Working With Discourse: Meaning Beyond The Clause (Martin & Rose, 2007)
A Discourse Analysis Of The Publication That Martin Refers To As "English Text For Dummies"
Thursday, 21 November 2024
Sunday, 6 June 2021
The People's Front Of Systemics
Martin & Rose (2007: 332):
We are now all confronted with the urgency of tackling head-on the ‘growthist’ ideology of global capitalism that is fuelling the greenhouse effect. We can’t be sure how interventions of this order will focus functional linguistics — but as the comrades of our youth once took Bob Dylan’s words to heart, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. As culpable weather-makers, it is time to re-imagine the possibilities of our craft, and to realise them as social action.
Friday, 4 June 2021
Perception Management
Martin & Rose (2007: 332):
Our experience is that the most influential factor shaping the direction of research is what we are developing our linguistics for. For us, as participants in the Sydney School, the development of discourse semantics out of cohesion, the emergence of genre theory and appraisal analysis, and the current interest in intermodality, have all been very much tied up with our concern with redistributing the literacy resources of western culture to the peoples who have historically been subjugated by them. Our aim has never been to promote a particular ideology, but simply to offer what we know about these language resources, so that people could redeploy them as they choose. This remains a central concern of our work and a major application in educational contexts, that continues to grow internationally, as we illustrated with David’s South African lesson in Chapter 7. But as far as we can see these peoples, be they working class, indigenous minorities, or third world nations, will have increasingly limited opportunities for such redeployment given current projections for global warming. This creates a new and pressing agenda for socially responsible linguistics.
To this point in time we have been primarily concerned, like the authors we have studied in this book, with subverting what Halliday (1993) has called the 'lordism' of the Eurasian culture bloc.
Throughout this long development, from 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them. With this difference, others have been associated. The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be, in greater or lesser degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically. They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that ‘nobility’ or ‘heroism’ is to be preferred. They have had a sympathy with irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion. The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists, have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion. This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of what we recognise as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought. In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.
His communion with Mandela, at such a distance in so many respects …
By repeatedly bathing in the reflected glory of genuine activists for social justice, through the inclusion of their texts in his publications, Martin has successfully misrepresented himself as a fellow activist. For a reality check, see Jim Martin "Honouring" The Late Ruqaiya Hasan.
[4] This is misleading, because it is untrue. Halliday (1993) makes no mention of "the lordism of the Eurasian culture bloc". Rather, his term 'lordism' refers to the notion of the uniqueness of the human species as the lords of creation, as an evolved destructive feature of our daily language. Halliday (2003 [1993]: 225-6):
So what are the lessons here for us as applied (or "applying") linguists? I tried to suggest in the paper I gave at the World Congress two years ago that the concept of doing applied linguistics means, among other things, that one is involved in the semiotic history of the culture. The point I was making there was that our dominant grammars lock us in to a framework of beliefs that may at one time, when they first evolved in language, have been functional, and beneficial to survival, but that have now become inimical to survival and harshly dysfunctional: the motifs of bigger and better (all 'growth' is positively loaded), of the uniqueness of the human species as lords of creation, the passivity of inanimate nature, the unboundedness of natural resources like water and air, and so on. These are not features of technical languages; they are aspects of our most unconscious, deeply installed, everyday common-sense grammar; and they are now very destructive, at a time when we have to learn to break the rhythm of endless growth, to identify ourselves with other species as part of a living whole, and to recognise that our planet is not a repository of infinite wealth and abundance. And I see this as an applied linguistic concern: to draw attention to these features of our daily language, its growthism and its lordism; and perhaps even to explore the possibility of design, though this will be forbiddingly hard to make succeed.
