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.
[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.
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