Week 1: Response to Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning by M.A.K Halliday

What it was that stopped you? 

1.     P195 The Notion of Register

As a second language learner, I agree that developing a language means gradually building and collecting new registers. For example, by expanding knowledge on a specific topic (describe someone), adding new vocabularies to word stock (i.e. adjectives in personalities, appearance, clothing etc.), using conventional grammatical structure (i.e. present tense and past tense etc.) to link all the information to make sense of the ideas.

2.     P196 Structural Aspects

I usually stuck by meaning making and translating in my first language, especially those blurry and compounded words, for example, ‘case analysis presentation slides’, where ‘presentation’ is a nuanced word to translate into a single word in Mandarin, ‘slides’ are usually presented as measure word, which is hard to link with the pages in PowerPoint without further hints. Thus, I guess demonstration in pictures, giving examples or synonyms would be helpful in explanation. 

3.     P199 The Uniqueness of Mother Tongue

There are many other words that are hard to find a matching translation in Mandarin due to the differences in culture, language and daily practices, such as ‘offer, pattern, available, and access etc.’, where in many casual occasions, young generation in China would generally keep the English word to avoid ambiguity. 

                                                                                                                    

4.     P 202 Mathematical Symbolism

     I came up with an example of reading fraction.

     12/15 was read from top to bottom as 12 over 15 in English.

     12/15 was read from bottom to top as 15 ‘分之’ 12 in Mandarin.

The position of two numbers are switched, I am not sure if there is a symbolism or philosophy in understanding fraction as a result of division?

Wonder:

If there is an extreme case, which aspect of language can be abandoned that people could still understand, vocabulary, grammar or others? So, can we say the dropped aspect is not that meaningful/useful for second language learners who just picked up the new language? 

Reference:

Halliday, M. (1978). Sociolinguistic aspects of mathematical education. In Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning (pp. 194-204). Edward Arnold.