CHAPTER 5: HOW AND WHY
HOW AND WHY
“The robbers heard the ghastly noise and leapt to their feet, convinced that a ghost
was coming in, and they ran out of the house into the forest.” With these words and
this picture, the Bremen Town Musicians narrative puts us on the robbers’ side.
We’re inside the house with them. They are human like us. The monsters burst in
on us, wailing demonically, and we recoil in dismay and disarray.
It’s the most dramatic moment of the story—by far. But if we choose to begin the
story with this picture, we will find that we have to do a lot of back-tracking and
flash-backing to explain how we got here and why the monsters are bursting in.
Only then will the children realize that this picture is really like a mirror on the
back wall of the robbers’ room, and that we are the wild animals bursting through
the window.
In this chapter, we explore two very different paths into the How and Why of the
story. The first, which we can call the narrativistic one, looks a little like our
Chapter Three path (“Where and When”) at least grammatically. When we tell
narratives, we can stand outside the story and comment on the problems as
1
CHAPTER 5
narrators, using Circumstantial Adjuncts like “because” and “so” and adverbial
groups of manner like “demonically” and “in dismay and disarray”. When we
check understanding, we find ourselves asking “Why?’ and “How?” just as the title
of this chapter predicts.
But there is another path, more dialogic and more promising for younger children.
In the last chapter, we took the children inside the characters and explored their
feelings and thoughts. We found that how characters feel can explain why they
think the way they do, and how they think can explain why they act and speak to
others as they do. In this chapter, this path for younger kids appears to double back
on itself—characters speak to themselves, and ask themselves questions (“Where
can I go? What can I do?” and even “Why am I here?” “How can I get away?”).
By talking to themselves, characters not only explain deeds and words to
themselves and to us, they make it possible to control their own words and deeds.
But we know that when very close friends talk, an enormous amount can be left
unsaid. As we’ll see, this applies even more to this kind of internal dialogue. A lot
of the sound simply falls away, but the meanings are still, mysteriously, there,
shaping the way dialogues unfold, the way texts cohere, and even the way that
concepts develop in children’s minds.
In the Hallidayan section of this chapter, we go down the third path into clause
structure: the textual metafunction and the systems of Theme and Information
which realize it. By using “Tell me about…” questions with given information, we
find that the children can focus on accurate reading, and by using them with what
Halliday calls the “New” we find we can predict the next sentence. But ordering a
story isn’t just a matter of putting one material process after another: there also
have to be ways of changing focus from doing to feeling to thinking to saying.
In the Vygotskyan section, we look at how clauses are ordered when the speaker
addresses himself: the parts of the clause that Halliday marked “Theme” and
“Given” appear to disappear. According to Vygotsky, this makes for a completely
new kind of grammar—not narrative, but rather an extreme form of intra-mental
dialogue in which everything except the New is left unarticulated, the sort of thing
we hear between people married for a long time. This “inner speech” is the
foundation of the child’s verbal—and eventually conceptual—thinking.
Finally, in the section on genre, we consider how whole texts can be ordered
either “lyrically”, to suggest a description, or narratively, to suggest a sequence of
events. We’ll see that in addition to narratives that tell how people come together
and battle outsiders to win themselves a homeland, there are other stories which are
more like our picture, full of dismay, disarray and laughter.
We can’t really call these stories epics. In French, they are called “des romans”
meaning romances, while in English they are called “novels,” i.e. news. But the
best name for them is the Chinese and Korean name, which means “minor
dialogue”, or perhaps “little talk”. In these stories of little talk, we find new plots,
including ghosts.
And in the following chapter, we’ll meet the ghost face to face and find we are
looking in a mirror.
2
HOW AND WHY
HALLIDAY: ARRANGING THEMES AND ORDERING INFORMATION
Imagine that the teacher has set the scene and created the characters. Now the
teacher opens the story-book and says: “Let’s play ‘Read and Ask’. I read and you
ask. Then you read and I ask! One answer—one point.”
The game begins, with the teacher reading first.
Long ago in Germany, there was an ass.
The teacher wants the children to learn to formulate questions which can be
answered by the next sentence so that they can become fluent readers on their own.
She tells the children that if they can ask a question that can be answered by the
next sentence of the story they get two points—one for the question and one for the
answer.
(Say the next sentence is “The ass’s name was Abe.” What question will the
children have to ask to get two points?)
But the children don’t ask questions. Perhaps they giggle (and perhaps the teacher
must, with a sigh, change “Abe the ass” to “Dinkey the Donkey,” just to get the
children’s minds off their behinds). Or perhaps the kids ask questions which are
too easy (“Was there an ass?”), incomprehensible (“When was the ass?”), or
simply backward-looking and rather pointless (e.g. “Where was the ass?”).
The teacher’s solution is twofold. First of all, she tells the children that all they
have to do is choose one participant or circumstance and add “Tell me more
about…”, e.g. “Tell me more about long ago”, “Tell me more about Germany”, or
“Tell me more about the ass”. Secondly, to add a little motivation, the teacher tells
the children that if they get twenty points there won’t be any homework. Even
though the children know that there probably won’t be any homework anyway, the
collective no-homework prize does seem to put a slightly keener edge to their
enthusiasm.
The teacher’s motives are a little more complex than the children’s. She wants to
get the children reading by themselves—that is, not for homework, not for
classwork, and not even out loud, but silently and for the fun of it. She wants them
to read with understanding—that is, checking their old understandings against the
new information they encounter as they go along, in much the same way that the
teacher does in class. Finally, she wants the kids reading fluently—that is, she
wants them looking forward to the next sentence and not backwards to the last one.
On the face of it, her three goals seem incompatible: if the kids read for fun, they
will not be checking their understanding very carefully. If they do ask themselves
questions, they will not be the sort of questions that the teacher asks in class. And
if they do ask the kinds of testing questions they get in class, they are likely to be
questions about what they just read (e.g. “Long ago in Germany, there was an ass.
