Interpersonal Enactment By Means Of Textual Lexicogrammar Misunderstood As Experiential Semantics

Martin & Rose (2007: 85): 

By means of this classification Tutu advocates an approach to justice that draws on implicitly positive evaluations, which he contrasts with implicitly negative evaluations. As in the contrasting attributes of Helena’s lovers, before and after their ‘operations’, taxonomic relations interact with resources of appraisal to categorise the world and evaluate the categories we construe. However, in Tutu’s philosophical argument the categories are not people and their qualities, but institutional abstractions, including legal systems, principles of justice, and moral behaviours.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This blurs the distinction between metafunctions.  To be clear, construing experiential categories is not the means of enacting interpersonal assessments.

[2] As previously demonstrated, Martin & Rose's notion of taxonomic relations

• mistakes lexical cohesion, a resource of the textual metafunction, for experiential (discourse) semantics,
• mistakes grammatical structures for lexical items, and
• mistakes the functions of grammar for relations between "lexical items".

[3] To be clear, 'philosophical' means

• relating or devoted to the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.
• having or showing a calm attitude towards disappointments or difficulties.