Sunday, 6 October 2019

Grammar-Based Approaches To Conjunction

Martin & Rose (2007: 116):
Where grammar-based approaches such as Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) treat conjunctions as a grammatical resource for linking one clause to the next, the perspective we take here models conjunction as a set of meanings that organise activity sequences on the one hand, and text on the other.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading.  In SFL theory, all content plane systems are 'grammar-based', since it is the grammar that construes the semantics.  The difference here lies in the fact that the sources of the authors' ideas — Halliday and Hasan (1976), Halliday (1985, 1994), and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) — present these systems as grammatical, whereas Martin & Rose misunderstand their sources and rebrand their misunderstandings as Martin's discourse semantics.

[2] To be clear, the terminological slippage from 'conjunctions' (word class) to 'conjunction' (system) is strategic, not accidental, and calculated to deceive.  In the authors' source material, 'conjunction' also refers to a system (a "set"): a grammatical system of the textual metafunction.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 612):

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