Misconstruing Textual Cohesion As A Type Of Logical Dependency

Martin & Rose (2007: 121):

Third, two sentences can be logically related by a conjunction such as Further or Thus:

It is also not true that the granting of amnesty encourages impunity...
Further, retributive justice…is not the only form of justice. 

This is a far more personal approach, which sees the offence as something that has happened to people and whose consequence is a rupture in relationships.
Thus we would claim that justice, restorative justice, is being served when efforts are being made to work for healing, for forgiveness and for reconciliation.

We will refer to these kinds of dependency relations between sentences as cohesive (following Halliday and Hasan 1976).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL theory, cohesive conjunction is a non-structural grammatical system of the textual metafunction.

[2] To be clear, here Martin & Rose confuse interdependency, which is structural and logical, with cohesion, which is non-structural and textual.

[3] This is misleading. To be clear, Martin & Rose are not "following" Halliday & Hasan (1976); they are taking the grammatical model of cohesive conjunction in Halliday & Hasan (1976) and simply rebranding (their misunderstanding of) it as their own model of discourse semantics (following Martin 1992).