Martin's Claim That Cohesion Is Only "Measured" Between Clause Complexes [New]

Martin (1992: 19):

In essence, the amount of cohesion in a text varies according to mode: the more spoken the text, the less cohesion, since clause complexes are longer in speech than in writing (Halliday 1985b) and cohesion is only measured between clause complexes. The alternative developed in English Text will be to pursue Halliday and Hasan's definition of text as a semantic unit by setting up a level of discourse semantics stratified with respect to lexicogrammar on the content plane. This will permit generalisations to be made across structural and non-structural textual relations.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This bare assertion, unsupported by evidence, is misleading. It is the type of cohesion that can be expected to vary according to mode. For example, while spoken language might involve less conjunction than written language, given its preference for clause complexing, Martin provides no evidence that spoken language involves less substitution–&–ellipsis or lexical cohesion.

[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue. As Halliday & Hasan (1976: 9) make clear, grammatical structure is irrelevant to cohesion:

The most obvious falsifiers of Martin's claim are substitution–&–ellipsis and lexical cohesion, but anaphoric reference within the clause complex also functions cohesively. Consider the following instance:

Pauline took her son to the museum and showed him the dinosaur skeletons.

Within this clause complex, the cohesive relations include:

reference: her -> Pauline, him -> son;
lexical cohesion: museum -> dinosaur, museum ->skeleton, dinosaur -> skeleton;
ellipsis: and Pauline showed …

[3] To be clear, what Martin actually does is 

1. relocate Halliday & Hasan's cohesion, the non-structural grammatical resource of the textual metafunction, to his new stratum of discourse semantics — which he misunderstands as a module, rather than a level of symbolic abstraction — and
2. rebrand Halliday & Hasan's reference and substitution–&–ellipsis as Martin's identification,
3. rebrand Halliday & Hasan's lexical cohesion as Martin's ideation,
4. rebrand Halliday & Hasan's cohesive conjunction as Martin's conjunction, and
5. rebrand Halliday's (semantic) speech function as Martin's (discourse semantic) negotiation.

 In doing so, Martin misconstrues, not only lexicogrammar as semantics, but

1. textual functions (lexical cohesion) as experiential (ideation), and
2. textual functions (cohesive conjunction) as logical (conjunction)

thereby adding further to the theoretical inconsistencies in his model.

Not Recognising The 'Continuity' Between Clause Taxis And Conjunctive Cohesion

Martin (1992: 19):

The main problem with this treatment [of clause taxis and conjunctive cohesion by Halliday and Hasan] is that it fails to bring out the continuity of the structural (i.e. as soon as, because, whereas) and the non-structural (i.e. immediately, consequently, by contrast) resources.

 Blogger Comment:

This is not true.  Systemic Functional grammar provides the means of understanding what they have in common as well as how they differ in function.

They differ in terms of metafunction: taxis involves logical relations between units in univariate structures (complexes), whereas conjunctive cohesion involves non-structural textual relations.

But textual cohesion involves the deployment of all the metafunctions for textual (metafunctional) ends:

• conjunction is the deployment of logical resources to textual ends,
• reference is the deployment of textual resources to textual ends
• substitution and ellipsis is the deployment of interpersonal resources to textual ends, and
• lexical cohesion is the deployment of experiential resources to textual ends.

Therein lies the 'continuity' between clause taxis and conjunctive cohesion.