3
CHAPTER 5
What was there long ago in Germany?”) This kind of looking back over your
shoulder with every sentence is not going to make them fluent readers.
But maybe the three goals are not completely incompatible. The children notice,
while they are playing the game, that the teacher keeps asking particular kinds of
questions—questions which COMBINE the functions of giving information and
checking understanding, questions that formulate hypotheses to be tested against
the next sentence instead of instead of simply checking to see if the last sentence is
safely stored in the short term memory; in a word, proleptic questions rather than
retroleptic ones.
With proleptic questions, when the teacher sets the scene, she is already thinking
about creating characters (e.g. “Long ago in Germany, there was an ass. What is a
good name for an ass?” or “The ass’s name was Abe. Was Abe a good ass or a bad
ass?”). Similarly, when the teacher creates the characters, she is already thinking
about posing plot problems (“Abe was a good old ass. But Abe’s owner wanted to
make soup out of him! Why? And how could Abe escape?”)
At all points in the story, when the teacher is reading aloud about why things
happen, she appears to be predicting how they can be different (“Now, how can
Abe live? Where can he go? What can he do?”). And, when she reads about how
characters do things, she appears to be predicting and even “post-dicting” (“Abe is
going to Bremen. Why?”).
(Imagine that the teacher uses this grid to make an “Ask and Answer” game
between the teacher and the students. The aim is to get and hold three squares. One
answer, one square—but you can only hold on to your square if you can answer the
follow-up challenge—“Why?” or “How do you know?”)
Who?
What is
he/she?
(Human
or
nonhuman?)
What is
he/she
like?
(Old
or
young?
Good or
bad?)
How are
others
treating
him/her?
(Well or
badly?)
How
is
he/she
feeling?
(Happy or
sad?)
What is
he/she
thinking?
(“I want
to ….”)
Abe
Abe’s
Owner
You can see that there are very different kinds of prediction going on here:
Predicting what a character is from the character’s name or description is rather
different from predicting what she or he is like, and both of these are different from
predicting how she or he is feeling from how he or she is thinking. Yet we do seem
to be able to predict what comes next, not just in a story but even in a single
utterance. How exactly is this done, and what kind of meaning does it involve?
You remember that in Chapter Three we looked at the kind of meaning that
4
HOW AND WHY
Halliday calls ideational (experiential). That’s the kind of meaning that we see
when we change “There was an ass in Germany” to “Here lives a cat in Korea”.
The two sentences communicate different ideas, different experiences, different
facts. In Chapter Four we looked at the interpersonal kind of meaning that we see
when we change “There was an ass in Germany” to “Was there an ass in
Germany?” These two sentences don’t really construe two different representations
of reality. Instead the two sentences put us at opposite ends of the same
representation: in one case, we are giving facts and in the other we are getting them.
Now, consider “An ass was there in Germany long ago” and “Long ago in
Germany there was an ass.” It’s tempting to say that the first one is WRONG and
the second one is RIGHT, or at least that the first one is UGLY while the first one
is much more beautiful. Halliday tells us that both are acceptable and both are, in
their own time and place, perfectly attractive. But the two sentences mean
something different, and this difference in meaning is neither an ideational
difference nor an interpersonal difference; it is neither concerned with different
experiences nor with different roles in an exchange of information. It is, instead,
concerned with different ways of tying the parts of the text together, and so
Halliday calls it textual meaning.
If somebody starts off a narrative with “Long ago in Germany there was an ass,”
we can imagine that they mean something like “I’m going to tell you a story. Now,
this story takes place in Germany some time ago and concerns this donkey.” In
contrast, “An ass was there in Germany long ago” seems to imply something more
like “A recent archaeological find demonstrates that German asses were not
imported from the Central Asian steppe and the Tibetan plateau in the modern
period. An ass was there in Germany long ago.”
You might feel that this kind of description is peculiar to scientific writing. But
listen to this (listen!):
An OLD grey DONK-ey ONCE was THERE
In GER-man-y LONG a-GO.
His COAT was THIN; his MANE was BARE
His GAIT was LAME and SLOW.
(Notice that we can change “in Germany” into “near Bremen” and make the meter
much more regular—more like a child’s counting rhyme. But if we keep to “in
Germany” this creates a certain lame gait that is quite suitable to the subject.)
There’s now a good reason for putting things in this order. It’s a poem, and poems
have to rhyme, so we often find that their clauses start and stop in unusual and
unexpected places. Poems also need a certain “gait”, called meter. And if the word
order is awkward, the rhymes are plain, and the gait is lame and slow, we only feel
that it is appropriate to the asinine subject matter.
Who but an eccentric archaeologist or a deranged poet would even want to say
“An ass was there in Germany long ago”? Well, a teacher might. Remember that
we want to be able to stand between clauses and look back and forth—backwards
5
CHAPTER 5
to specific points of information that the children need for the next sentence and
forward to the kinds of information that are developed from those points. That is
exactly what understanding the textual metafunction will reliably allow us to do.
We saw that the ideational metafunction analyzed the clause into Processes,
Participants (who and what) and Circumstances (where, when, why, and how). We
saw that the interpersonal metafunction analyzed the clause into a Mood (Subject
and Finite) and a Residue (everything else). Halliday’s “textual metafunction”
allows us to analyze the clause into a “Theme” and a “Rheme” on the one hand,
and a “Given” and a “New” on the other.
On the one hand, “Theme” and “Rheme” show how the clause is put together
from the point of view of the speaker: the starting point and ending point. Halliday
says that the Theme of a clause is everything from the very beginning of the clause
right up to—and including—the first element that has a role in the transitivity of
the clause (that is, the first thing that is either Circumstance or Process or
Participant, the kind of thing we looked at in Chapter Three). “Long ago” gives the
time in relation to the moment of speaking and “in Germany” locates the starting
point in space; together they are a Circumstantial Theme, which makes this
sentence striking and highly marked (circumstances are usually not the starting
point of a sentence, since we can take them for granted or refer to previous
sentences). Then there is a Rheme (“there was an ass”) which functions as a kind
of comment or development of this Theme for the benefit of the hearer. This is
where we get the feeling that we are about to hear a story about this ass.
