Grammar works for us at two levels. Whether we are in the moment conscious of it or not, our meanings are constituted in patterns. The patterns are there, even when we don’t care to name them. Mostly we don’t need to name them. Notwithstanding our relative disinterest, the patterns of meaning are not just circumstantially present – they are profoundly so, they are essentially so, and in their astounding complexity. Complex and multilayered patterns of meaning drive our meanings, even when unspoken and unthought as patterned. This is the first or primary level at which grammar operates.

Then, there is a second level, when the patterns are named and when we begin to think reflectively and then more or less systematically about them. There is a folk or everyday version of this practice of reflection, which begins to appear when we try to account for misunderstandings, or when we are struck by moments of exceptional clarity. For example, in communication, we might note a person’s ineffectiveness or effectiveness in “getting the message across.”

Michael Reddy identifies such expressions in spoken English, all mundane, and all appearing with remarkable frequency. “It’s very hard to get an idea across in a hostile atmosphere.” “Your real feelings are finally getting through to me.” “The man’s thought is buried in these terribly difficult and dense paragraphs.” “I’m cramming history for tomorrow’s exam.” These are moments of explicit self-reflection on the processes of meaning.⁸⁷

Reddy goes on to identify the self-deceptive, “biasing” power that is frequently built into these self-understandings. He identifies the frequency of “container” and “conduit” metaphors to account for the processes of meaning in English. Perhaps 70 per cent of references to communication in English use metaphors of this kind, he says. “This model of communication objectifies meaning in a misleading and dehumanizing fashion. It influences us to talk and think about thoughts as if they had [some] kind of external, intersubjective reality.” Moreover, “to the extent that the conduit metaphor does see communication as requiring some slight expenditure of energy, it localizes that expenditure almost totally in the speaker or writer.”⁸⁸

Here we have a case where, in our practices of meaning, although we do have ways of speaking about meaning, they may be systematically flawed. They are biased towards self-deception about our role as meaning-makers and the transportability of meanings in the act of communication. We only start to realize this at points of apparent failure to communicate.

A comprehensive theory of meaning entails representation (including levels of unawareness), communication, and re-representation in moments of interpretation (including systematic patterns of seeing different things into a meaning, and failing to see). Such a theory may serve to undo the naive and egocentric assumptions about communication intrinsic to our folk “grammar.”

Within our second level of meaning, where we explicitly name and acknowledge patterns and processes in meaning, there are in fact multiple sub-levels. In Reddy’s case, there is a folk level and a scientific level by means of which the systematic occlusions in the folk level of self-understanding are revealed.

So, we have these two principal levels of operation of grammar, the unacknowledged but nevertheless powerfully efficacious grammar in everyday life at a first level, and explicit acknowledgments of the presence of this grammar, across a scale of increasing abstraction from folk self-representation to systematic observation and conceptualization that might warrant the term “science.”

These two levels Michael Halliday^§MS0.3a wants to call “grammar” and “grammatics,” to make the distinction abundantly clear.⁸⁹ Grammar is our practice. Grammatics is its explicit naming and explanation. Between everyday self-reflections on the processes and patterns of meaning and the convoluted intricacies of formalized representations of these meanings in the various branches of linguistics (lexis, syntax, pragmatics, semantics), then even more abstractly in formal logic, computer science, and semiotics, there are numerous middle spaces.

One such space is a “grammatics” for language study in schools. This needs to be technical enough to render usable insights for learners and to provide teachers with conceptual tools for their instructional trade. In the words of Mary Macken and her co-authors, teachers need to turn the conceptual apparatus of “knowledge about” meaning into the practical capacities of “know-how.”⁹⁰

We started this journey with Mary Macken, Gunther Kress, Jim Martin, and Joan Rothery, attempting to translate Hallidayian linguistics – impractically over-complicated for children, and quite unnecessarily so for the purposes of pedagogy – into a program for the teaching of writing.⁹¹ Our overarching frame was the notion of “genre,” or different kinds of text structure for different social purposes.⁹²

We’re not going to mark the “grammatics” distinction with a special term, in part because the borderline between grammar as nameable patterns of meaning and conscious naming of the patterns is blurred. It’s hard to tell where thinking in patterns ends and thinking about the patterns begins. Also, there is a succession of steps, where in a first step, reflection on meaning is practically inseparable from the activity of meaning, even in folk meaning; to more formalized and institutionalized practices in media and teaching; to, at another extreme, the arcane intricacies of academic specialisms. It’s all grammar, as object and reflection.

But why take this journey between object and reflection, why travel this distance, however far? Our answer is in the usefully insightful processes of identifying deeper meanings which may cast doubt on immediate impressions or folk understandings. The world, at first glance, does seem flat. Inequalities, at first glance, do seem normal. Communication, at first glance, does seem to be a conduit for meaning.

Occluding ideologies may seem to speak truth to the practical reality. But when you look carefully, things are more complex than they at first seem. We need to uncover the complexities in order to develop a truer realization. This is one reason why we might do grammar, to uncover the less immediately obvious, more complex and deeper truths.

However, now we encounter a paradox. For every moment when grammars uncover complexity, they can also simplify things for us. Their generalizations about meaning encompass multiple instances, and are potentially transferable to instances yet to be encountered or possibly encounterable. This also makes them helpful. Such reflections might prompt us to conceive meanings that are possible but, for the moment at least, purely imaginary.

This makes grammar in our broad sense the basis for creativity that extends the bounds of human possibility. The design concepts that architects, or writers, or artists bring to bear in their work allow them to create new buildings, or writings, or artworks. They facilitate knowledge transfer and scaffold creativity.

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⁸⁷ Michael J. Reddy, 1993, “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language,” pp. 164–201 in Metaphor and Thought, edited by A. Ortony, Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–197; 177.

⁸⁸ Ibid., p. 186.

⁸⁹ M.A.K. Halliday, 1996 [2002], “On Grammar and Grammatics,” in On Grammar, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Volume 1, edited by J.J. Webster, London, UK: Continuum.

⁹⁰ Mary Macken-Horarik, Kristina Love, and Len Unsworth, 2011, “A Grammatics ‘Good Enough’ for School English in the 21st Century: Four Challenges in Realising the Potential,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 34(1):9–23, p. 11.

⁹¹ Mary Macken, Mary Kalantzis, Gunther Kress, Jim Martin, Bill Cope, and Joan Rothery, 1990d, A Genre-Based Approach to Teaching Writing,Years 3–6, Book 1: Introduction, Sydney, AU: Directorate of Studies, N.S.W. Department of Education; 1990c, A Genre-Based Approach to Teaching Writing, Years 3–6, Book 2: Factual Writing: A Teaching Unit Based on Reports About Sea Mammals, Sydney, AU: Directorate of Studies, N.S.W. Department of Education; 1990b, A Genre-Based Approach to Teaching Writing,Years 3–6, Book 3: Writing Stories: A Teaching Unit Based on Narratives About Fairy Tales, Sydney, AU: Directorate of Studies, N.S.W. Department of Education; 1990a, A Genre-Based Approach to Teaching Writing, Years 3–6, Book 4: The Theory and Practice of Genre-Based Writing, Sydney, AU: Directorate of Studies, N.S.W. Department of Education.

⁹² Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds., 1993, The Powers of Literacy: Genre Approaches to Teaching Writing, London, UK: Falmer Press and Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 55-58. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Michael Reddy’s "Conduit Metaphor" §MS0.4b