Misrepresenting Field And Confusing Reader Expectation With Speaker Meaning

Martin & Rose (2007: 118):

Indeed sequence in time is so consistently expected by story genres that there is often no need to use any conjunctions:

On arriving back at Sandton Police Station, at what they call the Security Branch
the whole situation changed
I was screamed at, verbally abused
I was slapped around
I was punched
I was told to shut up
sit in a chair
then I was questioned
when I answered the questions
I was told that I was lying
I was smacked again...

Conjunction between the first five activities in this sequence is left implicit — they just happen one after another — until the field shifts from physical and verbal abuse to interrogation, and this shift in field is signalled with the explicit conjunction then. We can now expect a different set of activities — concerned with questioning rather than beating. However the interrogators’ response to their victim’s answers was unexpected, at least to the victim, and this is again signalled with an explicit conjunction when.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, on the authors' previous analysis, there is no way to determine whether the conjunctive relation here is sequence in time or addition, since the omitted conjunction could be either then or and.

[2] To be clear, here Martin & Rose again confuse what the author of the text says with what various others expect.  In this case, the expecting process is mediated (metaphorically) by story genres, and by readers (including discourse analysts).  In the final instance, Martin & Rose imagine that the author's projection of himself in the text mediates a process of not expecting.

[3] To be clear, here Martin & Rose confuse ideational semantics (language) with ideational context (field). In terms of SFL theory, the field of the text — 'what is going on' — is a witness giving evidence at the Truth And Reconciliation Commission.  It is not the contextual field that shifts, but the ideational meanings being instantiated in the logogenesis of the text.

[4] To be clear, these are hindsight claims by Martin & Rose, not meanings made by the author in the text.  This can be demonstrated by comparing the use of these conjunctions in other texts, or by removing the text that follows each of the conjunctions.  For example, the wording

I was punched
I was told to shut up
sit in a chair
then …

does not lead the reader to expect the instantiation of the Process was questioned any more than a wide range of other potential processes.  Similarly, the wording

I was punched
I was told to shut up
sit in a chair
then I was questioned
when …

does not signal any interrogator responses as unexpected by the victim, not least because the author does not express the view that the interrogator responses were unexpected by him.