Sunday 12 April 2015

Misconstruing The Level Of Symbolic Abstraction Of Cohesion [Revised]

Martin (1992: 23):
Univariate structure at the rank of clause brings us to a grammatical frontier — the distinction between the clause complex and cohesion discussed in Section 1.4 above.  As noted, Halliday and Hasan refer to this frontier as non-structural; and from the perspective of lexicogrammar, this is just what they aresemantic relationships which transcend grammatical structure.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading. The distinction between clause complexing and cohesion is not a grammatical frontier; it is a distinction within lexicogrammar: between the structural resources of logical metafunction and the non-structural resources of the textual metafunction.

As previously observed, Martin repeatedly misleads by misrepresenting Halliday & Hasan's cohesion as opposed to lexicogrammar, instead of within it, as a prelude to rebranding Halliday & Hasan's cohesion as his discourse semantics.

[2] Trivially, it is not this frontier — "the distinction between the clause complex and cohesion" — that is non-structural; but cohesion.

[3] Cohesive relations are also non-structural from the perspective of discourse semantics, as will be demonstrated in later posts.

[4] This is misleading on two counts. On the one hand, not all cohesive relations are semantic. Halliday (1985: 296):
But unlike reference, which is itself a semantic relation, ellipsis sets up a relationship that is not semantic but lexicogrammatical – a relationship in the wording rather than directly in the meaning.

On the other hand, cohesive relations do not transcend grammatical structure. Instead, grammatical structure is irrelevant to cohesion. Halliday & Hasan (1976: 9):