On the other hand, “Given” and “New” show how the clause is put together
from the view of the hearer. Sure enough, this way of tying clauses together is
sometimes easier to hear than it is to see. Consider the clause not as the
grammatical development of an initial starting point in the direction of the hearer
but rather as a quantum of information (what Halliday calls an ‘information unit’).
The very first part of the clause, “Long ago in Germany,” is the Given
information—the part that is unstressed because it’s really shared by speaker and
hearer. That means that “there was an ass” is the new information. Since “an ass” is
the very newest part of that new information (the “Cumulative New”), it’s going to
take the stress, or, as Halliday puts it, the Tonic.
So we see that clauses are tied together in two ways: from Me to You and from
Old to New. First, there is the message structure: a progression from a Theme,
which is the starting point of the speaker, and a Rheme, which is the way the
speaker develops it, comments on it, expands, expounds, or elaborates it for the
benefit of the hearer. Second, there is the information structure, which is the way it
appears to the hearer: a transition from the shared information, called the Given, to
the news, called the New.
Long ago in Germany, there was an ass. The ass’s name was Abe. Abe
was old and tired. So one day his master was feeling hungry and started
thinking about donkey soup. “How about donkey soup for dinner?” he said
to his wife.
6
HOW AND WHY
(Can you figure out what the Theme of the second sentence is? What about the
Rheme? Are the Given and New the same as the Theme and Rheme?)
Now, that is the transition WITHIN the clause. But what about the transition
BETWEEN clauses, so important to story-telling? We’ll be talking about this a
good bit in the next five chapters, but we need to say something about it here to
explain how and why it sometimes disappears.
Look at the transition from “an ass” to “the ass” which links our first sentence
with our second one. Of course, this is exactly the same transition as the one
between “Once upon a time there was a mountain” and “On the mountain was a
temple” which we saw in Chapter One. In Hallidayan terms, the Rheme of “There
was an ass” is thematized in “The ass’s name was Abe”, and of course the New
information, no longer new, becomes the Given (which is why it loses stress).
When we come to the third sentence there is a rather different way of carrying on
the flow of information, realized by a conjunctive adjunct, namely “So”. This is, of
course, a Theme—that’s what it’s doing at the beginning of the sentence. But it’s
not an Intepersonal Theme (e.g. a Finite), and not a Topical Theme either (that is,
it’s not a Participant, Process, or Circumstance, some element in the ideational
metafunction we explored in Chapter Three). It’s a conjunction, and Halliday calls
it a Textual Theme.
(Can you find three or four other examples of Textual Themes in our introductory
paragraph? What QUESTIONS would you ask if you wanted to check the children
understanding here? Which ones are about “Why?” Which ones are about “How?”
What about “On the other hand….”?)
So, as with the information WITHIN the clause, the information flows BETWEEN
clauses in (at least) two ways, at least in this text. First of all, the Rheme of one
clause is “picked up” as the Theme by the next clause. Secondly, a textual Theme
is used to make a logical relationship such as causality or consequence or contrast
quite explicit.
(There are some other ways of linking clauses, which have to do with projecting
thinking and speaking processes. Can you see an example in our text?)
So what can teachers do with this? Remember that our big question for this section
was why some questions appear to “look forward” and others appear to “look
back”. As soon as we understand that there is a Given and a New in each sentence,
we can give a very precise answer.
We stand between sentences. Questions that look back to the Given of the
previous sentence are very retroleptic while those that look back to the New (that is
the stressed information) are less so. Questions that look forward to the Given of
the next sentence are somewhat proleptic while questions that look all the way
forward to the New of the next sentence are extremely so.
Let us linger a moment between the first two sentences, “Long ago in Germany
7
CHAPTER 5
there was an ass” and “The ass’s name was Abe”. We get to the end of the first
sentence. Which question is more likely to predict the next one?
a) Tell me more about the time and place.
b) Tell me about more about the ass.
You can see that an experienced reader will know that the next sentence will take
up the ass, and not the time and place. How does our experienced reader know all
this?
First of all, we’ve already set the scene, and so now it is time to create the
characters. Secondly, the ass is the New in the sentence, not Germany or antiquity,
and the experienced reader knows perfectly well that a flowing piece of narrative
prose is mostly likely to take up the New as Given in the next sentence. Thirdly,
the ass is the Rheme—the hearer’s information focus for the first sentence, and so
it’s the default “starting place” for the speaking focus of the next one. Verily, as
Heraclitus says, no man steps in the same river twice, for the second time it is not
the same river and he is no longer the same man.
Bakhtin says, in his very earliest writings on ethics and philosophy, that it’s not
enough to stand in the shoes of another: one must somehow use those shoes to get
back to one’s own point of view if one is to take part in a dialogue (1990: 26; 1993:
16). In this section, we’ve seen how that “own point of view” is what is specified
in the Theme, and how the point of view of the other is acknowledged in the
Rheme. What happens, though, if a man who steps in the river of discourse uses it
to turn around…and talk to himself? And what happens if that man is a child?
We’ll ask Vygotsky. But first, we’ll take the child inside each character’s point
of view with a practical activity.
VYGOTSKY: THEME AND GIVEN DISAPPEAR
We’ve been considering “Tell me about…” questions as the only possible type. But
what happens when the teacher wants to reduce the degrees of freedom in the
question, so as to focus the children’s attention on particular aspects of the plight of
each animal? For example, suppose we want to take up each character and “pose
the problem” from that character’s point of view.
We can set up a “three in a row” game, using the rules of “Tic Tac Toe.” The
problem is that “three in a row” allows the children to choose any square, and we
would really like them to READ the rows from left to right. First, the teacher
divides the children into teams, like this:
T: Let’s play “What is he saying?” I ask, and you answer. One answer, one
square. This team tells me about Abe. That team answers about Bea. What
about you? Are you going to tell me about Cade or Dee?
