Strategically Misrepresenting The Relation Between Speech Function And Mood [New]

Martin (1992: 34):

Following Halliday (1984a) the semantic inventory of interacts outlined above can now be expanded into four pairs, which will be referred to provisionally, following work in ethnomethodology (e.g. Schegloff & Sacks 1973), as "adjacency pairs":

The grammar then makes available resources for tying an initiation to a response (ellipsis and substitution) and for orienting the exchange to goods and services or information and to giving or demanding (declarative, interrogative and imperative). These resources do not however stand in any biunique relation with a particular move in dialogue, so two levels of analysis are needed to relate system and text.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Halliday (1985: 69) provides two types of response, expected vs discretionary, with different terms for the expected responses of offers (acceptance), commands (undertaking) and questions (answer), stipulating that only the last of these is essentially a verbal response:

[2] To be clear, ignoring the fact that there may be no verbal response to offers, commands and statements, and so no adjacency pairs, the tying of an initiation to a response by ellipsis-&-substitution is a cohesive tie, which is a resource of the textual, not the interpersonal metafunction. See Halliday (1985: 295-302).

[3] This is misleading. The grammatical MOOD selections (declarative, interrogative and imperative) realise selections in semantic SPEECH FUNCTION systems of COMMODITY (goods-&-services vs information) and INITIATING ROLE (giving vs demanding). 

However, if Martin had used the word 'realise', it would have disclosed the fact that the content plane had already been stratified by Halliday — a fact he is trying to keep from the reader — since realisation is the relation between strata.

[4] This is misleading. With the exception of offers, there is a "biunique" relation between SPEECH FUNCTION selections (semantics) and MOOD selections (grammar) except in the case of interpersonal metaphor. It is grammatical metaphor that motivates the stratification of the content plane into semantics and lexicogrammar (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 237), which is the main reason why Halliday stratified the content plane before Martin came along to try and take the credit.