Tuesday, 1 June 2021
Misleading Through Misrepresentations, Misunderstandings And A Logical Fallacy
From our own vantage point, there have been some interesting shifts of focus in discourse analysis over the four decades of Jim’s involvement and two decades of David’s. In the 1970s, cohesion was the favoured episteme, as grammarians cast their gaze outwards beyond the clause. In the 1980s it was genre that came to the fore, fostered in important respects by work on literacy development in the Sydney School, English for Academic Purposes and New Rhetoric traditions (Hyon 1996). The 1990s saw the emergence of evaluation as a major theme, as analysts developed models of attitude in functional and corpus linguistics (Hunston and Thompson 2000, Martin and Macken-Horarik 2003). Currently we are in the midst of a surge of interest in multimodal discourse analysis, inspired by the ground-breaking work of Kress and van Leeuwen (1996/2006, 2001) on images. Looking ahead, we can probably expect an emerging rapprochement between qualitative and quantitative approaches to text analysis, depending on the kinds of technology that can be brought to bear in large-scale studies of many and longer texts. Just how this will tend to focus discourse analysis epistemes is harder to predict. Our own approach, in this book and beyond, contrasts strikingly with current trends, which for operational reasons (or worse) tend to elide discourse semantics in favour of word counts, collocations and colligations — as if texts where random sequences of words, phases or clauses. As analysis technologies develop, we need to ensure these trends do not become entrenched in the field in the long term.
A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text… the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.
Sunday, 30 May 2021
Problems With The System Of Image-Text Relations
Martin & Rose (2007: 329, 333n):
Image-text relations include expansion or projection, boundary strength and identification. These … options in image-text relations in Figure 9.14.⁹
⁹ We have used the term IMAGE-TEXT BOUNDARY whereas Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) use the term ‘framing’ for boundary strength, which conflicts with Bernstein’s (1971, 1996) use of ‘framing’ for control within a context.
Friday, 28 May 2021
Problems With The System Of Image Textual Organisation
In sum, images and layouts are organised by their left-right, top-down and centre-margin axes, and by the relative salience of their elements. … These options in textual organisation are set out in Figure 9.13. … ⁹
⁹ Kress and van Leeuwen’s terms Given and New derive from Halliday’s description of the linguistic system of INFORMATION (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). We have generalised their Given-New, Ideal-Real and Centre-Margin contrasts as options in INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION.
The term ‘salience’ is used by Kress and van Leeuwen, but the SALIENCE values of high/neutral/low are our own.
Tuesday, 25 May 2021
Enhancing Image-Text Relations
Martin & Rose (2007: 323, 328-9):
The left-right axis of the page, the vectors in the inauguration-flag image, and its relations with preceding text, combine to construct an indexical temporal sequence. The gaze of people in the crowd is up to the stage and across to the left. Implicit in these gazes is the inauguration ceremony they are watching, and its central protagonist, Mandela. And their gaze is also towards Mandela’s life story that lies to the left of the image. These vectors realise implicit identification, all pointing anaphorically to ‘him’, Mandela. But Mandela himself is not in the picture. Counterbalancing this up and leftward gaze is the powerful vector in the flag, which points down and right towards the people who surround it, cataphorically identifying ‘them’. In sum, the layout and images indexically construe a complex activity sequence, in which not only apartheid belongs to the past, but also the struggle against it, and Mandela’s own life story. In contrast the future belongs to the people.
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is misleading, because it is not true. The two photographs construe the same temporal location — that of the inauguration of Mandela as President — but the text, an excerpt from the Meaning of Freedom text (reproduced below) is not located in time relative to the inauguration.
Sunday, 23 May 2021
Elaborating Image-Text Relations
Martin & Rose (2007: 323, 328):
In the horizontal triptych, image-text relations are both elaborating and enhancing. The image of the boy restates the words that begin Mandela’s story, I was not born with a hunger to be free . . . It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion ... that I began to hunger for it. The analogy with the text is signalled by the weak image-text boundary, with the photo intruding into the text. In contrast, the image of the inauguration is more strongly bounded from Mandela’s story, and Mandela himself is noticeably absent from the photo, replaced by the people of South Africa under the flag of their new nation. So this image is clearly marked off from the text as distinct new information.
Blogger Comments:
[1] As previously noted, the logico-semantic relations of elaboration and enhancement do not feature in Martin's model of logical discourse semantics, conjunction, because it is a rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's (1976) model of cohesive conjunction, which was written before they had formulated the most general categories of logical relations.
[2] To be clear, this is manifestly untrue. The image is a photograph of a boy at Mandela's inauguration as President. As such, it does not restate Mandela's words about himself. This can be demonstrated by presenting the photograph to someone and asking them what it "states".