The teacher then starts each team at the far LEFT of each row by asking “How is
8
HOW AND WHY
the master treating Abe/Bea/Cade/Dee?”
Notice the difference between the “thinking” column and the “feeling” column.
Something has changed—a simple choice of nouns or adjectives or adverbs no
longer quite suffices, and instead we use clauses and quotation marks.
Who
How
are
others
treating
him/her?
(well/ill)
How
is
he/she
feeling?
(sad/glad)
What is
he/she
thinking?
(“I want
to….”
What is
he/she
saying?
(“I
can….”
“Can
I…?”)
What is
he/she
going to
do?
(He/she
is going
to….)
Abe
Bea
Cade
Dee
Of course, we don’t always think the words “I want to…” when we are thinking to
ourselves any more than we actually talk when we talk to ourselves. But what
exactly do we think?
In Chapter Seven of Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky re-analyzes Piaget’s data on
“egocentric speech,” the self-directed talk which Piaget takes as a relic of the
child’s egocentric thinking, the child’s inability to take the point of view of other
people. Vygotsky wants to show that instead of the dying gasp of the child’s
egocentrism, it may well be the first breath of the child’s inner speech.
First, Vygotsky experimentally tests the three major claims Piaget makes about
egocentric speech, namely that the child does not attend to whether he or she is
understood or not, that it occurs in “collective monologues” when children are
working side by side but not really together, and that as a result the child does not
take to care to make sure that he is audible (Vygotskij, 1990: 357).
Vygotsky finds all three claims false (Vygotskij, 1990: 359-361), at least at the
inception of self-directed “egocentric” speech: the kids do not continue to speak
“egocentrically” if others cannot understand them, nor do they continue if there is
no possibility of collaborative work, and they will not speak “to themselves” if
others cannot hear. On the other hand, they do speak to themselves in order to
resolve problems, much the way that adults do.
But can Vygotsky say that “inner speech” really is descended from this ghostly
self-directed speech? Inner speech—and silent thinking to yourself—is neither
understandable, nor dependent on collective activity, nor audible. So if
understandability, activity-dependence, and audibility are all essential to the selfdirected “egocentric” speech of the preschooler, how does it actually happen that
these things are no longer necessary by age seven, and how do they fall away?
Vygotsky answers this question by using the same kind of method he used
when deforming fables by replacing the dog’s reflection in the water with another
9
CHAPTER 5
dog, or by transforming the fox with the grapes into a human (and this is really the
same method we used when we considered “non-stories” in Chapter One). He
simply imagines what conversations are like where understandability, shared
activity, and audibility are maximally present: “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“When is Tram B arriving?” Vygotsky points out that “Yes, I would like a cup of
tea” and “The Tram B, for which we have all been waiting patiently at this stop for
the last twenty minutes, is now coming into view” are almost unthinkably otiose.
Just as the circumstances of a story are “taken for granted” and “go inward”,
progressively more and more of a conversation is allowed to disappear, and when
the child is speaking to only the child, that means all the spoken attributes of
language in their entirety. Even psychologically, Vygotsky suggests that inner
speech consists only of “predication”, that is, only the New (Vygotskij, 1990: 365).
We can see that as the text develops, we simply make one thing stand for
another. The unstressed Given “the ass” comes to stand for the stressed New “an
ass”. Then “Abe” comes to stand for “the ass” and eventually “Abe was old and
tired” comes to stand for “Abe was old” and “Abe was tired”. When we ask
questions like “What was Abe like?” we get nothing but the New: “Old” and
“Tired”. So, like the cheese in “The Fox and the Crow”, Theme and Given
disappear. Since the scene is already set and the character is already created, we
can say less and less and mean more and more.
We can also see how this process of “going inward” works in a classroom.
Imagine, for example, that our story continues like this:
On the way to Bremen, Abe met a beagle. The beagle’s name was Bea.
Bea was old and tired. So one day her master was feeling hungry and
started thinking about dog soup. “How about dog soup for dinner?” he said
to his wife. Bea heard this and so she ran away. But where could she go?
How could she live?
Now, suppose we are playing the game of “You read and I ask; then I read and you
ask” and we ask the children a very open question, such as “Tell me about Bea”.
We can imagine that they will copy the “donkey soup” language at first. They may
do so all too faithfully, mixing up Abe’s name with Bea’s or saying “donkey”
instead of “dog.” But then the child will begin to omit and abbreviate (e.g. “Bea
had the same problem, so she ran away too” “What about Bea? She did too” “Bea?
She too”).
The teacher can re-invest this time saved in the story, by introducing details (e.g.
“Bea the Beagle played the bassoon” or “Bea sang sad songs to the moon”),
confident in the knowledge that the child can build these new details on the bare
bones of the already established schema, the “donkey/dog soup” problem which
has been “internalized” or “interiorized” by the child.
Vygotsky invents a Russian word for this: “вращивания”, or “vrashivaniya”,
which has the sense of a “revolution” as a “turning inward” to describe this “going
inward,” as well as the sense of “ingrowing” or “inward rooting”, or even “inward
routing”. We shall call it “intro-volution”.
10
HOW AND WHY
Now, we can accept the idea that the child’s mind is, functionally speaking, a
kind of text. After all, the mind does have the function of recording events the way
a narrative does. We can even accept the idea that the child’s mind is in some sense
a kind of discourse: after all, it does have the function of participating in dialogue.
This picture of the mind as text and as discourse is a more humane picture than
imagining the child’s mind as a ghostly reproduction of the child’s body (after all,
texts live on after death even though bodies do not).
But what happens to words without sounds? We know what sounds without
words are like, from music and from babies crying. We even know, from children
reading texts that they do not understand, what wordings without meanings sound
like—that is, how sounds can become zombified, and walk the earth without any
mental life of their own. But what becomes of the meanings when they are shorn of
their sounds, and even the various narratives and dialogues that they come in
wither away?
