Martin's Logical Discourse Semantic System Of CONJUNCTION [New]

Martin (1992: 27):

CONJUNCTION focuses on logical meaning — on relations of addition, time, cause and comparison between messages, as these are variously realised through paratactic, hypotactic and cohesive conjunctions (or metaphorically within a clause; see Chapter 4 for details). Once again, this analysis is inspired by Gleason (1968) and by Halliday and Hasan (1976).

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, Martin's logical discourse semantic system of CONJUNCTION is far more than just "inspired" by Halliday & Hasan (1976). It is a confusion of Halliday & Hasan's cohesive CONJUNCTION and Halliday's CLAUSE COMPLEXING, misunderstood and relocated from lexicogrammar to Martin's discourse semantics. That is, Martin confuses expansion features serving the textual metafunction (cohesive CONJUNCTION) with expansion features serving the logical metafunction (CLAUSE COMPLEXING). This confusion is maintained by Martin's use of Halliday's textual unit 'message' as his logical unit (p325).

The reason why Martin uses the relations of addition, time, cause and comparison instead of expansion and its most general subtypes elaboration, extension and enhancement is that these were the categories used in Martin's source, Halliday & Hasan (1976).

Moreover, because the logico-semantic relation of projection does not function cohesively, Martin's model of logical semantics omits the system of PROJECTION. That is, there is no semantic system to be realised lexicogrammatically by projection relations between units in unit complexes or metaphorically, for example, in circumstantial relational clauses such as the lecture covered topics in evolutionary biology.

Martin's Textual Discourse Semantic System Of IDENTIFICATION [New]

Martin (1992: 27):

IDENTIFICATION is a textual system concerned with tracking participants in discourse. At issue here is the way in which people, places and things are introduced in text and potentially referred to again once introduced (e.g. a robot...the android below). This work is based on Gleason's analysis of discourse structure within a stratificational framework (Gleason 1968) and Halliday and Hasan's (1976) description of referential cohesion.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin's IDENTIFICATION, which he characterises (p93) as 'reference as semantic choice' is Halliday & Hasan's cohesive reference, misunderstood, relocated from Halliday's lexicogrammar to Martin's discourse semantics, and rebranded as Martin's work.

The fundamental misunderstanding that invalidates the model is Martin's confusion of textual reference with 'reference' in the the sense of ideational denotation. It is this confusion that leads Martin to misconstrue an ideational unit, the participant, as his textual unit.

This also leads Martin to mistake nominal groups — that realise participants — for reference items, which then leads Martin to confuse reference with nominal group DEIXIS.

[2] Consistent with the metafunctional confusion noted above, Martin here provides an example of his experiential system, IDEATION, instead of his textual system, IDENTIFICATION.

The Aim Of Martin (1992) [New]

Martin (1992: 1):

English Text is an introduction to discourse analysis within the framework of systemic functional linguistics. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive set of discourse analyses which can be used to relate any English text to the context in which it is used. Readers familiar with Halliday and Hasan's seminal Cohesion in English will find in English Text an elaboration of their work, in ways that have been influenced by Gleason's stratificational approach to discourse structure (Gutwinski 1976:36-63) and by almost 20 years of research by systemic linguists since Cohesion in English was first circulated in manuscript form.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, within the framework of Systemic Functional linguistics, it is the grammar that provides the means of analysing discourse. Halliday (1985: xvi-xvii, 345):

The current preoccupation is with discourse analysis, or 'text linguistics'; and it has sometimes been assumed that this can be carried on without grammar — or even that it is somehow an alternative to grammar.  But this is an illusion.  A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text … the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.

A text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one.  But meanings are realised through wordings; and without a theory of wordings — that is, a grammar — there is no way of making explicit one's interpretation of the meaning of a text. …

A text is meaningful because it is an actualisation of the potential that constitutes the linguistic system; it is for this reason that the study of discourse (‘text linguistics’) cannot properly be separated from the study of the grammar that lies behind it.

[2] To be clear, readers familiar with Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English will find in English Text Martin's misunderstandings of Halliday and Hasan's seminal work, rebranded as Martin's systems, and incongruously relocated from textual lexicogrammar to textual, logical and experiential semantics, as the analyses on this blog demonstrate.