Preparing To Argue 'From Below' And Misunderstanding 'Cumulative' [New]

Martin (1992: 10, 28n):

Structural arguments for metafunctional diversity are of particular relevance here in light of the proposals for discourse structures to be developed in Section 1.5 below. Halliday's (1979a) suggestion is that experiential meanings predispose particulate forms of realisation, interpersonal meanings prosodic ones and textual meanings periodic² ones.

² Halliday (1979) actually refers to periodic structures as culminative ones; the term periodic is preferred here because of the misleading association between culmination and final position.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, arguing for metafunctional diversity on the basis of structure is arguing 'from below', which is the direct opposite of the perspective taken in SFL Theory, where priority is given to the view 'from above'. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 49):

Giving priority to the view ‘from above’ means that the organising principle adopted is that of system: the grammar is seen as a network of interrelated meaningful choices. In other words, the dominant axis is the paradigmatic one: the fundamental components of the grammar are sets of mutually defining contrastive features. Explaining something consists not in stating how it is structured but in showing how it is related to other things: its pattern of systemic relationships, or agnateness …

[2] To be clear, in the field of linguistics, the term 'culminative' is not associated with final position, but with prominence, which in SFL Theory, is a resource of the textual metafunction. The notion of 'culminative function' is from the phonology of Trubetskoy (1960):

the function carried out by those characteristics (features) of sounds in speech that permit the listener to apprehend the number of words, or syntagmas, in a sentence. The unit containing the element of sound that performs the culminative function is called the culmination, for example, the culmination of a syntagma. The culminative function in German, for example, is performed by the primary stress. Stress, pitch, and other prosodic elements usually carry out the culminative function.