Looking Forward and Practical Applications 207
an attempt to describe speech in its own terms and not as a written text
formed out of abstract units grammarians in a post hoc analysis can identify
as sentences. He claims that his grammar can be used to analyze ‘any
sample of used language’ (ibid. 222). However, this book has shown that
while Brazil’s claim is well founded the mechanism of his chaining rules
has to be relaxed slightly in order to be able to successfully describe the
features of ellipsis and dysfl uency found in speech. The incorporation
of the communicative value realized by key selections (which signal the
expectations the speaker projects will be realized by the increment), ter-
mination selections (which signal the speaker’s expectation of the hearer’s
reaction to the increment) and end-rising and level tone has expanded
the descriptive power of the grammar in detailing a user’s model of the
purposeful driven nature of speech as a process.
This view of describing language as a fl ow of spoken lexical elements
punctuated by the realization of increments which meet communicative
ends represents an alternative way of mapping out how individuals com-
municate. There are no formal rules which must be satisfi ed prior to use;
rather the function realized by the language sculpts its emergent form in
the discourse (see Hopper 1987, 1998), and Hunston and Francis (2000)
for descriptions of grammars in which meaning emerges from regularities
in the discourse). The grammar presented here allows for another descrip-
tion of the meaning potential of the language; one that highlights lexis,
intonation and context at the expense of abstract syntactic rules.
Space does not allow for any more than a brief sketch of the implications
generated by looking at the meaning potential of the language from the
standpoint that it is a purposeful, cooperative and contextualized happening.
But such a view has obvious practical applications both in the teaching
of the language in foreign/second language classrooms and for discourse
analysts examining the performance of purposeful driven speech. The
following paragraphs outline two possible applications.
It is hoped that the view of language described above could stand along-
side traditional descriptions of the language in foreign/second language
classrooms. Learners instead of thinking solely in terms of formal rules of
how to generate sentences could be instructed to think in terms of the
realizations of target states which satisfy communicative ends. They could
be instructed in ‘learning to mean’ (Halliday 1973) rather than in learning
abstract rules.^2 Learners could be presented with language and asked
to focus on consciousness-raising exercises^3 detailing how the speaker
achieved the desired communicative purpose. Metalingual classroom
exercises starting with instances of the simple chaining rules could be