[3] To be clear, this is a bare assertion, unsupported by argument as to why a "weak image-text boundary" should represent a relation of analogy, rather than anything else, or why a "strong image-text boundary" should not represent a relation of analogy. Moreover, it is not true that the image "intrudes" into the text, since there is no overlap of image with text. Instead, the text wraps around the image, each remaining distinct from each other.
[4] To be clear, this is bare assertion, unsupported by argument as why this image-text boundary is "more strongly bounded" than the other. On the contrary, both images are unframed, and both images are separate from the texts adjacent to them. This would suggest that the image-text boundaries are the same for both images.
[5] To be clear, Mandela is absent from both photographs. The boy depicted in the left-hand photograph is not Mandela, but a member of the crowd at Mandela's inauguration as President. Accordingly, Mandela has not been replaced in the right-hand photograph.
[6] To be clear, this conclusion is not validated by the propositions that precede it; see [4] and [5].
Friday, 21 May 2021
The Vertical Textual Organisation Of Layout: Ideal/Real
Martin & Rose (2007: 323, 328):
The semantic contrast between the top and bottom texts is between the historical origins of apartheid (Ideal) and their outcomes in the recent past and present (Real); the text above deals with both the inauguration of a new republic and erection of the former apartheid regime; the text below notes the effects on people, first of the old regime (harsh and inhumane), and then of the new (respect for the rights and freedoms of all peoples). The photo of the boy mediates this temporal succession: the top-bottom layout construes the apartheid regime as preceding the boy’s protest, and its overturning as following his protest. The relatively high salience of the image has the effect of emphasising the causative role of the people’s defiance, represented by the boy, in overturning the inhumane regime. This is a reading of the texts enhancing the image, but as we discussed above for appraisal, the boy’s tenacity can also be read as determination for the future, which is elaborated by the words in the text below (overturned forever).
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, "the top and bottom texts" are one text, or more properly, an excerpt of one text, interrupted by the photograph of a boy in the crowd at Mandela's inauguration as President.
Tuesday, 18 May 2021
The Horizontal Textual Organisation Of Layout: Given/New
Martin & Rose (2007: 323, 328):
In the horizontal triptych on pages 202-3, the photo of the boy is Given and that of the inauguration is New. The photos are more salient than the texts by virtue of their colour intensity and Given-New positions, with the inauguration image by far most salient. Our eye is attracted first to this large picture, then back to the photo of the boy, and then to the texts to explain the images for us. Within the left-hand vertical triptych, the image of the boy is more salient than the marginal texts above and below him, due to its size, colour and centrality. As a result we expect these texts to expand on the meaning of the photograph, and indeed they do, with enhancement.
Blogger Comments:
- Given^New
- Given^New^Given
- New^Given
- New
Sunday, 16 May 2021
Image-Text Relations
Martin & Rose (2007: 327-8, 333n):
Image-text relations include their logical relations, the boundaries between text and image, and identification. Logical relationships can be mapped in terms of expansion or projection, as we described for texts in macrogenres in Chapter 8. For example, images and texts can restate, specify or summarise each other (elaborating), they can be added to each other (extending), or explain or follow each other in time (enhancing). Images can also project wordings as thought or speech bubbles, and the reverse is also possible. Boundaries between image and text may be weak or strong: images may intrude into text, and text may overlap images, or there may be strong demarcation. And finally elements of images may be identified explicitly in accompanying texts (e.g. in captions), and elements of text or other images may be referred to in accompanying images, for example by vectors that point to them.⁸
⁸ Kress and van Leeuwen draw attention to vectors, which can be constructed through the gaze of participants or lines formed by the position of people and things. Whereas they interpret vectors in ideational terms, its seems to us that vectors are realisational strategies for ideational or textual functions.
Blogger Comments:
[1] Importantly, and not acknowledged here, these logical and identification relations obtain at the level of content, whereas the text-image boundary relations obtain at the level of expression.
[2] To be clear, the authors' model of logical discourse semantics, the system of conjunction (now rebranded 'connexion'), does not use the general category 'expansion', and 'projection' is entirely absent. This is because Martin's model is his rebranding of cohesive conjunction (Halliday & Hasan 1976), in which the general category of expansion had not yet been theorised by Halliday, and in which projection plays no cohesive function.
