Misunderstanding Taxonomy And Antonymy

Martin & Rose (2007: 80):

These taxonomies give rise to several types of lexical relation in discourse, including class-member and co-class, whole-part and co-part. We can also include here repetition, in which the same lexical item is repeated, sometimes in different grammatical forms, such as marry - married - marriage. There is also synonymy, in which a similar experiential meaning is shared by a different lexical item, such as marriage - wedding.

Then of course there are contrasts between lexical items. The most familiar is perhaps antonymy, in which two lexical items have opposing meanings, such as marriage - divorce. But another type of opposition is converse roles, such as wife - husband, parent - child, teacher - student, doctor - patient, and so on. Although these are oppositional relations, they are not strictly speaking antonyms.

In addition to such oppositions, another type of contrast is series. These include scales such as hot - warm - tepid - cold, but also cycles such as days of the week Sunday - Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday and so on.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, repetitions and synonyms do not constitute taxonomies, since the relation between items, in each case, is one of elaborating identity, rather than elaborating attribution (hyponymic taxonomy) — the general sense of 'taxonomy' — or extension (meronymic taxonomy).  Incidentally, Plotkin (1995: 44-5) terms hyponymic and meronymic taxonomies 'structural hierarchies'.

Consequently, Martin & Rose's rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's lexical cohesion as discourse semantic 'taxonomic relations' is based on a fundamental misunderstanding.

[2] To be clear, these are generally known in linguistics as complementary antonyms.

[3] To be clear, these are generally known in linguistics as relational antonyms.

[4] To be clear, these are generally known in linguistics as graded antonyms.

[5] To be clear, these "oppositions" can be interpreted as co-meronyms of 'week' and co-hyponyms of 'day'.

Confusing Contextual Field With Field-Specific Ideational Semantics

Martin & Rose (2007: 80):

Relations between classes and members, and between parts and wholes, make up two types of taxonomies by which we construe fields of experience. People, things and places belong to more general classes of entities, and at the same time they are parts of larger wholes, and are composed of smaller parts. These are known as classifying and compositional taxonomies respectively. Both hierarchies may have many layers, particularly in technical fields, for example (classifying) kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, sub-species and (composing) ecosystem, food-chain, organism, organ system, organ, tissue, cell, organelle, metabolism…  Processes can also be viewed as instances of more general types, or as parts of larger activities, but their taxonomies are not as multi-layered as for people, things and places.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, on the SFL model, we construe experience as ideational meaning.  Field, on the other hand, is the ideational dimension of context: the culture as a semiotic system.  Field does not refer to the ideational dimension of language.  Following Martin (1992), Martin & Rose confuse contextual field with the semantic counterpart of a field: a domain; see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 322-3).  The theoretical inconsistency is one of stratification (levels of symbolic abstraction).

[2] This confuses a type of circumstance ('places') with types of participant ('people, things').  Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 54):

Participants are inherent in the process; they bring about its occurrence or mediate it. There are a number of specific ways in which a participant may take part in a process; it may act out the process, it may sense it, it may receive it, it may be affected by it, it may say it, and so on. The different configurations of participants are the bases for a typology of process types. The distinction between participants and circumstances is a cline rather than a sharp division, but it is semantically quite significant. 

Circumstances are typically less closely associated with the process and are usually not inherent in it. They specify the spatial or temporal location of the process, its extent in space or time (distance or duration), its cause, the manner of its occurrence, and so on.

[3] Trivially, metabolism is not a part of a organelle (e.g. mitochondrion).  'Metabolism' refers to the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life. 

[4] This confuses two distinct types of class membership: delicacy ('general') and instantiation ('instance'); see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 145).

Construing A Lover As "An Organism Composed Of Parts"

Martin & Rose (2007: 79-80):

In the ‘repercussions’ phase of the second Incident in her story, Helena construes her second love as a tortured organism composed of various parts, including his anatomy and physiology, and his soul, highlighted below.

Sometimes he would just press his face into his hands and shake uncontrollably. I realised he was drinking too much. Instead of resting at night, he would wander from window to window. He tried to hide his wild consuming fear, but I saw it. In the early hours of the morning between two and half-past-two, I jolt awake from his rushed breathing. Rolls this way, that side of the bed. He's pale. Ice cold in a sweltering night - sopping wet with sweat. Eyes bewildered, but dull like the dead. And the shakes. The terrible convulsions and blood-curdling shrieks of fear and pain from the bottom of his soul. Sometimes he sits motionless, just staring in front of him. 1 never understood. I never knew. Never realised what was being shoved down his throat during the 'trips', I just went through hell. Praying, pleading: 'God, what's happening? What's wrong with him? Could he have changed so much? Is he going mad? I can't handle the man anymore!

We will refer to the relation between one part of a whole and the next as a co-part relation. The parts of Helena’s man are analysed as a lexical string in Table 3.2.

Table 3.2 Parts of Helena's second love
the man
part
his face
co-part
his hands
co-part
eyes
co-part
the bottom of his soul
co-part
his throat

In contrast to the classifying taxonomy in Figure 3.4 above, these parts of the man together make up a compositional taxonomy, consisting of wholes and their parts and sub-parts, which we can express as a tree diagram in Figure 3.5.

Figure 3.5 Parts of Helena's second love

Blogger Comments:

[1] Martin & Rose's absurd — though highly amusing — claim, that the author is construing her lover as an organism composed of parts, arises from their re-interpreting the textual system of lexical cohesion at the level of lexicogrammar (Halliday & Hasan 1976) as an experiential system at the level of discourse.  The theoretical inconsistency is primarily one of metafunction.

In the original work that provides the source for these ideas — unacknowledged by Martin & Rose — meronymic relations between lexical items help to create the texture that differentiates a unified text from a collection of unrelated instances.

[2] To be clear, a lexical string is a string of lexical items, not of nominal groups; that is, here Martin & Rose confuse lexis with grammar.  Moreover, lexical items, as the term suggests, are located at the level of lexicogrammar, not discourse semantics.  In this latter case, the theoretical inconsistency is one of stratification (levels of symbolic abstraction).

Misunderstanding The Nature Of The Metafunctions

Martin & Rose (2007: 77):

Helena describes herself in terms of her youth and her origins, and her lover in terms of his youth and English ethnicity, and she then contrasts this with another ethnic group he was popular with. As he is the focus of the story, her description of him is far more developed, including many positive attributes, such as bubbly, vivacious, beamed out wild energy, sharply intelligent, popular. However, these inscribed judgements are dealt with as appraisals in Chapter 2, and we will set them aside in the discussion here, limiting ourselves to purely ideational categories.

Blogger Comments:

This misunderstands the metafunctions.  Such wordings serve both ideational and interpersonal functions; that is, they both construe experience as meaning and enact intersubjective relations as meaning.  The notion of "purely ideational categories" reflects Martin's misunderstanding of metafunctions as interacting modules, instead of orders of a dimension; see, for example, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 20, 32).  Martin (1992: 390): 

Each of the presentations of linguistic text forming resources considered above adopted a modular perspective. As far as English Text is concerned this has two main dimensions: stratification and, within strata, metafunction.