Conflating Clause Complexing With Conjunction And Misunderstanding Internal Relations.

Martin & Rose (2007: 116):

Conjunction in other words has two faces. One side of the system interacts with ideation, construing experience as logically organised sequences of activities. The other side of the system interacts with periodicity, presenting discourse as logically organised waves of information.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in the authors' source material — originally Halliday & Hasan (1976) and Halliday (1985) — two simultaneous distinctions are made:

• clause complexing vs cohesive conjunction, and
• external vs internal expansion relations.

The first distinction is between

• logical (structural) relations between clauses in complexes, and
• textual (non-structural) relations between text spans of varying extent.

The second distinction is between

• relations between experiential construals ('external' to the speech event), and
• relations between interpersonal enactments ('internal' to the speech event).

In their rebranding of this original work, Martin & Rose

• conflate the first distinction between logical and textual deployments of expansion relations, and
• misconstrue the interpersonal dimension of the second distinction as textual,

and present their misunderstandings of these grammatical systems as discourse semantic systems.

[2] To be clear, the notion of metafunctions "interacting" betrays the authors' misunderstanding of these theoretical dimensions as 'modules'.  See critiques of Martin (1992) on the matter here.

[3] To be clear, as will be seen in later posts, the authors' model of periodicity is largely a rebranding of writing pedagogy misconstrued as linguistic theory.