal explicitation (IE) has been delimited as a type of explicitation corresponding to this function:

• 
  ‘Here is an excellent opportunity for getting rid of all the children who trouble us,’ and without the true critical spirit, they designate all who are unruly, or disinterested in the school.”
  

• 
  Notice the qualification it contains, “under natural conditions”.
  

2.3 The textual function

In Halliday’s words, “[t]he textual component is concerned with the creation of text; it expresses the structure of information, and the relation of each part of the discourse to the whole and to the setting” (Halliday, 1973: 99). Hopkinson adds that the textual function of language is the one that “enables the speaker to relate utterances to each other, to express their mutual relevance, to relate the text to its verbal and situational context, and thus to build a coherent and cohesive text, rather than a mere collection of isolated utterances” (Hopkinson, 2008: 71, Halliday,1978: 112-113). Textual meanings then are the meanings in relations, they link other meanings or spans of texts, clarify the relative information status or various elements or parts of sentences.

There are two types of textual meanings: those related to information structure and those related to cohesion (Hopkinson, 2008: 71). In other words, these are the “cohesive links beyond the scope of the logical function, such as more detailed reference to entities traced through the text” (Kamenická, 2007a: 56). An example of textual explicitation (TE) can be explicitated ellipses or the use of corresponding nouns that are used in preceding parts of the text instead of the anaphoric pronouns, etc. Examples from the corpus are provided below:

• 
  Fortunately, also, our Sun is not of the exploding kind; it is neither big enough nor old enough.
  

• 
  And the technology and social structure are part of the Northwesterners’ advanced economic development—part of what we’re trying to explain when we seek the causes of affluence.
  

. Kamenická refers to Caffarel et al. (2004: 537-662) summing up all Halliday’s metafunctions:

experience as meaning, analyzing and relating its components. The interpersonal function (with the speaker in the intruder role) is enacting social roles and relations as meaning, and the textual function (guaranteeing text relevance) is modulating meaning as the flow of more and less important information” (Kamenická, 2007a: 36).

Great attention has been paid to explicitation in the present chapter. However, implicitation as a tendency towards explicitness shifts in the opposing direction is inseparable from explicitation and it follows that the experiential, logical, interpersonal as well as textual components of the texts might be implicitated as well:

• 
  This says that hybrids bred from two kinds of animals in captivity, or two kinds of plants cultivated in a garden, are not enough to classify them as a member of a single species.
  

• 
  We cannot make such a comparison for the Archean because we know so little about the Earth then.
  

• 
  The literature on mental testing, at the time, was relatively small and decidedly inconclusive.
  

• 
  The difference had been that the Amazonians weren’t getting paid to work overtime.
  

All of the occurrences of translation-inherent explicitation and implicitation in the corpus will be investigated from the point of view of the four functions of language described above: experiential, logical, interpersonal and textual in order to follow the same conceptual framework as Kamenická in her dissertation so that the research is comparable. An attempt will be made to describe the centre and the periphery of translation-inherent explicitation and implicitation with the use of the classification within the four language metafunctions. Experiential explicitations and implicitations will be divided into three groups: explicitation/implicitation of information related to the process, to the process participants or to the process circumstances; within the logical explicitation and implicitation, two sub-systems will be used: temporal relations and causal relations; interpersonal explicitation and implicitation will be analyzed from the point of view of appraisal and modality; and two groups will be used with respect to textual explicitation and implicitation: explicitations/implicitations related to information structure and to plain cohesion.