Sunday 3 May 2015

Strategically Misrepresenting Halliday & Hasan (1976: 145)

Martin (1992: 121):
Phoricity systems, as defined above relate phoric items to their context by way of presumed information.  The ways in which they do this depends on the type of phoricity involved and within different systems on the particular options selected.  Halliday & Hasan (1976: 145) point out for example that redundancy phoricity is essentially a textual relation: it exists primarily as an anaphoric (or occasionally cataphoric) device, and in its rare exophoric use it tends to give an effect of "putting the words in the other person's mouth".

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misunderstands both systems and reference.  On the one hand, in their own terms, phoricity systems do not relate phoric items to anything; a system represents the range of potential choices, given a specific entry condition.  On the other hand, reference items are not related to their context by way of presumed information.  Reference items presume that meaning is recoverable, either from the co-text (endophoric), or elsewhere (exophoric).

[2] To be clear, the definition of phoricity was provided by Martin (p98) as follows:
The nominal groups in [3:1] have been organised semantically into phoric and non-phoric classes according to whether their grammar signals the identity of participant they realise as recoverable or not.
See the previous critique here.

[3] This is very misleading, since it gives the false impression that Martin's 'redundancy phoricity' is either acknowledged by Halliday & Hasan (1976) or consistent with their model.  Either way, having taken their ideas, misunderstood them, and rebranded the misunderstandings as his own ideas, Martin now misrepresents Halliday & Hasan as endorsing his system.

[4] This is a very humorous misunderstanding of Halliday & Hasan (1976: 145):

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