"The Purpose Of These Descriptions Is To Enhance, Not Supplant, Those Offered In Cohesion In English" [New]

Martin (1992: 26):

The purpose of these descriptions is to enhance, not supplant, those offered in Cohesion in English; English Text functions for the most part to recontextualise Halliday and Hasan's conception of cohesion from the perspective of discourse semantics. Their very rich descriptions of texture in English will not in general be recapitulated, but rather presumed. This is particularly true with respect to SUBSTITUTION and ELISIPIS [sic], which will barely be touched on at all (see Chapter 6 below for further discussion).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Halliday & Hasan (1976) analysed data and came up wth the theory of lexicogrammatical cohesion and its subtypes. Martin (1992), on the other hand, does not take data and come up with a theory of discourse semantics. Instead, he takes the hard won theorising of Halliday & Hasan and merely relabels (his misunderstanding of) it:

• lexicogrammatical cohesion is rebranded as discourse semantics,
• cohesive reference is rebranded as identification,
• cohesive conjunction is rebranded as conjunction (later 'connexion'), and
• lexical cohesion is rebranded as ideation.

By doing so, Martin gains institutional credit for the original intellectual work of Halliday & Hasan.

[2] To be clear, the reason why Martin was not able to reinvent Halliday & Hasan's ellipsis–&–substitution as discourse semantics is that it sets up a relationship that is lexicogrammatical, not directly semantic; see Halliday (1985: 296-7).