Confusing Metafunctions: Graduation Focus

Martin & Rose (2007: 46):

Now let’s look briefly at the second dimension of graduation, focus — the sharpening and softening of experiential categories. What we’ve considered so far are resources for adjusting the volume of gradable items. By contrast, focus is about resources for making something that is inherently non-gradable gradable. For example, Helena introduces her second love as a policeman:

After my unsuccessful marriage, I met another policeman.

Experientially, this sets him up as having one kind of job rather than another (tinker, tailor, soldier, spy etc.). Classifications of this kind are categorical distinctions — he was a policeman as opposed to something else. After his promotion, however, her second love describes himself as a real policeman, as if he hadn’t quite been one before:

We are real policemen now.

This in effect turns a categorical boundary between types of professions into a graded one, allowing for various degrees of ‘policeman-hood’. It implies that when Helena met him he was less of a policeman than after his promotion:

I met a kind of policeman
I met a policeman sort of

Grading resources of this kind doesn’t so much turn the volume up and down as sharpen and soften the boundaries between things. Real policeman sharpens the focus, a sort of policeman softens it.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This blurs the distinction between interpersonal and experiential meaning.  To be clear, if graduation is a system of appraisal, then 'focus' is concerned with the sharpening or softening of the attitudinal assessment that enacts intersubjective relations as interpersonal meaning.

[2] The classification of Helena's second love as a policeman is made through cohesion, the non-structural resources of the textual metafunction.  This can be seen by looking at the realisation of "meaning beyond the clause":

After my unsuccessful marriage, I met another policeman. Not quite my first love, but an exceptional person. Very special. Once again a bubbly, charming personality.  Humorous, grumpy, everything in its time and place.

The conflated Deictic/post-Deictic another makes cataphoric comparative reference to my first love, while policeman is lexically cohesive — through instantial equivalence (Hasan 1985/9: 82) — with my first love on the one hand, and with both an exceptional person and a bubbly, charming personality, on the other.

[3] This again blurs the distinction between interpersonal and experiential meaning.  The categorisation as a 'real policeman' is made by the attributive clause We are real policeman now, which construes class membership.  This is distinct from the interpersonal assessment enacted by the attitudinal Modifier real.

[4] This continues the confusion between interpersonal and experiential meaning.  In terms of appraisal, any implication of the statement is an interpersonal assessment of 'what he was before', not an experiential construal of 'what he was before'.

[5] Trivially, the examples of 'softening of focus' do not appear in the text, despite being presented in the same manner as the two genuine instances.