Misconstruing Continuity And Clarifying Elaboration As Additive Extension

Martin (1992: 219):

Used to demarcate stages in a text, well needs to be grouped with items such as now, allright, okay, incidentally, by the way, anyway, anyhow and so on.  These all have the function of organising discourse at a global level.  These can be subclassified according to whether they are oriented to genre or field.  Well, now, okay and allright frame a text generically, with respect to its schematic structure. …

Conjunctions like incidentally, by the way, anyway and anyhow are more oriented to field than genre.  They signal a change of topic, with incidentally or by the way marking a departure from what has gone before and items like anyway or anyhow marking a return.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is the classification of wordings, the view from below, not the view from above (conjunctive relations).

[2] All systems of the textual metafunction, including all the cohesive resources — conjunction, reference, substitution-&-ellipsis and lexical cohesion — have the function of organising discourse (text).

[3] These are continuatives.  Their function is to indicate that a clause beginning a new turn is cohesively related to a clause in the previous turn.  Here they are misconstrued as marking the expansion relation of addition, a subtype of extension.

[4] In SFL theory, incidentally and by the way mark distractive clarification, a subtype of elaboration.  (See Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 542.)  Here they are being misconstrued as marking addition, a subtype of extension.

[5] In SFL theory, anyway and anyhow can mark dismissive clarification, a subtype of elaboration.  (See Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 542.)  Here they are being misconstrued as marking addition, a subtype of extension.

[6] Signalling a change of topic is a textual function.  These are being construed as resources of the logical metafunction at the level of discourse semantics.

[7] In SFL theory, continuity and conjunction are cohesive resources that mark textual transitions in the organisation of text.  It is not a matter of being "oriented" to either field or genre.  The relation of field, the ideational dimension of context, to semantics is realisation.  It will be seen later that the notion of genre — though misconstrued as a stratum of context — actually confuses:

1. text organisation (the textual metafunction at the semantic stratum), and 
2. one of a subset of text types (registers varying according to mode).