Vygotsky says that word meanings, shorn of their sounds, become the stuff that
minds are made of. He says that they have, at first, a pre-conceptual existence, still
tied to heaps of things and concrete collections, and we’ll learn about the preconceptual life of word meanings in the last part of this book. But Vygotsky also
says that eventually the child succeeds in organizing them into families of their
own, related by acts of thought rather than acts of memory.
So for example, instead of remembering that Bea plays the bassoon, Cade plays
the cello, and Dee plays the drums, children are able to understand that the bassoon
is a member of the woodwind family, the cello is a string instrument, and the drums
are found in the percussion section of the orchestra. This conceptual hierarchy is
neither dialogue nor narrative; it is something entirely new.
Let’s observe a lesson. Ms. Lee has taught the children all about the “Bremen
Town Musicians.” They are older children, eleven or twelve, and they are
musically inclined, so the characters they are most interested in are actually not the
talking animals but rather the accordion, the bassoon, the cat-gut-stringed cello and
the drums. So Ms. Lee would now like to systematize this new vocabulary into
some kind of overall conceptual “family”, the instruments of the orchestra.
She’s teaching in English, and there are some problems. First of all, the general
categories of instruments are quite clear to the children from their first language,
but the names of the categories are not so clear. We can easily imagine that this is
just the opposite from when children learn the names of orchestral instruments
from stories like “The Bremen Town Musicians” for the first time. When the
children learn the names of the instruments for the first time, they learn the
instruments first and the categories later, but here they grasp the categories quite
quickly from their first language and only learn the specific instruments later.
The main problem that the children are having is that the teacher wants a
definition, not an example. That is, she really wants the kids to be able to decide
for themselves whether an instrument is a string, woodwind, brass, or percussion
instrument; she wants them to be able to create a description that will include all
the members of the family and only the members of the family.
11
CHAPTER 5
Now, you can give an example with a single word (e.g. “trumpet”). But a good
dictionary definition will take you at least two clauses (e.g. “a brass instrument is a
type of orchestral instrument which is played by vibrating the lips in a brass tube”).
Ms. Lee: What is a brass instrument?
Hye-yeong: Trumpet is a brass instrument.
Ms. Lee is not satisfied. She wants more than an example out of Hye-yeong.
Providing new examples is a simple matter of generalization: producing a set large
enough to include the various examples. But defining involves abstraction as well:
producing an essential criterion which will exclude as well as include. Generalizing,
then, is a matter of adding on. But abstracting is a matter of taking away.
So there is a good reason why it takes at least two clauses, and a wh-element,
for a good definition: we have to add on with one hand (by using a general
hypernym, called the genera, that includes too much) and take away with the other
(by using a hyponym, a restrictive relative clause, that pares the genera down to the
species). In other words, we need to figure out some superordinate class it belongs
to (e.g. “is a type of orchestral instrument”) and then differentiate it (“which is
played by”).
But that’s not what Ms. Lee does at all. Instead, she focuses on metacognitive
processes—providing evidence. Like this:
Ms. Lee: Why do you think so?
Hye-yeong: Because we blow…. Um….
Ms. Lee: You can blow it? I think it is a woodwind instrument.
Of course, you blow brass instruments too!
Fearlessly, Hye-yeong immediately offers two other categories with examples.
Unfortunately, only one of them is correct. But fortunately, her friend Yunkyeong
is there to help.
Hye-yeong: But…. But…. I think string instrument is a violin and percussion
instrument is a clarinet and recorder.
Yun-kyeong: No…. Percussion instrument is a bongo drum. Woodwinds
are clarinet, recorder and so on. But brass is a tuba and trumpet because it
is blowing but there are buttons, too. I think they are made of brass.
Ms. Lee: Oh, good. What is brass? How do you call it in Korean?
Yun-kyeong: 금속 (geumsok, “brass”)? Um…. Ah, 금관악기 (geumsok akgi) “brass tube instruments”)?
Hye-yeong: I see. It is made of brass. And tuba and trumpet are brass
instruments.
Hye-yeong and Yun-kyeong have learned a lot. Hye-yeong now knows what
percussion instruments and woodwind instruments are. Yun-kyeong now knows
12
HOW AND WHY
why “brass” instruments have that name in English. But neither appears to know
the essential principle for grouping instruments in the orchestra (the principle of
sound-making involved) or the essential principle for grouping instruments within
a family (from “soprano” to “alto” to “tenor” to “baritone” to “bass”). So for
example both Hye-yeong and Yun-kyeong appear to believe that brass instruments
are defined by the fact of blowing and differentiated from woodwinds by the
material of which they are made.
(What would they make of a saxophone? Would they be able to explain why a
metal flute is a woodwind but a plastic sousaphone is a brass? Why not? Suppose
you started with the strings family. How would you show Hye-yeong and Yunkyeong the principle of sound making behind classification and differentiate it
from the material and the manner of playing? How would you stratify the concept
by using the operating principle of “soprano”, “alto”, “tenor” and “bass”?)
We know that wh-elements really have two functions. One is the question word,
standing between turns of talk and functioning as the Theme of an interrogative
(“What is brass? How do you call it in Korean?”). The other is the relative pronoun,
standing between clauses within a turn of talk, as the Themes of subordinate
clauses (“Brass is a material which we call geumsok in Korean” “Brass instruments
are orchestral instruments which are sounded by buzzing the lips”). One is the
harbinger of inter-mental, discourse complexity—and the other a token of intrasentential, grammatical complexity. The children don’t know this yet. They are still
struggling to differentiate examples from definitions. And the way they do this has
a lot more to do with the question-word function than the relative clause. Yet one
cannot help but feel that there is a defining relative clause in the immediate future.
There is another way in which the process of concept formation might be
observable, which is actually more closely related to the way that stories develop
(and for this reason it is more distantly related to the way that concepts develop in
actual children’s minds). If all instrument families are formed according to the
principle of sound-making and not the material or the manner of playing, why,
Hye-yeong and Yun-kyeong might ask, do we have some families of instruments
like “brass” that are named after the material and others like “percussion” that are
named after the manner?
