| Pub. Date | : June, 2020 |
|---|---|
| Product Name | : The IUP Journal of English Studies |
| Product Type | : Article |
| Product Code | : IJES122020 |
| Author Name | : Kamal Hasan Ali Abohadi |
| Availability | : YES |
| Subject/Domain | : Arts & Humanities |
| Download Format | : PDF Format |
| No. of Pages | : 08 |
This paper aims at exploring the projection relations in the genre of court decisions. Projection is considered an important resource for meaning making. According to Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014, 506), it is the second type of logico-semantic relations by which a clause can combine with another clause to form a clause complex. The first type is known as "expansion," which is a direct representation of a nonlinguistic experience. On the other hand, "projection" is regarded as a "representation of a (linguistic) representation." Thompson (1994, 2) observes that a projection relation is a metaphenomenon wherein language is used to construe language itself rather than construing the experiential metafunction (i.e., real-world experiences). This paper analyzes the construal of projection relations in six court judgments-three pertaining to civil law and three to criminal law.
Systemic Functional Grammar (hereinafter SFG) deals with language not as a set of structures but as a network of meanings. For Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014), language is a system that enables the speakers to communicate on the basis of the function or the particular meaning required for a particular situation. Functions, in this context, refer to the semantic stratum which is represented by the lexicogrammatical level identified by the systems and the subsystems. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the relations between clauses forming clause complexes can be described on the basis of two systems: the taxis system and the logico-semantic system. The taxis system is concerned with the degree of interdependency between clauses in a clause complex. Two types of interdependency relations are identified by Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014): (i) parataxis refers to the relation between clauses of equal status; and (ii) hypotaxis refers to the relation between clauses of unequal status where one is dependent on the other. The logico-semantic system accounts for the type of meaning a clause has in relation to