Misunderstanding Halliday On The Ineffability Of Grammatical Categories

Martin (2013: 24):

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This is misleading, because On The Ineffability Of Grammatical Categories (Halliday 1984) is not at all about a balancing act of 'respecting both terminological traditions and the language to hand'. Instead, the paper explains that grammatical categories can only mean themselves. That is, while it is possible to provide an encoding definition of a grammatical category (how it is expressed), it is not possible to provide a decoding definition of a grammatical category (what it means). Halliday (2002 [1984]: 292-3, 303, 307, 309):

Once having reified these abstract categories by naming them, the Greek grammarians went on to ask what the names meant. What ‘is’ a noun? they wondered. At first, this was a question of: how do I recognise a noun when I see it? how do I know whether something is a noun or not? But before long the questions came to be asked in the other direction: what ‘is’ a noun, in the sense of what function does it serve? At this second stage, instead of treating ‘noun’ as the Value and then supplying a Token for it, the definition now treats ‘noun’ as the Token and seeks to supply a Value for it. Instead of ‘a noun is a word that inflects for number and case’, we have ‘a noun is the name of a person, creature or thing’. This is a decoding definition, one which embodies a notion of ‘what the category means’. … But how does one define by decoding? how do we say what a grammatical category means? …

The meaning of a typical grammatical category thus has no counterpart in our conscious representation of things. There can be no exact paraphrase of Subject or Actor or Theme – because there is no language-independent clustering of phenomena in our experience to which they correspond. If there was, we should not need the linguistic category to create one. If language was a purely passive partner, ‘expressing’ a ‘reality’ that was already there, its categories would be eminently glossable. But it is not. Language is an active participant in the semogenic process. Language creates reality – and therefore its categories of content cannot be defined, since we could define them only by relating them to some pre-existing model of experience, and there is no model of experience until the linguistic categories are there to model it. The only meaning of Subject is the meaning that has evolved along with the category itself. …

To understand these categories, it is no use asking what they mean. The question is not ‘what is the meaning of this or that function or feature in the grammar?’; but rather ‘what is encoded in this language, or in this register (functional variety) of the language?’ This reverses the perspective derived from the history of linguistics, in which a language is a system of forms, with meanings attached to make sense of them. Instead, a language is treated as a system of meanings, with forms attached to express them. Not grammatical paradigms with their interpretation, but semantic paradigms with their realisations. …

What I have been trying to show with this illustration is that while, with a category like Subject, it is impossible to answer the question ‘what does it mean?’, this does not signify that it has no meaning. The problem of ineffability is common to all grammatical categories; there are various reasons why some may seem less problematic than others, but it is an illusion to think that any can be exhaustively defined. And this, as I remarked above, is not because of the shortcomings of natural language for serving as a metalanguage, real though such shortcomings are. Rather the converse: it is the very richness of natural language, its power of distilling the entire collective experience of the culture into a single manageable, and learnable, code that puts its categories beyond the reach of our conscious attempts at exegesis.