The answer is that word meanings develop over historical time, and the naming
principle does too. Take, for example, Yun-kyeong’s word “bongo”, or “tom tom”
or “tam-tam”. We can easily imagine that the drums that produce these sounds
were simply named after the sound, and we can even produce our own names (like
“tim-tim” for a high-pitched drum, or “tinkle tinkle” for a high pitched cymbal).
We can see that in each case the principle is quite concrete.
But we can also imagine that as human families grew, the communities they
lived in began to expand too, and even the store of noise-making artifacts at their
disposal became richer and more complex. We can easily imagine that under these
circumstances it became necessary to distinguish between one kind of drum and
another. This might have been done very much the way that human names were
13
CHAPTER 5
differentiated when small villages turned into towns.
Just as “John” had to be differentiated into “John Carpenter” and “John
Peterson”, people began to speak of a “bass drum”, a “snare drum” and a “kettle
drum”. You can see that the criteria for differentiating the different Johns tends to
vary unsystematically (like a chain in a story). You can also see that the criterion
for naming the bass drum (sound) is different from the criterion for naming the
kettle drum (appearance) and both differ from the criterion by which the snare
drum was named (a “snare” is an noise-making element). The naming rule is not
really abstract: it is based on generalizations. It is based on adding on members of
the drum family and not trying to take away the different features of a drum to
reduce it to the essence of drum-hood (Vygotsky would call it “complexive” rather
than “conceptual”).
Finally, when whole families of objects are brought together in a kind of metafamily, it becomes necessary to have a system based on a single clear and
unambiguous criterion or set of criteria, such as the sound-making principle (or, in
human communities, money and power). Under these circumstances, we abstract
away the features of each drum and reduce all drums to their essence (rather as we
tried to reduce stories to their essence in the first chapter). We then contrast this
essential principle with the essential principles of other families of instruments. In
this way, we no longer have sprawling families of noise-makers, but a tidy
conceptual hierarchy of instruments: an orchestra.
Is this better? Sometimes, but not always. We can easily imagine that if our
donkey, our dog, our cat and our duck had arrived in Bremen and joined the
Bremen symphony orchestra, they might have had to sit in very different sections.
No wonder they decided to stay in the robbers’ house and become ghosts instead.
GENRE: FROM NOVEL TO PLAY
H.G. Widdowson points out that ways of arranging text are also ways of arranging
the reader’s anticipations. Take, for example, Wordsworth’s poem “Simon Lee”:
In the sweet shire of Cardigan,
Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,
An old man dwells, a little man, 'Tis said he once was tall.
Wordsworth has set the scene and created the character. So, as you might predict,
he then poses the problem:
Few months of life has he in store
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell.
14
HOW AND WHY
So this is to be a poem about swollen ankles. But wait, there is a more serious
problem. Or rather, a more real one:
My gentle Reader, I perceive
How patiently you've waited,
And now I fear that you expect
Some tale will be related.
O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in every thing.
What more I have to say is short,
And you must kindly take it:
It is no tale; but, should you think,
Perhaps a tale you'll make it.
Wordsworth seems to be saying: YOU, O Reader, are the problem! YOU lack the
imagination and sensitivity that silent thought has brought to Wordsworth, so he
tells you to make up your own story, and he will sit by and snicker at you while
you try.
Wordsworth is, however, better than his word. In fact, there IS a story in the rest
of the poem (it has to do with the author’s trying to help poor Simon Lee dig up an
old stump and how bad the old huntsman’s tears of gratitude made our noble
author feel). Not even Wordsworth can resist the clear invitation of a narrative
opening.
Widdowson asks why. That is, why do we expect to be told a story in this
situation? How does the order of setting the scene, creating the characters and
posing the problem automatically set up this expectation, and what happens if
change the order?
A few years later, his “Lucy” poems solve this problem of ordering.
Widdowson compares:
a) A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love
Dwelt among th’untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove
b) She dwelt among th’untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love. (Widdowson, 1986: 135)
You can see that a) sets up the Simon Lee problem—a character is created and a
story is expected. But b), which is Wordsworth’s real poem, gets around that
15
CHAPTER 5
problem in the same way that “An old grey donkey once was there/In Germany
long ago” avoids it.
By putting the circumstances AFTER the character, we make the character rather
than the circumstances the starting point, and so we come to expect more
characterization and less adventure. The poem becomes less of a poetic romance,
and more of a prosaic description. If our donkey only could speak, or if it had in its
mind such stores as silent thought would bring, we could write more than a poem.
We could write a whole novel.
A novel is a chain—of events, but also of utterances. Now, there is a children’s
game in Korea called 끝말잇기 (Ggut-mal-it-ki, or Word-Ending Chains), where
children take turns to think of words. The ending of my word then has to provide
the beginning of your word, e.g. “Daytime”, “Time-table” “Table-ware”,
“Warehouse”, etc.
(Can you continue this game? Can you continue it with LETTERS instead of with
syllables? What happens if you play it with CLAUSES –that is, with short, simple
sentences that have one process and two participants?)
One way to read “The Bremen Town Musicians” is as a game of this type, a kind
of chain of dialogues: An ass meets a dog. The dog and the ass meet a cat. The ass,
the dog, and the cat meet a duck. The Bremen Town Musicians then meet a set of
robbers, but they never go to Bremen.
Even the beginning of our text looks a little like that—the end of each clause is
the starting point of the next one.
Long ago in Germany, there was an ass. The ass’s name was Abe. Abe
was old and tired. So (i.e. because Abe was old and tired) one day his
master was feeling hungry and started thinking about donkey soup.
But then the chain breaks, and the principle of organization changes. Why?
“How about donkey soup for dinner?” he said to his wife. Abe heard this
and so he ran away. But where could he go? How could he live? He loved
music, and Bremen loved music too. So he headed for Bremen. He wanted
to be the town musician!
