Misrepresenting Cohesive Conjunction As A Misunderstanding Of Stratal Relations

Martin & Rose (2007: 6):

As the meaning of the South African flag is more than the sum of its shapes and colours, so too is discourse more than the sum of its wordings, and culture more than the sum of its texts.  For example, here’s part of the story we’ll be working on later. The narrator, Helena, is talking about separating from her first love:

Then one day he said he was going on a 'trip'. 'We won't see each other again.., maybe never ever again.' I was torn to pieces.

The last clause here, I was torn to pieces, tells us how Helena felt; but because of the way meaning unfolds through the discourse phases of ‘meeting’, ‘description and ‘leaving’ it also tells us why she felt upset; there’s an explanation going on which transcends the meaning of the individual clauses. Taken one by one, each clause describes what happened; taken together they explain it.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misrepresents the relation between strata as the higher stratum being "more than the sum of" elements on the lower stratum.  That is, it misrepresents two different levels of symbolic abstraction as a single level of abstraction organised in terms of composition.  In terms of the fractal types of expansion and projection, this misrepresents elaboration (intensive identity) as extension.

Martin & Rose:

discourse (semantics)	is	more than the sum of its wordings
Carrier	Process: relational: attributive	Attribute

SFL:

meaning (semantics)	is realised	by wording (lexicogrammar)
Value	Process: relational: identifying	Token

[2] In the story text, there is an implicit conjunctive relation of cause: result between the clause complex 'We won't see each other again.., maybe never ever again' and the following clause I was torn to pieces.  This is a type of cohesion, a non-structural resource of the textual metafunction on the stratum of lexicogrammar.  Martin & Rose miss this implicit grammatical relation of cause, and instead attribute it to 'the way meaning unfolds' through 'discourse phases' — as a way of exemplifying their misinterpretation of stratal relations as "more than the sum of".