On Attitudinal Lexis

Martin & Rose (2007: 44-5):

Here are some more examples of attitudinal lexis from Helena’s Incidents, with some suggested scales of intensity:

vivacious man     dull/placid/lively/vivacious…
pleading              ask/request/pray/beseech/plead…

Beyond this, we can also be guided by the prosody of feeling that colours a whole phase of discourse. In Helena’s narrative for example attitudinal lexis is more a feature of her Incidents than her Orientation or Interpretations. And genre is also a factor. Tutu uses less of this resource in his exposition… 

On the other hand, the Act arguably uses no attitudinal lexis at all, just as it avoids intensifiers like very.  So we can score various genres on how much amplification they are likely to display: narratives tend to amplify most, expositions less so, and administrative genres like the Act amplify very little.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Trivially, 'dull' is an antonym of 'lively' and 'vivacious'.  That is, in terms of appraisal theory, 'dull' is negative polarity, whereas 'lively' and 'vivacious' are positive.  The upscaling of a negative appraisal is another negative appraisal, not a positive appraisal; the downscaling of a positive appraisal is another positive appraisal, not a negative appraisal.

[2] As a scale of verbal Processes, this is a scale of construals of experience (ideational metafunction). Whether, as Predicators, they are used to enact intersubjective relations by appraising by means of the values of affect, appreciation or judgement is another matter.  The text in question is: Praying, pleading: 'God, what's happening?'

[3] This again mistakes lack of structure for prosodic structure.  Consider, for example, what could, by the same misunderstanding, be claimed to be the "prosody" of processes (experiential metafunction) in the above extract.

[4] This use of 'feeling' highlights a confusion that pervades this chapter: the blurring of the ideational construal of emotion with the interpersonal enactment of intersubjective relations through appraisal.

[5] Here the terms 'Incident', 'Orientation' and 'Interpretation' are identified as phases of discourse.  This is inconsistent with the theory on which this work is based (Martin 1992: 546, 558, 565-8) where such phases are located on Martin's stratum of genre, not discourse.  This is also inconsistent with Rose's claim (Sys-func 16/9/17) that phases are units on Martin's stratum of register, as recorded and critiqued here.  For reasons why neither genre nor register can be coherently modelled as either strata or context, see here (register), here (genre) and here (context).

[6] This directly contradicts the previous analysis of this text, where what were claimed to be attitudes of positive appreciation (understanding, reparation, ubuntu) and negative judgement (vengeance, retaliation, victimisation) were all realised by the choice of lexical items, rather than through choices in closed grammatical systems; see the original critique here.

[7] This remains a bare assertion until supported by empirical evidence.

Misconstruing Rhetorical Mode As Social Purpose

Martin & Rose (2007: 12):

An exposition consists of the basic stages Thesis and supporting Arguments. Its social purpose is to persuade an audience to the writer’s point of view, the ‘thesis’. Expositions contrast with the argument genre known as ‘discussion’, in which two or more points of view are presented and one argued for over the others.

Blogger Comments:

In SFL theory, the function of language in a situation (type) is termed (rhetorical) mode, the theoretical projection of the textual metafunction onto the stratum of context (the culture modelled as a semiotic system).

The discussion here misconstrues semiotic function as social purpose and blurs the stratal distinction between context (mode) and semantics (text structure) — of a text type (genre).  Text types are located on the cline of instantiation between system and instance, not at the system pole, and they are varieties of language, not context.

Blurring The Distinction Between Semantics And Context

Martin & Rose (2007: 1):

And it also means that we treat discourse as more than an incidental manifestation of social activity; we want to focus on the social as it is constructed through texts, on the constitutive role of meanings in social life. … and it is also an invitation to social theorists to reconsider social activity as meaning we negotiate in discourse.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear:

• not all social activity is realised in language, and 
• there is more to culture (context) than just social activity.

[2] The notion of 'the social being constructed through texts' affords two distinct interpretations.  On the one hand, it could be said to be concerned with the theoretical claim embodied in the stratification hierarchy that language (text) and context (situation) are construed together during logogenesis.  On the other hand, it could be said to be concerned with the semantic construal of social activities within texts, as in the plot-lines of novels.

The reason this distinction is worth highlighting here is that, in the work that this publication 'takes as its point of departure', English Text (Martin 1992), events in texts and events in the environments of texts are largely not distinguished; see, for example, the evidence here.

[3] To be clear, the meaning we negotiate in discourse is the meaning of language: semantics.  Language and context are distinct levels of symbolic abstraction, such that language realises context.  In SFL, 'context' refers to the culture as a semiotic system that has language as its expression plane.

The reason this distinction is worth highlighting here is that, in the work that this publication 'takes as its point of departure', English Text (Martin 1992), 'meaning' is misattributed to all strata, as a direct result of mistaking a statement about semogenesis — 'all strata make meaning' — for the principle of stratification; see, for example, the evidence here.