As you can see, the master’s question “How about donkey soup for dinner?” seems
to stand outside the text, something projected by the verbal process “said” (and so
“donkey soup” is a New element when Abe’s master mentions it to his wife, even
though the narrator has just mentioned it). But it’s not entirely outside the text,
because Abe hears it and runs away. In the narrative, there is dialogue.
Then the story moves in an even more strange direction, reminiscent of the way
that our first grade teacher projected herself inside her student’s minds to show
them how to think about the task in the last chapter. “But where could he go? How
16
HOW AND WHY
could he live?” Suddenly the narrator’s voice seems to project us right inside Abe’s
mind, listening in on Abe’s self-directed speech, Only the use of “he” tells us that
this isn’t the kind of quoted speech that heard earlier, but is instead the narrator’s
account of what Abe is thinking to himself.
Voloshinov remarks that this kind of “quasi-direct discourse” is a modern
invention (1973: 141). There are glimpses of it in Chaucer, and as we shall see
Shakespeare uses it very extensively indeed. But it doesn’t become a central part of
English literature until the novels of Jane Austen and eventually James Joyce.
Of course it wasn’t really invented by Austen and Joyce or even by Chaucer and
Shakespeare. It wasn’t really invented at all, or even evolved. Instead, it was
exapted—projected speech was adapted by removing quotation marks.
The underlying silent thinking of words to oneself, however, is invented. Not
by Austen or Joyce or Chaucer or Shakespeare, but by every single child who
develops a verbalized mode of thinking out of self-directed speech. But when we
see this new type of thinking it in children’s literature, particularly in literature by
children, we do not, in general, find it in the form of quasi-direct discourse.
Halliday and Matthiessen point out that it is readily visible in cartoons (2014: 433).
We can see this if we simply map our story of Abe and his owner onto a typical
four frame cartoon.
TIME
First… 
Saying

Thinking

Feeling

Doing
MODE

Second


Third


Finally

As you can see, the cartoon, which plays such a central role in child literacy, can
easily include feeling processes and thinking processes that do not overtly appear
in speech. More, the cartoon combines drawing and even play with writing. Above
all, the cartoon shows a whole new dimension which is crucial to good story-telling
and good theatre. It’s the same kind of self-directed-but-really-other-directed
verbalized thinking we saw in the third section of the last chapter, and so we may
suppose that it too is a crucial moment in ontogenesis, that is, in child development.
(How would you get the children to continue the four frame cartoon above in
pairs? Is there any way to get a class of thirty children to write the whole story as a
four-frame cartoon in five episodes?)
Let’s look back—way back. You remember that we began with a huge
contradiction to resolve. On the one hand, there is the general wholeness of what
happens to you, how feelings and even thoughts seem to occur all over you at once,
17
CHAPTER 5
without any spatial beginning or end, and sometimes without very perceptible
beginnings in time either. And on the other, there is the task of cutting up that
experience into nouns, verbs, adjectives and all the rest and conveying it bit by bit
in dialogue. There is the “finished quality” of the text. And then there is the
ongoing, unfinishable quality of talk. The two seem as different as past and future.
We know that Halliday’s ideational metafunction is mostly preoccupied with
the construction of a holistic representation of a whole experience (what Halliday
calls a “figure”). The interpersonal metafunction, in contrast, is more oriented
towards piece-by-piece interaction, and the textual metafunction is necessary to
mediate these contradictory impulses, the one tending towards finalization and the
other tending away from it. The textual metafunction weaves the warp of figure
and the weft of exchange together into a “texture”.
With this we come to the end of our exploration of the clause. We also come to
the end of this chapter, and the end of the first third of our book. The theme of all
three has been the Theme, that is, the starting point and the way that starting point
orients us as to what follows. This theme has to order words with respect to other
words (rather than ordering words with respect to the world, that is, with respect to
logic, experience, or interpersonal relations). Where transitivity is a reflection of
human experience and mood a response to human interaction, theme is a way of
ordering transitivity and mood in a cohesive message. There are explicit ways of
doing this (e.g. conjunctions) and there are implicit ways too (e.g. elision).
Everyday dialogue may seem to avoid a lot of this explicit back-tracking and
flash-backing, as least insofar as setting the scene is concerned: dialogues simply
take place wherever the participants—say, Abe the Ass and Bea the Beagle—
happen to find themselves and find each other, and so, when we look at the
language used in dialogue, we often find that it omits a lot of references to
“Where” and “When” which would be obligatory in a narrative. Sometimes, e.g.
with the imperative, dialogue even omits references to “Who” and “What”. But of
course we use conjunctions in dialogue as well, and sometimes we even have to set
the scene, create new characters and pose problems. For example, as soon as Abe
tries to explain to Bea why he is on the lam, as soon as Bea tries to explain to Abe
how unwanted and ill-used she feels, we find that dialogue too has to back track
and flashback. It is only when Abe talks to Abe that all of this can be completely
taken for granted.
Similarly, dialogue may seem to be self-ordering: one thing leads to another, the
way that Abe and Bea meet Cade the Cat. But even within a dialogue, when a
speaker creates a clause, that speaker has to choose the starting point and the
ending point, and build new information on shared and known information in some
way. When telling a narrative, these choices apply not only within clauses, but
between them, and not only to the clause but to the story itself. It is only when you
are telling a narrative to yourself that theme and given information, like the cheese
and the fox, can disappear.
Vygotsky codifies this disappearance as a developmental law: language
emerges first in interaction, and then disappears in what we might call “intraaction”, that is, the transformation of self-directed speech into silent but
18
HOW AND WHY
nevertheless verbalized thinking—thinking in word meanings rather than in
graphic images. It is this kind of verbalized thinking that allows the child to think
in metaphors, an also in definitions and examples. This allows us to characterize
the child’s development more precise psychological and linguistic terms—not just
the simple progression of activities (rote play, role play, and rule play) that we
began with in Chapter One.
