Saturday 20 August 2016

Misconstruing Prosody

Martin (1992: 557):
Martin (1992a) treats one aspect of interpersonal meaning at the level of genre as a kind of generic prosody (with high, median and low values) mapped onto a particulate structure of the kind reviewed in 7.3.1.1 above …

Blogger Comments:

[1] Cf Martin (1992: 556):
The difficulty here lies in Labov's equation of interpersonal meaning (language) with Evaluation (genre) and his failure to distinguish clearly between particulate and prosodic perspectives on generic structure.
[2] Prosody and particulate are alternative modes of structural realisation.  A prosody is not particulate; a particulate realisation is not prosodic.  Anything "mapped onto" a particulate structure is, by definition, not prosodic.