[3] To be clear, this would involve instances like he said <image>, and she thought <image>.
[4] To be clear, as previously demonstrated in the examination of Chapter 5, the authors' model of identification is a confusion of 'reference' in the textually cohesive sense, and 'reference' in the ideational sense of denotation. It will be seen that this misunderstanding is maintained in their discussion of image-text relations.
Friday, 14 May 2021
Problems With The Model Of Textual Organisation Of Images
To interpret the semantic relations of images to texts in the layout of pages 202-3, we need to introduce several dimensions of textual organisation and image-text relations. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) suggest two forms of textual organisation for images, ‘polarised’ and ‘centred’. On the one hand there is polarisation along horizontal and/or vertical axes. For images that are horizontally polarised, the lefthand side is glossed as Given and the right as New — organisation comparable to that outlined by Halliday for the English clause, as introduced in Chapter 6 above. For vertically polarised images Kress and van Leeuwen suggest the terms Ideal and Real, where Ideal may be characterised as a more general or abstract category, and Real as more specific or concrete. Alternatively, images may be organised around a Centre and Margin principle, with Centre the nucleus of information on which marginal elements depend. These axes are schematised in Figure 9.12.
A further textual dimension is the relative salience of elements in an image or page layout that draws readers’ attention to one element before another. Salience may be indicated by a number of factors, including size, colour intensity or the strength of vectors, as well as centre-margin, left-right, top-down positions.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, for Halliday, Given and New are elements of the information unit, not the clause.
[2] To be clear, 'ideal' and 'real' are ideational categories, not textual categories. That is, Martin & Rose follow Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) in mistaking a claim about ideational organisation for textual organisation.
[3] To be clear, the functionality of this problematic model can be tested by applying it to the following image:
- the 'New World' (western hemisphere) is Given, whereas the 'Old World' (eastern hemisphere) is New;
- the northern hemisphere as Ideal, whereas the southern hemisphere is Real; and
- the Mediterranean region is Centre, whereas all else is Margin.
- North America is Given and Ideal;
- South America is Given and Real;
- Eurasia is New and Ideal;
- Australasia is New and Real;
- Africa is Marginal and neither Given nor New.
Tuesday, 11 May 2021
Problems With The System Of Interpersonal Meanings In Images
Martin & Rose (2007: 326, 327):
In sum, the two photos illustrate options in attitude, engagement and graduation, set out in Figure 9.11.
- The authors' application of affect misrepresented ideational construals of emotion as interpersonal assessments using emotion (affect).
- The authors' application of appreciation confused ideational construals in a photograph with the appreciation of these by a viewer (the authors).
- The authors' application of judgement involved reconstruing the boy in a photograph as a metaphor for Nelson Mandela, whom the authors judged as tenacious, and then incongruously transferring that judgement to the boy.
- in exemplifying the graduation of appreciation, the authors confused scalable ideational qualities with the degree of their appreciation of them, and mistook textual prominence for interpersonal graduation, and
- in exemplifying the graduation of judgement, the authors interpreted the hand shape of the boy in a photograph as intensifying the tenacity they attributed to Mandela; see [1] above.
Sunday, 9 May 2021
Applying Appreciation, Graduation And Engagement To The Inauguration-Flag Photograph
Martin & Rose (2007: 326, 327):
On the other hand the inauguration-flag photo invokes positive appreciation, including aspects of reaction, composition and valuation. With respect to terms exemplified in Table 2.10, the inauguration crowd appears imposing, exciting and dramatic, as does the huge flag, whose composition is both complex and unified, and which carries values that are at once profound, innovative and enduring. These values are amplified by the size and centrality of the flag, and the intensity of its colours. With respect to engagement, the people are facing directly away from the viewer, so we are obliquely invited to enter the scene in the direction they are facing.
Friday, 7 May 2021
Misapplying A Misrepresentation Of Engagement To A Photograph
Martin & Rose (2007: 326):
As the boy directly faces the viewer, his defiance/celebration engages us directly, but at the same time his oblique gaze averts a potentially confronting challenge to the viewer. The message is not that I’m defying you, but is rather an invitation to join us in the victory over injustice.
