A Problem With The Argument For A 'Move Complex'

Martin & Rose (2007: 244-5):

To begin, David prepares the class to read the first sentence by telling them what it means, paraphrasing it in terms they can all understand, and then reads it to them. He then prepares the students to identify one element of the sentence, its initial temporal circumstance, by giving them its transitivity category ‘when’ and telling them exactly where to find it (‘that sentence starts by telling us… '). The logical relation between the sentence and the two preparations is elaboration (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Following Ventola (1987) we can treat this semantic triplet as a move complex, filling a single slot in exchange structure — two statements in other words functioning together as a K1 move. We'll highlight these move complexes by putting '=’ as a superscript before elaborating moves, and using dependency lines on the left, to group them with one another:

Blogger Comments:

[1] Trivially, 'when' is not a transitivity category; 'temporal circumstance' is its transitivity function.

[2] To be clear, the logico-semantic relation of elaboration does not feature in Martin's logical semantics, because his system of CONJUNCTION is a rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's cohesive conjunction (textual grammar) as logical discourse semantics, and Halliday & Hasan (1976) did not yet use the general expansion systems of elaboration, extension and enhancement.

Moreover, the logical relation between "the sentence and its two preparations" is not elaboration. In the first move by the teacher, he projects a clause complex that is a more congruent rendering of the metaphorical clause in his second move. It is the projected more congruent clause complex that can be said to be an elaboration of the (unprojected) metaphorical clause.

In the third move by the teacher, he projects a clause (when they were rebelling) that encodes the function of the temporal circumstance of the second move (In the mid-1980s). Again, the relation between the two is a type of elaboration (intensive identity), but there is no elaborating relation between the two sentences.

These distinction are important because the notion of a move complex depends on there being a logico-semantic relation between the sentences as moves, which is not the case here.