Serious Problems With Martin's Mood System [New]

Martin (1992: 34, 35):

The MOOD systems considered to this point are outlined below (Fig. 2.2)…

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, there are several serious flaws with Martin's MOOD network that make it entirely untenable. 

Firstly, it misrepresents a non-structural textual grammatical system, ellipsis-&-substitution, as part of the structural interpersonal grammatical system of MOOD. Martin later (p100-1)) compounds his error by relocating this "interpersonal" system back to the textual metafunction in his system of IDENTIFICATION on his stratum of discourse semantics. That is, Martin incongruously claims that ellipsis-&-substitution functions interpersonally at the level of grammar, but textually at the level of discourse semantics.

Secondly, the upper network bizarrely proposes that a clause can be both a declarative and a WH- interrogative, and such a clause has the option of WH- ellipsis, which, contrary to Martin's claim, has not been "considered to this point". To be clear, the selection of WH- ellipsis is limited to WH- clauses.

Thirdly, the lower network bizarrely proposes that 

• mood ellipsis ("implicit") is a subtype of residue ellipsis,
• clause ellipsis is a subtype of mood ellipsis, and
• substitution is a subtype of mood ellipsis.