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is misleading, because the boy does not directly face the viewer. His face is oriented to the left and down, relative to the viewer, his eyes further to the left, and his body tilts down and faces to the right of the viewer.
[2] To be clear, the authors' claim that the boy is expressing defiance is inconsistent both with the occasion, the inauguration of Mandela as President, and with other photographs of children purported to depict defiance, such as:
[3] To be clear, as previously observed, this is 'engagement' in the sense of Kress & van Leeuwen (1996), but misrepresented by Martin & Rose as 'engagement' in the appraisal sense.
Tuesday, 4 May 2021
Applying Judgement And Graduation To A Photograph
Martin & Rose (2007: 326):
In APPRAISAL terms, the photo of the boy invokes a positive judgement of tenacity that must be read in relation to the texts that surround him. The protest against the regime construed by his raised fist reflects the tenacious resistance of Mandela and his comrades as recounted in the adjacent Freedom text. The fist can then be read as amplifying his tenacity to the level of defiance (more so than if he had waved or saluted with an open hand). This is a retrospective reading of his tenacity as defiance against the old regime; on the other hand his tenacity can also be read prospectively as youthful determination in the nation’s hopes for the future. These are complementary readings as protest against the regime vs celebration of its overthrow, that are expanded by the texts above and below the photo — image-text relations that are discussed in the following section.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, Martin & Rose are not identifying the meaning created by either the photographer or the boy in the photograph, but by specific viewers of the photograph (themselves); see further below.
[2] To be clear, if the meaning of the image depends on the accompanying text, then the meaning is made by both semiotic systems, not by the image alone.
[3] To be clear, here Martin & Rose construe three levels of meaning within the image:
- the tenacious resistance of Mandela and his comrades, realised by
- the protest against the regime, realised by
- his raised fist.
More specifically, the middle level of meaning, the protest against the regime, is metaphorically encoded by reference to the lowest level, his raised fist, and the highest level, the tenacious resistance of Mandela and his comrades, is metaphorically decoded by reference to the middle level, the protest against the regime.
That is, the judgement of tenacity in this image of a boy is made on Mandela and his comrades by Martin & Rose.
[4] To be clear, here Martin & Rose have become confused by their levels of abstraction and incongruously transferred their judgement of the tenacity from Mandela and his comrades to the boy ('his tenacity') in the photograph. This is analogous to transferring a judgement of a movie character to the actor playing the rôle. With this confusion, they claim, without supporting argument, that the shape of the boy's hand is an amplification of his tenacity to the level of defiance, despite the fact that 'tenacity' means persistence, whereas 'defiance' means resistance.
[5] To be clear, here again Martin & Rose misattribute the tenacity they have ascribed to Mandela and his comrades to the boy ('his tenacity') in the photograph, and decode his tenacity by reference to youthful determination in the nation's hope for the future.
A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text … the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.
[7] To be clear, as can be seen below, the texts above and below the photograph of the boy (p324) do not expand the meanings of the photograph, as interpreted by Martin & Rose:
'regimes' above photo of young boyOn the day of the inauguration I was overwhelmed with a sense of history. In the first decade of the twentieth century, a few years after the bitter Anglo-Boer war and before my own birth, the white-skinned peoples of South Africa patched up their differences and erected a system of racial domination against the dark-skinned peoples of their own land.'effects' below photo of young boyThe structure they created formed the basis of one of the harshest, most inhumane, societies the world has ever known. Now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, and my own eighth decade as a man, that system has been overturned forever and replaced by one that recognised the rights and freedoms of all peoples regardless of the colour of their skin. (Mandela 1996: 202)
Sunday, 2 May 2021
Applying Appraisal Theory To Images
In terms of APPRAISAL developed in Chapter 2, images can inscribe feelings, for example with an image of a person crying or smiling, or invoke them with images that we respond to emotionally; they can invoke appreciation of things by the relative attractiveness of the object or scene presented; and they can invoke judgements of people, by means such as their activity, stance or facial expression. Engagement with the viewer can also be varied in images, for example by the gaze of depicted people looking directly at the viewer, obliquely to one side, or directly away from the viewer into the image. And of course feelings, appreciation and judgement can also be amplified and diminished.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, this is a basic misunderstanding that pervades work on APPRAISAL. The AFFECT system of APPRAISAL is concerned with interpersonal assessment through emotion, not with the ideational construal of emotion. The depiction of a person crying or smiling is an ideational construal of behavioural processes that manifest states of consciousness (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 302).
