The Discourse Semantic System Of External Conjunction

Martin & Rose (2007: 122):

External conjunction is concerned with logically organising a field as sequences of activities. For each general type of external conjunction - addition, comparison, time, consequence - there are two or more sub-types, summarised in Table 4.2.

 

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[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, external conjunction is concerned with relating text segments in their experiential guise.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 611):

As we have seen, elaborating, extending and enhancing conjunctions mark relations between semantic domains, i.e. between text segments. These text segments are simultaneously ideational and interpersonal; they construe experience as meaning, e.g. an episode in a narrative or a recount, and they enact roles and relations, e.g. an exchange in a conversation or consultation, or an argument in an exposition. Relations link text segments either in their ideational guise or in their interpersonal guise: they relate either chunks of experience or chunks of interaction. … Relations between representations of segments of experience are called external relations, and conjunctions marking such relations are called external conjunctions. … Relations linking text segments in their interpersonal guise are called internal relations – internal to the text as a speech event, and conjunctions marking such relations are called internal conjunctions.

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, external conjunction is a non-structural grammatical system of the textual metafunction that deploys the resource of expansion to create cohesive relations between portions of text.  Martin & Rose combine the textual system of conjunction and the logical system of clause complexing and rebrand it as discourse semantics instead of grammar, without providing evidence as to why it constitutes a higher level of symbolic abstraction.

[3] To be clear, in SFL Theory, field is the ideational dimension of context, the culture construed as a semiotic system.  Since sequences of activities are here construed as discourse semantic rather than context (contrā Martin 1992), field and activity sequences lie on different levels of symbolic abstraction and, as such, different levels of semiotic organisation.

[4] To be clear, the omissions and misunderstandings in the authors' model of external conjunction can be made evident by comparing it with the SFL model below (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 612):

For example, Martin & Rose:

• do not organise their system in terms of the three most general subtypes of expansion: elaboration, extension and enhancement, which are fractal types manifested across multiple domains (e.g. circumstances, relational processes, etc.);
• omit all 9 subtypes of elaborating relations;
• omit 4 of the 6 subtypes of extension;
• omit the enhancing relation of matter;
• misconstrue the adversative extending relation ('but') as a subtype of comparison (enhancing);
• misconstrue the manner subtype means as a relation of consequence (cause-condition).

Moreover, the logico-semantic relation of projection is entirely absent from the discourse semantic model of logical relations.