Serial Expansion Of Discourse

Martin & Rose (2007: 199-201):

Serial expansion is more of a chaining strategy than is periodicity, in the sense that discourse is added on to what went before without being predicted by a higher level Theme. Tutu, for example, begins his Chapter What about justice? with the issue he is arguing about…

But instead of tackling this right away as he does in the argument proper, he takes a moment to develop some background information about the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act which he feels he needs before he starts arguing. So before we get to the exposition, we have a report outlining the conditions for gaining amnesty…

Then, having built up this common ground, he restates the issue and moves into his exposition. Tutu’s transition from issue to report and from report to exposition is not scaffolded with higher level Themes, nor distilled in higher level News. He does not actually tell us before the report that he has to build some background first before discussing the issue; nor does he sum up at the end of the report what it is we needed to know. At both points he just moves on, expanding the issue with the report and then expanding the report with an exposition.

This is a serial movement from one moment in the discourse to another. We are simply expected to follow along, without the careful scaffolding of phases we get once his exposition is underway. And following his exposition the chapter expands along similar lines (some serial expansion, some hierarchy of periodicity), a kind of tandem act during which we’re sometimes warned where we’re going and reminded where we’ve been, and other times we just keep reading and find out as we go.

The important point here is that both serial expansion and hierarchy of periodicity are dynamic resources through which a text unfolds as a process. The meanings don’t emerge by crystallising. A text isn’t like an image downloading from the web, taking on detail and shape and focus here and there before our very eyes. Rather meanings flow, as texts unfold. The text materialises through time, however thing-like our written records of this dynamic misrepresent a text to be.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as previously explained, what Martin & Rose regard as a higher level Theme predicting what follows is actually the latter elaborating the former — elaboration being one sub-type of expansion. This confusion of textual status (thematicity) with textual transition (conjunction) is here being expanded to include conjunctive relations other than elaboration, which the authors term serial expansion. This is also inconsistent with the authors' own model, where cohesive conjunction (textual metafunction) is rebranded as a logical discourse semantic system.

[2] To be clear, this is self-contradiction. On the authors' own model, if Tutu restates the issue and then presents its exposition, this is the same relation of elaboration (exposition) that the authors ascribe to a higher level Theme "predicting" what follows.

[3] To be clear, the expansion relations in serial expansion and periodicity are cohesive relations along the syntagmatic axis, whereas the choices of Theme and New form patterns of instantiation during logogenesis, the unfolding of text. In other words, here Martin & Rose confuse the unfolding of text (logogenesis through instantiation) with non-structural relations along the syntagmatic axis.

[4] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the unfolding of text is logogenesis, and the materialisation of text is instantiation: the process of instantiating potential as actual.