Tuesday 29 October 2019

Confusing Different Strata, Different Metafunctions, And Different Grammatical Elements


Martin & Rose (2007: 119-20):
Like Tutu, Helena uses explicit conjunctions to signal the beginning of new phases in her story. But whereas Tutu uses them to organise his argument, Helena uses them to sequence the phases in time.
 
Helena uses the time conjunctions Then and After to connect each phase to the immediately preceding events, but the scope of finally is the story as a whole. During all the preceding events Helena didn’t understand the struggle, but now she finally does. 
The other resources Helena uses here to sequence the story in time are Circumstances - As an eighteen-year-old, one day, More than a year ago, After my unsuccessful marriage, After about three years with the special forces, Today. These Circumstances set the events in an exact time period, while time conjunctions simply indicate the sequence.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this confuses different levels of description.  Although this is presented as discourse semantics, conjunctions are grammatical, the stratum below discourse semantics, and phases of story are, on the authors' model, genre, the stratum two levels above discourse semantics.

[2] To be clear, the two instances of after in the extract are not conjunctions and do not function conjunctively, either logically within a clause complex, or textually as a cohesive relation.  Both are prepositions and function, experientially, as the minor Process — and interpersonally as the minor Predicator — of a prepositional phrase serving as a circumstance of temporal Location.

[3] To be clear, this is (high school) reading comprehension, not (academic) linguistic analysis.

[4] To be clear, circumstances do not function logically or sequence a story in time.  Circumstances function experientially within a clause.  However, each of circumstances cited is also highlighted in the text as a marked Theme, and it is this textual logogenetic pattern of Theme selection (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 659ff) that works with the textual grammatical system of conjunctive cohesion — misunderstood by Martin & Rose as logical discourse semantics — in creating text.

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