Confusing Strata With Their Units

Martin & Rose (2007: 4):

What is the relation between grammar, discourse and social context? Obviously cultures aren’t just a combination of texts, and likewise texts aren’t just a combination of clauses. Social activity, discourse and grammar are different kinds of phenomena, operating at different levels of abstraction: a culture is more abstract than a text, and the meanings that make up a text are in turn more abstract than the wordings that express them. The relation between these strata is described in SFL as realisation; social contexts are realised as texts which are realised as sequences of clauses.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a rebranding of the SFL stratification hierarchy, with semantics misconstrued as discourse, and context — the culture as semiotic system — as social context, which is, in turn, equated with social activity.

[2] To be clear, in the SFL stratification hierarchy, context is realised by semantics, and semantics is realised by lexicogrammar.  Text is the highest unit on the semantic stratum, and clause is the highest unit on the lexicogrammatical stratum.

Misunderstanding And Misrepresenting Stratification

Martin & Rose (2007: 4, 5):

These two points of view on discourse are illustrated in Figure 1.2. Grammar, discourse and social activity are symbolised as a series of circles, in which discourse nestles within social activity and grammar nestles within discourse, suggesting three complementary perspectives on a single complex phenomenon. This type of diagram is often used in SFL to symbolise its evolving model of language in social context.

Blogger Comments:

[1] The inclusion of a text in the 'discourse' circle in Figure 1.2 confuses an instance (cline of instantiation) with a stratum (hierarchy of stratification).

[2] This is a rebranding of the SFL strata of lexicogrammar, semantics and context.

[3] This misinterprets the figure as a Venn diagram, and so misrepresents the organisational principle of the stratal hierarchy as one of inclusion, rather than realisation.

[4] In SFL, a 'cotangential circles' diagram represents a hierarchy of symbolic abstraction, such that higher strata are realised by lower strata.  This is a distinct dimension from the evolution of the SFL model, or indeed the evolution of language (phylogenesis).

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.

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.

Blogger Comments:

[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.