Sunday 5 February 2017

Rebranding Strata And Misrepresenting Stratification

Martin & Rose (2007: 4):
The focus of this book is on the analysis of discourse. In SFL, discourse analysis interfaces with the analysis of grammar and the analysis of social activity, somewhere between the work of grammarians on the one hand and social theorists on the other. This has partly to do with the size of what we’re looking at; texts are bigger than a clause and smaller than a culture.

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[1] This rebrands the stratum of semantics as 'discourse'. In SFL, discourse refers to 'the patterned forms of wording that constitute meaningful semiotic contexts' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 512). For Halliday (2008: 78), discourse and text are two angles on the same phenomenon:
“discourse” is text that is being viewed in its sociocultural context, while “text” is discourse that is being viewed as a process of language.
[2] This reduces the stratum of context to 'social activity'. In SFL, context refers to the culture conceived as a semiotic system, as it is realised in language and its attendant semiotic systems.

[3] This misrepresents SFL grammarians as linguists who focus only on the stratum of lexicogrammar and on the instance pole of the cline of instantiation.  For Halliday (2008: 85), 'grammarian' is the rôle played by a linguist when concerned with both semantics and grammar, and with the system pole of the cline of instantiation.

[4] This presents the size of the biggest units of content strata as a principle on which the stratification hierarchy is organised — continuing the misunderstanding in Martin (1992: 496). Strictly, the stratification hierarchy is organised on the basis of symbolic abstraction — an intensive identifying relation — only.

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