[2] To be clear, creating an image that induces an emotional response in the viewer is not a variation of creating an image that depicts an interpersonal assessment through emotion.
[3] To be clear, this blurs the distinction between an appreciative assessment made by the creator of an image and feelings of appreciation induced in a viewer by an image. This is analogous to blurring the distinction between what a speaker says and the reaction of the addressee to what is said.
[4] Again, this blurs the distinction between a judgemental assessment made by the creator of an image and judgements induced in a viewer by an image. Again, this is analogous to blurring the distinction between what a speaker says and the reaction of the addressee to what is said.
[Engagement] is concerned with the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers adopt a stance towards to the value positions being referenced by the text and with respect to those they address … the different possibilities for this stance-taking which are made available by the language, … the rhetorical effects associated with these various positionings, and … what is at stake when one stance is chosen over another.
Martin & Rose, on the other hand, here misinterpret engagement as (metaphorically) realised by the behavioural stance of an entity of an image (metaphenomenon) relative to a viewer of the image (phenomenon). That is, this is 'engagement' in the sense of Kress & van Leeuwen (1996), but misrepresented by the authors as 'engagement' in the sense of Appraisal Theory.
Friday, 30 April 2021
Problems With The System Network Of Ideational Meanings In Images
Martin & Rose (2007: 325):
A very general outline of options for ideational meanings in images is given in Figure 9.10.
Blogger Comments:
As previously demonstrated, these systems model textual meaning, not ideational meaning. On the one hand, it is the textual metafunction that focuses on phenomena, and on the other hand, it is the textual metafunction at the level of context, mode, that is distinguishes the channel of 'construal'. That is, the authors' network is theoretically inconsistent in terms of both metafunction and plane of symbolic abstraction.
With regard to the wiring of the network, the claim is that entity-focused images either classify entities (e.g. 'boy') or present them as composed of parts (eg. 'head', 'fist' etc.), but not both.
With regard to the argument on which the network is based, as previously demonstrated, Martin & Rose have not provided an instance of a complex activity, and have not provided a consistent theoretical argument for their inclusion of the term 'indexical'.
Tuesday, 27 April 2021
The Authors' Inconsistent Use Of Peirce's 'Iconic', 'Indexical' And 'Symbolic'
Beyond this is the manner in which they are construed. Photos and realistic drawings can depict entities and activities iconically; there is a direct visual relation between the image and the category it construes. In contrast, images such as flags or diagrams construe their categories symbolically; the viewer must know the symbol to recognise its meaning.
In between are images that are neither iconic nor symbolic, but indicate categories by one or more criteria; an example is the relation between the crowd, the dignitaries on the stage, and the flag, which indicate the categories of the people, their leaders and the nation by their relative positions — bottom, top and middle. In Peirce’s 1955 terms, this kind of visual construal is indexical.⁷
⁷ Previous efforts to interpret ideational and interpersonal meanings in visual images have been based on analogies with grammatical categories of process types, mood and modality (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, O’Toole 1994, Unsworth 2001) rather than discourse semantics. In keeping with the discourse oriented approach here, and to keep labels manageable, we have used the same terms as for verbal texts wherever possible. For example, where Kress and van Leeuwen use the cryptic terms ‘overt/covert’, we use ‘explicit/implicit’; and where they use polysemous terms ‘concrete/abstract’, we have found the semiotic terms ‘iconic/indexical/symbolic’ less ambiguous.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, "the manner in which they are construed" is modelled as channel, a system within MODE, the textual dimension of the context (culture); see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 34). It will be seen in the following post that Martin & Rose misconstrue this as an ideational system at the level of discourse semantics.
[2] To put this in terms of SFL Theory, for such images, whose graphic channels might be subcategorised as photographic and pictographic, there is a natural (non-arbitrary) relation between their content and expression.
