Martin & Rose (2007: 312):
That being said, of course we want to know things about text types, registers and systems as well. … The main thing we’d like to argue for here is not to mistake a lot of clause analysis for discourse analysis. It doesn’t matter how many clauses we analyse, it’s only once we analyse meaning beyond the clause that we’ll be analysing discourse. And we need to analyse discourse right along the instantiation cline if we want to make sense of the semiotic weather we experience in the ecosocial climate of our times.
- different points of variation on the cline of instantiation of language, and
- systems of context, not language, with text type (genre) realised by register.
A text is meaningful because it is an actualisation of the potential that constitutes the linguistic system; it is for this reason that the study of discourse (‘text linguistics’) cannot properly be separated from the study of the grammar that lies behind it.
The clause is the central processing unit in the lexicogrammar – in the specific sense that it is in the clause that meanings of different kinds are mapped into an integrated grammatical structure. … Grammar is the central processing unit of language, the powerhouse where meanings are created …
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. Thus the present interest in discourse analysis is in fact providing a context within which grammar has a central place.
[4] On the one hand, this is a bare assertion, unsupported by reasoned argument. On the other hand, it is misleading, because it is untrue. In SFL Theory, "meaning beyond the clause" is realised by the lexicogrammatical systems of textual cohesion. Text analysis that merely examines the instances of cohesion fails to account for all the meanings that are realised structurally: interpersonal, experiential, logical and textual.
For Martin & Rose, however, "meaning beyond the clause" specifically refers to Martin's discourse semantic systems, so this bare assertion is actually an attempt to bully the reader into using Martin's systems. But, as demonstrated in great detail here, here, and on this blog, Martin's discourse semantics is largely a confusion of Halliday's semantic system of SPEECH FUNCTION (rebranded as Martin's NEGOTIATION), and Halliday & Hasan's lexicogrammatical systems of COHESION (rebranded as Martin's IDENTIFICATION, IDEATION, and CONNEXION/CONJUNCTION), as well as a rebranding of writing pedagogy (the authors' PERIODICITY) misrepresented as linguistic theory.
A text is thus a unit of meaning – more accurately, a unit in the flow of meaning that is always taking place at the instance pole of the cline of instantiation.
Moving up the cline is a move away from analysing data to theorising language.
[6] To be clear, this seriously misunderstands the cline of instantiation. The cline of instantiation of which text ("semiotic weather") is an instance is a scale of perspectives on language. The "ecosocial climate of our times", on the other hand, is not language, but culture (context as system), at the current state of its phylogenesis.
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