Saturday 9 May 2015

Confusing Semogenesis With Stratification

Martin (1992: 137):
Such examples demonstrate one of the respects in which textual meaning provides only a partial account of text structure and the importance of taking the contribution a meaning making grammar makes to discourse structure into account.

Blogger Comment:

This confuses semogenesis, meaning making, with the stratification of the content plane into two levels of symbolic abstraction: higher level meaning (semantics) and the lower level wording (lexicogrammar).  The wording of the grammatical stratum (Token) realises the meaning of the semantic stratum (Value).  As an identifying relation, each can be used to identify the other:
  • The identity encodes the meaning of the semantic stratum (Value/Identified) by reference to the wording of the grammatical stratum (Token/Identifier).
  • The identity decodes the wording of the grammatical stratum (Token/Identified) by reference to the meaning of the semantic stratum (Value/Identifier)