Tuesday 10 November 2015

Using Ideational Labels For Textual Units And Vice Versa

Martin (1992: 325):
These ideational units at the level of discourse semantics are brought into relation with the interpersonal and textual units proposed in Table 5.18.

Table 5.18. Discourse semantics: units proposed in English Text
interpersonal
textual
ideational:
logical

experiential
exchange



move

message


participant

message part


Blogger Comments:

[1] Given that participants are construals of experience (experiential metafunction), and that the textual metafunction is second-order — concerned with organising the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions — the use of the term 'participant' for a unit of the textual metafunction betrays a misunderstanding of what the metafunctions mean.  As explained in posts critiquing Chapter 3, this specific misunderstanding arises from confusing the textual system that makes cohesive reference with the elements thus cohesively related.

[2] In SFL theory, 'message' is a unit of the textual metafunction at the level of semantics.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) discuss the realisation of textual meaning in the clause under the title 'Clause as Message', and in textual cohesion, the (lexicogrammatical) system of conjunction realises transitions between (semantic) messages.

[3] Here again, the relation between units of the logical and experiential metafunctions is misconstrued as composition (part–whole).

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