Confusing Textual Highlighting With Logic-Semantic Relations

Martin & Rose (2007: 201-3):

Here’s the whole text, analysed for its generic staging. This is a story genre known as a recount, with the typical recount stages:

orientation ^ record of events ^ reorientation

We can also show how recount is organised with layers of hyperThemes and hyperNews (in bold):

There are five hyperThemes here that organise Mandela’s recount of his growing desire for freedom (its ‘method of development’). We’ll use an '=' sign to indicate the way in which the higher level Themes and News paraphrase the information they predict or distil. Halliday 1994 refers to these kinds of relation as elaboration:

1 I was not born with a hunger to be free

= …

2 It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion... that I began to hunger for it.

= …

3 But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free.

= …

4 It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black.

= …

5 When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both 

= …

And three hyperNews that distil his conclusions about the struggle for freedom (its ‘point’):

3 ... = Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.

4 ... = The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

5 ... = The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

Beyond the hyperThemes and hyperNews in each phase, the Orientation functions as its macroTheme and its Reorientation as its macroNew. And with respect to Mandela’s book as a whole, this recount functions as a higher level macroNew, both summarising his journey and distilling the meaning of his life. The key point here is that texts expand, and that this expansion may or may not be explicitly scaffolded by layers of Themes and News. In most texts we find a mix of scaffolding through periodicity, and serial expansion that is not so clearly scaffolded, since these are simply two complementary strategies through which texts grow.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Trivially, it is the stage names that are in bold, not the hyperThemes and hyperNews.

[2] Non-trivially, here Martin & Rose acknowledge that what they have identified as the function of higher level Themes and News, prediction and distillation, are actually logico-semantic relations (elaboration) between portions of text. That is, their model confuses textual highlighting (Theme, New) with textual transitions (implicit conjunctive relations).

[3] To be clear, applying SFL Theory, it follows from this that the 'record of events' and 'reorientation' function as the macroRheme of the recount as macromessage, and that the 'orientation' and 'record of events' function as the macroGiven of the recount as macro-information unit.

[4] Again, applying SFL Theory, it follows from this that the rest of Mandela's book functions as a higher level macroGiven in the text as higher level macro-information unit.

[5] To be clear, as previously demonstrated, in terms of SFL Theory, these "two complementary strategies", periodicity and serial expansion, are, in this aspect, complementary expansion relations — elaboration (periodicity) and extension or enhancement (serial expansion) — that obtain between portions of text. In terms of SFL Theory, they could be interpreted as resources of cohesive conjunction (textual lexicogrammar). In terms of Martin's model, to be theoretically consistent, they should have been interpreted as resources of conjunction (logical discourse semantics).