We also wanted a more sophisticated approach to genre than the child’s eye
view we took in Chapter One, dividing them into stories and play, and we got one.
We found that some stories were barely more than proverbs. For example, “The
Fox and the Crow” is, at least in its more prosaic form, little more than a warning
against flatterers. However, in their lyrical form fables can achieve a kind of epic
grandeur or even a novelistic depth: the cruel fox and the credulous crow,
instructed by Momotaro, become the heroic dog and pheasant, and the
grasshopper’s rock band becomes the Bremen Town Musicians.
Despite what Bakhtin (1991) says about the “self-contained” epic vs. the
unfinalizable novel, we can easily find both self-containment and unfinalizability
in both. When we consider a typical epic such as the Iliad one of the first things
that strikes us is that it seems to begin nowhere and end nowhere—Achilles is mad
about something at the beginning and then Hector dies at the end, but in between
it’s really just one thing after another.
In contrast, the novel, which should be far more disorganized, since it is full of
that mostly madly disorganized art form of all, human conversation, has a definite
beginning (the scene is set, the character created, and the problem presented) and
an even more definite end (very often with the death or marriage of the
protagonist).
It turns out that the tension between narrative and dialogue explains that pretty
well, although perhaps not exactly the way you might think. With an epic,
everybody knows the story anyway, so it doesn’t really matter where you begin and
where you end. On the other hand, a novel is new, so you have to do a lot of
explaining. The epic turns out to be the narrative of a nation, and the historical or
mythical events in it are simply constructed along the lines of a chain, almost like a
dialogue. It can have no ending, because it is really the story of the birth of the
community and so it must be open ended. The novel, in contrast, is the narrative of
a person, and the dialogue in the novel is real talk and not a chain of events. A
person, unlike a nation, must come to an end.
THE NEXT CHAPTER: PARENT AND CHILD
In these first five chapters, we have studied stories. In the next eleven, we look at
plays. But not just any plays! You see, in almost every speech community there is
at least one writer whose texts are both an epic narrative of the whole speech
community and a novel of the real lives and the real dialogues of the time. That
writer’s style forms the grammar and that person’s diction becomes a kind of
dictionary. The characters which that writer creates develop, like word meanings,
from childhood to adulthood in a way that directly influences the development of
19
CHAPTER 5
actual children, for that writer creates the genres from which almost all future
speech genres will be created. For every speaker of English, that writer was
William Shakespeare.
Of all the texts that Shakespeare wrote, the one which probably had the biggest
impact on the English language and the way we think about thinking is probably
Shakespeare’s tortured play about the tortured would-be revenger, Hamlet, Prince
of Denmark. Certainly this was the play which preoccupied Vygotsky the most, and
certainly it influenced his theory of mind, with its different “stage” planes and its
emphasis on the drama between people as a kind of experimental dress rehearsal
for the dramas within them (1997a: 106). So this is the play we want to consider
next.
In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet comes face to face with a ghost. Or does he?
Although other people see the ghost at the beginning, only Hamlet can hear the
ghost. By the middle of the play, other people cannot even see the ghost, and the
ghost has no role to play at all by the end.
Was the ghost really Hamlet’s father? Or was it only some misty event in the
history of Denmark which became a sad but somehow compelling story that
Hamlet told himself until it became a terrible inner voice that has to be obeyed no
matter what the consequences? By the end of the play, even this question seems not
to matter, and in any case there is no answer.
Can we really teach this? Well, Bruner said any subject can be taught to anybody
at any age in some form that is still honest (1960: 12). In other words, when we
simplify, we can figure out some way to retain the complexity of Shakespeare’s
words.
Piaget disagreed (1971: 20). If Piaget is right, then there is probably no way to
explain the intricacies of Shakespeare to a child. But is he right? That’s what we
must find out in the next five chapters.
Let’s begin where Shakespeare does. Like this:
GHOST: Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand
Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin
Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled;
No reckoning made but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head—
Oh, horrible, oh horrible, most horrible! (1.5.73~1.5.80)
Now, consider this one, for children:
GHOST: He, my brother, took my wife,
Took my crown and took my life.
Didn’t give me time to pray
Now for all my sins I pay
Horrible, horrible, horrible!
20
HOW AND WHY
You can see that our second version is rather more like a child’s counting rhyme
than a play that could transform a whole speech community forever. But you can
also see that, like the counting rhyme, our childly Shakespeare can develop—we
might teach it alone (to younger children). We might teach it to a group of middle
school students and then have them try to read the real thing in class. We could
even teach it in class and then have them try to read Shakespeare’s original as
homework.
But we will always want to start by “setting the scene”, “creating the
characters”, and “posing the problem”. Imagine this:
T: Look! This is King Hamlet. This is his brother, Claudius. And this is his
queen, Gertrude. And this is their son, Prince Hamlet. Now, King Hamlet
dies. Who is the next king?
Unless the children know the story very well, they will answer that the next king
will be Prince Hamlet. But of course the next king, and Gertrude’s next husband, is
not Prince Hamlet, but Claudius! And that is precisely the problem we want to pose.
This can, of course, be illustrated quite easily with the whiteboard:
|
Claudius
|
King Hamlet + Queen Gertrude
|
Prince Hamlet
(Suppose we want to pose the problem of the ghost? How do we continue?)
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). Epic and Novel. In The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1990). Art and Answerability. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1993). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bruner, J. (1960). The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard.
Halliday, M.A.K. with Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar.
Fourth Edition. London and New York: Routledge.
Piaget, J. (1971). Biology and Knowledge. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Voloshinov, V.N. (1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press.
Vygotskij, L.S. (1990). Pensiero e linguaggio. Roma: Editoria Laterza.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1997a). Collected Works, Vol. 4. London and New York: Plenum.
Widdowson, H.G. (1986). The Untrodden Ways. In C.J. Brumfit & R.A. Carter (Eds.) Literature and
language teaching, pp. 133-139. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
21