The Applied Research On Cardiff Grammar’s Syntax

With the development of Systemic Functional Linguistics, many differentgrammar models under the same framework such as Cardiff Grammar, NottinghamGrammar, and Madrid grammar, etc. are gradually striving to move forward. SydneyGrammar, the most renowned as well as the representative theory of SystemicFunctional Linguistics, is innovated by Halliday, while another representative grammarmodel, Cardiff Grammar, was transformed from Halliday’s theory by Fawcett. As earlyas1980s, Butler, a prominent British linguist, initiated to study Cardiff Grammar andmade a brief comparison with Sydney Grammar. Interior research on this grammar wasinitiated by Huang Guowen, Fawcett’s Student, in the early21stcentury. Later, He Weiintroduced Cardiff Grammar more thoroughly and comprehensively, which contributesa lot to the popularity of this grammar in Chinese linguistic domain. The ultimate aimof theory is to serve practice and guide practice development. As the latest theory ofSystemic Functional Linguistics, Cardiff Grammar is a new version compared withprevious models. It has vital significances to find out these changes.This thesis is based on Cardiff Grammar’s syntactic theories, takes SydneyGrammar’s syntactic theories as comparison object and computer programminglanguage as carrier, and adopts comparative analysis and formalization method. Thisstudy attempts to answer the following problems.1. In syntactic analysis, what changeshave Cardiff Grammar brought to Sydney Grammar?2. Compared with SydneyGrammar, what progress do these changes make?3. Can these new syntactic theories beapplied to practice? If can, which aspects they can be applied?Through this study, the results show that:Firstly, on the syntactic category, clause is divided into unit, class, structure andsystem in Sydney Grammar while it is divided into unit, element and item in CardiffGrammar; In realization rule, Cardiff Grammar only has four kinds of rules such ascomponence, conflation, filling and exponence, which simplify Sydney Grammar’srealization rules; In clause analyzing approach, instead of Sydney Grammar’s box diagram, Cardiff Grammar adopts tree diagram; Finally, the new concept ‘Place’ is putforward in Cardiff Grammar.Secondly, Cardiff Grammar is a functional grammar based on form, in which, theeach element structure is analyzed in details and each element is endowed withgrammatical function. This makes up Sydney Grammar’s shortage that it only analyzesthe structures of a clause and the element analysis is rarely involved.Thirdly, through the study of computer programming language, this thesis findsthat the analysis approach adopted in Cardiff Grammar coincides with the process ofcomputer programming language. In addition, as one generative grammar, CardiffGrammar is easier to realize with the aid of computer. This provides a new researchperspective for computer programming language.Briefly speaking, the study on Cardiff Grammar’s Syntax application, on one hand,it helps to systematically understand the two main models of Systemic FunctionalLinguistics and their advantages and disadvantages. On the other hand, it provides anew research angle to research computer programming language. However, this thesispays most attention to theoretical research. A large amount of practical work waits to beconducted, which enlightens us to move further at the same time.