Sunday 25 June 2017

Rebranding Speech Function As Negotiation

Martin & Rose (2007: 21):
Negotiation
The key resources here are for exchanging roles as an interaction unfolds, for example by asking a question and answering it, or demanding a service and complying with the command. Here one speaker demands information with a question, and the other responds with a statement:
Sannie: Are you leaving?
Coetzee: - Of course I'm leaving.
Next a father demands a service with a command, and his son complies:
Hendrik: Ernest, get those snœk [a kind of fish],
Ernest: - (Ernest proceeds to do so.)


Blogger Comments:

Martin's discourse semantic system of negotiation is a rebranding of Halliday's semantic system of speech function.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 135):
These two variables [speech rôle and commodity], when taken together, define the four primary speech functions of offer, command, statement and question. These, in turn, are matched by a set of desired responses: accepting an offer, carrying out a command, acknowledging a statement and answering a question.

Sunday 18 June 2017

Misrepresenting Writing Pedagogy As Linguistic Theory

Martin & Rose (2007: 20-1):
Periodicity (the rhythm of discourse)
Here we’re concerned with information flow: the way in which meanings are organised so that readers can process phases of meaning. Helena for example doesn’t launch straight into her story by telling us she met a young man. To begin, she lets us know that she’s going to tell a story about a teenage farm girl in Eastern Free State:
My story begins in my late teenage years as a farm girl in the Bethlehem district of Eastern Free State.
And Tutu himself provided us with some more background to this story as he introduces it:
The South Africa Broadcasting Corporation's radio team covering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission received a letter from a woman calling herself Helena (she wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals) who lived in the eastern province of Mpumalanga. They broadcast substantial extracts.
This means that by the time Helena begins we know what to expect — which genre (a story), and something about where and when it took place and who was involved. This kind of predictability is absolutely critical for digesting information, and we need to look carefully at the ways in which texts tell us what’s coming, alongside reminding us where we’ve been. Helena for example is just as clear about where her story ends:
I end with a few lines that my wasted vulture said to me one night
Here she lets us know that the predictions that helped us through the story are closing down, and that a transition to something different is coming, in this case a big hop back to Tutu’s argument. We use the term periodicity for these resources because they organise texts as waves of information; we surf the waves, taking a look back and forward on crests of informational prominence, so that we can glide smoothly through the troughs on the flow of meanings we expect.

Blogger Comments:

The system of periodicity — based on Martin (1992) but inconsistent with it, as previously explained here — is writing pedagogy misrepresented as linguistic theory.  Its concern is that of the
  • introductory paragraph, rebranded as macro-Theme,
  • topic sentence, rebranded as hyper-Theme,
  • paragraph summary, rebranded as hyper-New, and
  • text summary, rebranded as macro-New.

Sunday 11 June 2017

Rebranding A Misunderstanding Of Grammatical Reference As Discourse Identification

Martin & Rose (2007: 20):
Identification (concerned with tracking people and things)
Helena’s narrative focuses on the two loves of her life and the way their violation of human rights destroyed their humanity. Her first love is introduced as a young man, and his identity is then kept track of using the pronouns his and he:
As an eighteen-year-old, I met a young man in his twenties. He was working in a top security structure.
Years later Helena meets him once again, and he is reintroduced as my first love, to distinguish him from the other men in her life:
More than a year ago, I met my first love again through a good friend.
The key English resources here are indefinite reference (a) to introduce the young man, pronouns to maintain his identity (his, he, my) and comparison (first) to distinguish him from Helena’s second love:


discourse functions
wording
A young man
presenting a participant
indefinite reference
his twenties
tracking a participant
pronoun
he
tracking a participant
pronoun
my first love
comparing participants
pronoun, ordinal number

Blogger Comments:

[1] Martin's system of identification is presented as 'reference as semantic choice' (Martin 1992: 93).  However, as demonstrated here, it confuses the system of reference (the means of referring) with the instantial referents ("the people and things tracked" in a text).  This confusion of grammatical cohesion is then rebranded as discourse semantics, without demonstrating how it constitutes a higher level of symbolic abstraction (a higher stratum) than lexicogrammar.

[2] Trivially, his is here a possessive adjective, not a pronoun.  An example of his as a possessive pronoun is the mistake was his, where it stands for a noun.

[3] The indefinite article, as the name suggests, serves no referential function.

[4] From the perspective of SFL theory, the inclusion of young man and love here confuses cohesive reference (textual metafunction) with the referents — participants (experiential metafunction).

[5] In SFL theory, ordinatives do not function as comparative reference items.  Their function is structural, rather than cohesive.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 374, 375):
The Numerative element indicates some numerical feature of the particular subset of the Thing: either quantity or order, either exact or inexact. … The ordering Numeratives (or ‘ordinatives’) specify either an exact place in order (ordinal numerals, e.g. the second train) or an inexact place (e.g. a subsequent train);
[6] This is inconsistent with Martin (1992), where the most general options are [presenting] vs [presuming].  Here 'tracking' is used both, as a replacement for the general feature [presuming], and as the general function of the system, as in the title above.  That is, it is used, inconsistently, as both superordinate and hyponym.

[7] This confusion of grammatical function (reference) and classes of grammatical form (pronoun, ordinal number) underplays the grammatical contribution to semogenesis here, thereby giving the false impression that the 'discourse functions' proposed here are not just rebrandings of (misunderstood) grammatical cohesion.

Sunday 4 June 2017

Rebranding Lexicogrammar As Discourse Semantics

Martin & Rose (2007: 19):
Conjunction (inter-connections between processes)
Later in the narrative Helena comments on her understanding of the struggle against apartheid, outlining the conditions under which she herself would have joined the struggle:
I finally understand what the struggle was really about. I would have done the same had I been denied everything. If my life, that of my children and my parents was strangled with legislation, if I had to watch how white people became dissatisfied with the best and still wanted better and got it.
To demonstrate her understanding she places herself in victims’ shoes, outlining the conditions under which she would have done the same. The key resources here for establishing conditions are conditional conjunctions If…, If…, and the Subject-verb inversion had I… . These realisations serve to link Helena’s intended action I would have done the same, with the conditions under which she would have done so, had I been…, If my life…, If I had to watch:
I would have done the same



discourse function
wording (grammar)
had I been denied everything
condition
Subject-verb inversion
If my life … was strangled with legislation.
condition
conjunction
If I had to watch how white people became dissatisfied …
condition
conjunction



Blogger Comments:

[1] As previously explained, relations between processes are also modelled by sequences, in the experiential discourse semantic system of ideation.

[2] This is misleading, since it ascribes the conditional relation that obtains in both the semantics and lexicogrammar to the discourse semantic stratum only.

[3] This reductive account of the grammatical realisation of condition mixes grammatical function at clause rank (Subject) with classes of grammatical form at word rank (verb, conjunction).