The Inconsistency In Treating Genre As A Connotative Semiotic [Revised]

Martin (1992: 51):

The rank scale at the level of discourse proposed originally by Sinclair and Coulthard included three additional ranks, two above the exchange (lesson and transaction) and one below (move).  Considerations at the ranks of lesson and transaction will be handled under the heading of genre in this book and will be taken up again in Chapter 7, along with a discussion of why genre is treated as a[n] underlying connotative semiotic rather than a higher rank at the level of discourse semantics…

Blogger Comments:

Treating genre as a connotative semiotic is inconsistent with the meaning of both genre and connotative semiotic.  Because 'genre' is a variety of language, and language is a denotative semiotic, 'genre' is a variety of a denotative semiotic. And because a connotative semiotic is a semiotic system whose expression plane is language (Hjelmslev 1961), 'genre', as a variety of language, is located on the expression plane of a connotative semiotic, not on its content plane (context).

Martin's Interpersonal Discourse Semantic System Of NEGOTIATION [New]

Martin (1992: 26-7):

NEGOTIATION is an interpersonal system concerned with discourse as dialogue. Given an exchange such as that presented below, an account will be developed which shows how a sequence of speech acts which we might gloss informally as question, nomination, answer and validation are syntagmatically related to each other and systemically related to other types of exchange. This work takes as its point of departure the work on classroom discourse developed by the Birmingham school (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975).

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, NEGOTIATION is Martin's only genuine semantic system, the other systems being rebrandings of Halliday & Hasan's lexicogrammatical systems of COHESION. However, NEGOTIATION is only "Martin's" system in the sense that it is his rebranding of Halliday's system of SPEECH FUNCTION, incorporating work carried out by Halliday's colleagues.

By the same token, NEGOTIATION is also Martin's only system that is realised by genuine structures, the others being, instead, cohesive relations misconstrued as Lemke's covariate structures, which Lemke has since (1989) conceded are not, in fact, a type of structure. However, despite being interpersonal structures, Martin models them in terms of constituency — e.g. exchanges consisting of moves — which is the favoured structure type of the experiential metafunction.