Friday 3 April 2020

The Textual Discourse Semantic System Of Identification

Martin & Rose (2007: 155):
Identification is concerned with tracking participants — with introducing people and things into a discourse and keeping track of them once there. These are textual resources, concerned with how discourse makes sense to the reader by keeping track of identities.


Blogger Comments:

To be clear, Martin (1992: 93) glosses identification as 'reference as semantic choice', and it is indeed Halliday & Hasan's (1976) grammatical system of cohesive reference, misunderstood and rebranded by as discourse semantics. (Evidence here.)

The name of the system derives from a second intellectual source, the participant identification of the Hartford stratificationalists (Martin 1992: 95), which, as the term 'participant' makes clear, is concerned with experiential meaning, not textual meaning. It will also be seen in later posts that Martin's system of identification additionally confuses (non-structural) textual reference with the (structural) interpersonal deixis of the nominal group.

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