[4] To put this in terms of SFL Theory, unlike the preceding characterisations of 'iconic' and 'symbolic' images, this characterisation of 'indexical' images is not concerned with a relation between content and expression, but with a relation between levels of symbolic abstraction within the content of the image:
[5] To be clear, all the terms — iconic, symbolic and indexical — derive from the semiotics of Peirce, a model that is epistemologically inconsistent with SFL Theory. Peirce (1955: 102-3):
According to the second trichotomy, a Sign may be termed an Icon, an Index, or a Symbol.
An Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not. It is true that unless there really is such an Object, the Icon does not act as a sign ; but this has nothing to do with its character as a sign. Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it.
An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object. It cannot, therefore, be a Qualisign, because qualities are whatever they are independently of anything else. In so far as the Index is affected by the Object, it necessarily has some Quality in common with the Object, and it is in respect to these that it refers to the Object. It does, therefore, involve a sort of Icon, although an Icon of a peculiar kind ; and it is not the mere resemblance of its Object, even in these respects which makes it a sign, but it is the actual modification of it by the Object.
A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object. It is thus itself a general type or law, that is, is a Legisign. As such it acts through a Replica. Not only is it general itself, but the Object to which it refers is of a general nature. Now that which is general has its being in the instances which it will determine. There must, therefore, be existent instances of what the Symbol denotes, although we must here understand by " existent," existent in the possibly imaginary universe to which the Symbol refers. The Symbol will indirectly, through the association or other law, be affected by those instances ; and thus the Symbol will involve a sort of Index, although an Index of a peculiar kind. It will not, however, be by any means true that the slight effect upon the Symbol of those instances accounts for the significant character of the Symbol.
Sunday, 25 April 2021
The Authors' Analysis Of An 'Activity-Focused' Image
Martin & Rose (2007: 323, 325):
The inauguration photo construes a simple activity, in which the crowd is looking up to the stage and across to the left, underneath a huge flag. Within this activity however, the image could also be interpreted as implicitly classifying the ordinary people in the lower foreground, separate from the dignitaries above them on the stage. The central flag can then be interpreted as mediating these categories, representing the superordinate category of the nation. The flag itself is a compositional image, in which the categories of South African peoples and histories that it symbolises are implicit. That is, the red, white and blue refer to the pre-apartheid era British flag, and black, green and yellow to the flag of the African National Congress, all converging from the past towards the future.
In sum, these photos illustrate the four ideational categories we have suggested for images: classifying or compositional entities, and simple or complex activities.
Blogger Comments:
It might be alternatively argued that the photograph is 'entity-focused', since its most salient element is the new South African flag which is highly relevant to the represented occasion. Moreover, the authors themselves gloss the image (p323) as an entity, not an activity: 'new South African flag, in the crowd, at the inauguration'.
[2] To be clear, this demonstrates the arbitrariness of the authors' framework. On the one hand, having classified the photograph as 'activity-focused', Martin & Rose demonstrate that it can be just as easily classified as 'entity-focused'. On the other hand, their interpretation of the image as classifying 'ordinary people' as lower and separate from the dignitaries 'above' runs counter to the new social equality that the occasion celebrated.
Alternatively, the photograph can be analysed, in terms of the textual metafunction, as foregrounding (highlighting) the crowd and backgrounding the dignitaries, which is more in keeping with the celebration of the liberation of the powerless from the powerful.
[3] Trivially, this mistakes meronymy for hyponymy. To be clear, 'nation' is not a superordinate ('hypernym') of 'ordinary people' or 'dignitaries' because these latter are not subtypes (elaboration: hyponymy) of 'nation'. On the other hand, 'nation' can be interpreted as comprising (extension: meronymy) both 'ordinary people' and 'dignitaries'.
[4] To be clear, unknown to Martin & Rose, in pointing out the relevance of the flag to the occasion, they have provided a cogent argument for interpreting the flag as the element under focus, and for interpreting the photograph as 'entity-focused', rather than 'activity-focused', in their framework.
[5] To be clear, Martin & Rose have not illustrated their notion of complex activities, and their simple activities were those of saluting ('entity-focused' image) and looking ('activity-focused' image). Moreover, their 'classifying' is merely the identification of a depicted entity, and 'compositional' merely acknowledges the fact that entities have parts.