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.