Sunday 19 April 2015

Martin's Logical Discourse Semantic System Of CONJUNCTION [New]

Martin (1992: 27):
CONJUNCTION focuses on logical meaning — on relations of addition, time, cause and comparison between messages, as these are variously realised through paratactic, hypotactic and cohesive conjunctions (or metaphorically within a clause; see Chapter 4 for details). Once again, this analysis is inspired by Gleason (1968) and by Halliday and Hasan (1976).


Blogger Comments:

To be clear, Martin's logical discourse semantic system of CONJUNCTION is far more than just "inspired" by Halliday & Hasan (1976). It is a confusion of Halliday & Hasan's cohesive CONJUNCTION and Halliday's CLAUSE COMPLEXING, misunderstood and relocated from lexicogrammar to Martin's discourse semantics. That is, Martin confuses expansion features serving the textual metafunction (cohesive CONJUNCTION) with expansion features serving the logical metafunction (CLAUSE COMPLEXING). This confusion is maintained by Martin's use of Halliday's textual unit 'message' as his logical unit (p325).

The reason why Martin uses the relations of addition, time, cause and comparison instead of expansion and its most general subtypes elaboration, extension and enhancement is that these were the categories used in Martin's source, Halliday & Hasan (1976).

Moreover, because the logico-semantic relation of projection does not function cohesively, Martin's model of logical semantics omits the system of PROJECTION. That is, there is no semantic system to be realised lexicogrammatically by projection relations between units in unit complexes or metaphorically, for example, in circumstantial relational clauses such as the lecture covered topics in evolutionary biology.

No comments:

Post a Comment