Misrepresenting Judgement — And A False Dichotomy

Martin & Rose (2007: 32):

Judging people's character 

As with affect, judgements of people’s character can be positive or negative, and they may be judged explicitly or implicitly. But unlike affect, we find that judgements differ between personal judgements of admiration or criticism and moral judgements of praise or condemnation.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misrepresents the appraisal system of judgement by reducing its scope, since judgement is not simply limited to assessments of people's character, as explained here:

The attitudinal sub-system of JUDGEMENT encompasses meanings which serve to evaluate human behaviour positively and negatively by reference to a set of institutionalised norms. Thus JUDGEMENT is involved when the speaker provides an assessment of some human participant with reference to that participant's acts or dispositions … The social norms at risk with these JUDGEMENT assessments take the form of rules and regulations or of less precisely defined social expectations and systems of value. Thus, under JUDGEMENT we may assess behaviour as moral or immoral, as legal or illegal, as socially acceptable or unacceptable, as laudable or deplorable, as normal or abnormal and so on.

[2] The opposition of 'personal' vs 'moral' is a false dichotomy, since the alternatives are not mutually exclusive.  A judgement that is not 'personal' is not necessarily 'moral', and a judgement that is not 'moral' is not necessarily 'personal'.  This is very poor theorising.

Confusing Metafunctions And Misunderstanding 'Prosodic'

Martin & Rose (2007: 31):

As we can see, Helena uses a range of resources to build up a picture of her second love’s living hell, including direct expressions of emotional states and physical behaviour, and implicit expressions of emotion through extraordinary behaviour and metaphor. 

In Helena’s story these resources work together, reinforcing for example the desperation of her second love’s emotional devastation, his spiritual murder as she describes it. This accumulative effect over a phase of text reflects the ‘prosodic’ nature of attitude, and of interpersonal meaning in general. Interpersonal meanings are often realised not just locally, but tend to sprawl out and colour a passage of discourse, forming a ‘prosody’ of attitude. By looking at phases of attitude, we can explore how readers are being aligned rhetorically as a text unfolds; we’ll return to this issue of aligning the reader below.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Martin & Rose confuse the ideational metafunction with the interpersonal metafunction.  "Building up a picture" of someone's emotional states takes the perspective of construing experience, not the perspective of appraising by affect.  Genuine examples of appraising by affect would be of the type I loved everything about him, he hated what was happening etc.

[2] Since the perspective on meaning adopted here by Martin & Rose is ideational, not interpersonal, the instance does not demonstrate the "prosodic nature of attitude".  More importantly, 'prosodic' refers to a type of structure.  Here it is confused with the selective attention to elements in different structures.  By this misunderstanding, all meaning could be regarded as having "prosodic structure".

[3] The notion of 'phase' is inconsistent with the notion of 'prosodic' structure.  The term 'phase' refers to one of a series of stages of some process, and so represents a dynamic perspective on the structure types that are continuous, not prosodic: experiential, logical and textual.

Misunderstanding Affect As "Constructing Emotion"

Martin & Rose (2007: 29-31):

First let’s look at positive and negative affect. More perhaps than any other family of genres, stories involve us in people’s feelings. We empathise and sympathise with characters as they take part in extraordinary events. …
This contrast between good and bad vibes is a basic one as far as emotions and attitudes in general are concerned.  Next well look at direct and implicit expressions of feelings. …
Taken out of context, from this unusual behaviour we know something is wrong but we can’t be quite so sure about the exact emotion being expressed; we need to use a bit of psychology perhaps. …
We can also note here the role that metaphor plays in constructing emotion.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This again misunderstands affect. Affect is not simply a matter of 'expressing feelings' or "constructing emotion". Affect is 'the characterisation of phenomena by reference to emotion' (as explained here).

[2] This again misunderstands affect. Affect is not a matter of experiencing the emotions of participants in texts.  Affect is a system of appraisal, a resource of the interpersonal metafunction.

[3] There is no "need to use a bit of psychology".  There is, however, a need to understand that affect is an interpersonal system, not an experiential one, and as such, is a resource whereby speakers (and writers) enact intersubjective relations. 

Misrepresenting The Three Kinds Of Attitude

Martin & Rose (2007: 26-9):

Attitudes have to do with evaluating things, people’s character and their feelings. … 

So these evaluations can be divided into three basic kinds according to what is being appraised: (i) the value of things, (ii) people’s character and (iii) people’s feelings. … 

And there are three main types of attitude: expressing emotion, judging character and valuing the worth of things. Technically we’ll refer to resources for expressing feelings as affect, resources for judging character as judgement and resources for valuing the worth of things as appreciation. …

In this section we look more closely at the three kinds of attitude we have identified: affect (people’s feelings), judgement (people’s character) and appreciation (the value of things).

Expressing our feelings: affect 

As we explore how people express their feelings in discourse, we find that they vary in two general ways. Firstly, we can have good feelings or bad feelings, so affect can be positive or negative. Secondly people can express their feelings directly, or we can infer how people are feeling indirectly from their behaviour, so affect can be expressed directly or implied.

Blogger Comments:

[1] The interpretation of affect as "evaluating people's feelings" confuses the kind of evaluation with what is evaluated. This is, in turn, inconsistent with the notion of affect as "expressing feelings"; see [4] below.

[2] This is inconsistent with the body of work on appreciation. Appreciation is not limited to 'valuing the worth of things'. Appreciation is 'the evaluation of objects and products (rather than human behaviour) by reference to æsthetic principles and other systems of social value' (as explained here).  For example, the very important professor is an instance of appreciation, despite appraising a person.

[3] This is inconsistent with the body of work on judgement. Judgement is not limited to 'appraising people's character'. Judgement is 'the evaluation of human behaviour with respect to social norms' (as explained here).

[4] This is misleading in that it misrepresents affect. Affect is not simply a matter of 'expressing feelings'. Affect is 'the characterisation of phenomena by reference to emotion' (as explained here).

Misrepresenting Functional Varieties Of Language As The Cultural Context Of Language

Martin & Rose (2007: 22):

Finally in Chapter 9 we outline connections between the discourse analysis tools we have discussed and other modes of analysis. These connections include firstly the model of social context we introduced briefly above, and assume throughout the following chapters. This model of register and genre is crucial for interpreting the roles of interpersonal, ideational and textual meanings in social discourse.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This follows Martin (1992) in misrepresenting functional varieties of language, register and genre, as the cultural context of language.  In SFL theory, register and genre (text type) are two ways of looking at the same thing: register is text type viewed from the system pole of the cline of instantiation, whereas text type is register viewed from the instance pole of the cline.  The relation between context and language is realisation — they are different levels of symbolic abstraction.  Viewed from the system pole, registers are sub-potentials of language that realise sub-potentials of context; viewed from the instance pole, genres are types of text that realise situation types — a situation being an instance of context.

[2] The use of the word 'social' to characterise the cultural context invites a confusion between two distinct orders of experience: the first-order experience of the interlocutors who create a text, and the second-order experience that is the text they produce which realises the instance of semiotic context (situation).