Martin's Reason Why Discourse Semantic Units Cannot Be Defined As Categorically As Grammatical Units [New]

Martin (1992: 59):

A2 Can you get me a beer in light of my impending death from thirst? …

The point is that seen as process, any dialogue is an on-going site of textual dynamism. There is nothing to prevent an interlocutor digging in and negotiating information presented as non-negotiable: my impending death from thirst is not presented for grading in the first example above; but one can imagine contexts in which it is contested, light-heartedly or not.

Because of this dynamism it is not possible to define discourse units as categorically as grammatical ones. There is a system, but its potential for ongoing re-contextualisation means that there will always be rough edges for the analyst. Analysis in other words will inevitably involve interpretation.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this is a non-sequitur. The ability to negotiate wording that lies in the Residue of a clause (in this instance: my impending death from thirst) can have no bearing on what constitutes a unit at a higher level of symbolic abstraction. If such a wording is taken up for negotiation, it simply falls within the Mood or Residue of the following clause. In SFL Theory, the semantic unit that such clause realises is a move (proposition or proposal) in an exchange (Halliday 1985: 69-71).