Sunday 12 February 2017

Misrepresenting The Complementarity Of Grammarian & Discourse Analyst

Martin & Rose (2007: 4):
Grammarians are particularly interested in types of clauses and their elements. But texts are usually bigger than single clauses, so a discourse analyst has more to worry about than a grammarian (expanded horizons). By the same token, cultures manifest themselves through a myriad of texts, and social theorists are more interested in how social contexts are related to one another than in how they are internally organised as texts (global horizons). Discourse analysis employs the tools of grammarians to identify the roles of wordings in passages of text, and employs the tools of social theorists to explain why they make the meanings they do.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misrepresents grammarians as text linguists whose interests are limited to lexicogrammar, and within the grammar, to clause structure.  This is misleading on several counts.  On the one hand, playing the rôle of a grammarian means being concerned with the system, rather than the instance, and being concerned with both content strata, semantics and lexicogrammar, rather than just the grammar. On the other hand, the grammar also includes the non-structural resources of cohesion, which obtain throughout a given text.

[2] The claim here is that a discourse analyst — in the sense of a text linguist concerned with the stratum of (discourse) semantics — has "more to worry about" ("expanded horizons") than the caricature of a grammarian as a text linguist who is only concerned clause structure.

[3] Again, the culture as a semiotic system is rebranded as the social system.

[4] The claim here is that discourse analysis employs the tools of social theorists to explain why wordings in passages of text make the meanings they do.  If any uses of any social theory appear in Martin & Rose (2007), they will be labelled as such, as a way of identifying the extent to which social theories are employed.

No comments:

Post a Comment