As noted in our Introduction, we have had to make some decisions about what regions of the language system to focus on in this book. Language is an immensely complex phenomenon, no less than the contexts of social life that it realises, and discourse analysis is a very large and growing field of practice, so our focus has been on providing the tools that analysts can use to start exploring these domains. To this end we have focused on systems at the level of discourse semantics rather than the levels of lexicogrammar or social context, although we have touched on these lower and higher level systems at certain points.
In particular we have explored discourse semantic resources for enacting social relations through appraisal and negotiation, for construing fields of experience through ideation and conjunction, and for presenting our enactments and construals as meaningful text-in-context through identification and periodicity.
As far as discourse semantics is concerned, one set of textual resources we have not dealt with here is substitution and ellipsis — in part because we cannot enhance the accounts given in Halliday and Hasan’s 1976 Cohesion in English, and in part because rehearsing them would involve a lot of additional grammatical description. Martin’s 1992 English Text also contains discussions of cohesive harmony and modal responsibility that we have not developed here; and it also outlines a model of context, about which we’ll now say something further.
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[1] To be clear, for Halliday, it is the grammar that is essential for discourse analysis. Halliday (1994: xvi-xvii):
The current preoccupation is with discourse analysis, or 'text linguistics'; and it has sometimes been assumed that this can be carried on without grammar — or even that it is somehow an alternative to grammar. But this is an illusion. A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text … the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.
A text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one. But meanings are realised through wordings; and without a theory of wordings — that is, a grammar — there is no way of making explicit one's interpretation of the meaning of a text.
However, as demonstrated in painstaking detail here, much of Martin's (1992) discourse semantics is grammar: the model of textual cohesion in Halliday & Hasan (1976), relabelled and relocated from Halliday's grammatical stratum to Martin's discourse semantic stratum. Martin & Rose have focussed on discourse semantics, rather than grammar, simply because discourse semantics is presented as Martin's theorising.
[2] For the theoretical problems with these systems, and inconsistencies in their exposition, click on the following links:
- appraisal here
- negotiation here and here
- ideation here and here
- conjunction here and here
- identification here and here
- periodicity here and here.
[3] To be clear, in SFL Theory, experience is construed as the ideational meaning of language, whereas field is the ideational dimension of the culture that is construed by language. The distinction is important epistemologically, since 'experience' is what is transformed into meaning.
[4] To be clear, the reason why Martin & Rose are unable to 'deal with' ellipsis-&-substitution is because the relations involved are lexicogrammatical, not semantic. Halliday (1994: 316):
Nevertheless, Martin (1992) locates ellipsis-&-substitution both interpersonally within the mood system of grammar (pp34-5) and textually within the identification of discourse semantics (pp 100-2, 135, 144). The theoretical inconsistency here is thus metafunctional as well as stratal.
[5] For the misunderstandings of Hasan's cohesive harmony in Martin (1992), see the clarifying critiques here.
[6] For the misunderstandings of Halliday's modal responsibility in Martin (1992), see the clarifying critiques here.
[7] For the theoretical inconsistencies that invalidate the model of context in Martin (1992), see the clarifying critiques here.
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