Using Appraisal Theory To Reveal Primate Dominance Strategies In The Systemic Functional Linguistics Community
Wednesday 29 June 2022
Mick O'Donnell Falsely Accusing The Sys-Func Moderator Of Misogyny
Sunday 19 June 2022
David Rose Negatively Judging The Late Ruqaiya Hasan
It was sad to be reminded of RH’s ‘refutation’ of JRM’s work, especially as he constantly refers and defers to her throughout English Text and ever since, building the field respectfully on the work of its elders. There has been nothing else like it in SFL that I know of. The nearest in my own experience was the dismissive review of The Western Desert Code in AJL, which aimed to keep Australian descriptivists in the dark about SFL for another generation. It was sad I think for herself, as Cohesion in English established her as a major authority in discourse analysis, but her later research retreated from its visionary discourse semantics to cataloguing message types. It was sad for MAKH because it asked him to choose between his ally and leader of the next SFL generation, and the stance of his life partner. He also retreated from the discourse semantic trajectory of CinE to ambivalence and guarded acknowledgements, such as in Ch9 of IFG...‘The organisation of text is semantic rather than lexicogrammatical, and (at least as far as cohesion is concerned; we are not going into questions of register/ contextual structure in this book; see Halliday & Hasan, 1985; Hasan, 1984; Martin, 1992: Ch. 7, Martin & Rose, 2003, 2008) much looser than that of grammatical units.’It was sad also for SFL, as it aimed to split a community that was and remains vulnerable to its institutional competitors. A sad legacy for a brilliant career.
Blogger Comments:
[1] Rose begins by negatively appreciating Kellogg mentioning Hasan's refutation of Martin's model of context because the refutation — which was without equal — was Hasan being disrespectful to Martin despite the fact that Martin has always been respectful of Hasan. That is, Rose is not at all concerned with the question of whether the refutation has any validity.
On the positive judgement of Martin's propriety, the reason why Martin "constantly refers" to Hasan in his English Text (1992) is that Halliday & Hasan (1976) is the data for Martin's theorising. That is, as explained here, Martin's discourse semantics is Halliday & Hasan's cohesion misunderstood, relocated from textual lexicogrammar, and rebranded as Martin's systems.
Moreover, it is simply not true that Martin has always been respectful of Hasan. For example, with regard to Martin (1992), see, for example:
Presenting Misunderstandings Of Hasan's Cohesive Harmony As Deficiencies In The Model
Misrepresenting Hasan's Work On Coherence As Formalist
Not Acknowledging Hasan As Intellectual Source
Under-Acknowledging Hasan As Theoretical Source
Strategically Misrepresenting Hasan
Thursday 16 June 2022
David Rose Negatively Judging David Kellogg For Judging Negatively
David Rose replied to David Kellogg on sys-func on 16/6/22 at 12:00:
I tried to say this more subtly before, as ‘judgement overtaking reason’ …the rhetorical problem with forceful appreciations like ‘rejection’ and ‘refutation’, is that they shut down readers’ options for evaluation, and so weaken the writer’s argument, except for the already convinced.
Blogger Comments:
Here Rose falsely accuses Kellogg of using judgement instead of reason while doing this very thing himself. That is, instead of presenting a reasoned response on the validity of the content of Kellogg's post, Rose merely judges Kellogg as judging instead of reasoning.
What David Kellogg actually wrote to sys-func on 16/6/22 at 11:18:
There is an excellent discussion of the important differences (and also the even more important similarities) between the 1961 grammar and the SFL of ten years later in
Matthiessen, C.M.I.M., Wang, B., Ma, Y.-Y. and Mwinllaaru, I.N. (2022). Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics. Singapore: Springer Nature.See p. 104, and table 4.3. But see also Christian Matthiessen's comment on how scale-&-category theory was already neo-Firthian, because it introduced the paradigmatic axis as co-equal to the syntagmatic one. Matthiessen has a beautiful demonstration of how this made it easier for Halliday to deal with consonant clusters (because you could treat them as offering different paradigmatic systems at different points in the syntagmatic structure) and how that, in turn, led to the clear distinction between instantiation and realisation that is rejected in the Martin model.But see also Ruqaiya Hasan's refutation of "connotative semiotic" and "discourse semantics" in Volume Four of her Collected Works:Hasan, R. (2016). Context in the System and Process of Language. London: Equinox.
Tuesday 14 June 2022
David Rose Judging 'Old Man' Halliday
I’m interested in the fields these metaphors are imported from. Put ‘exchange’ together with ‘powerhouse where meaning are made’, with what we know of the old man’s history and what motivated his career, and we get the field of Marxist theory of economic production and exchange, combined with Hjelmslev’s theory of semiotic strata.
Far from revisionism, each of us can do no more than apply and extend the old man’s work…
Blogger Comments:
1. Old = venerable
2. Old = antiquated, outdated, outmoded, obsolete, passé
Saturday 11 June 2022
David Rose Evoking Negative Judgement Of David Kellogg
DK’s argument seems reasonable until perhaps point e) when for some reason, judgement overtakes reason (which DK himself might admit;).
Blogger Comments:
e) … The idea that the "discourse semantics" of Martin and Rose is somehow "implicit" in the examples of MAKH is a classic revisionist move on the part of Rose. In this case, it's an extremely weak revisionist move, since the theoretician (MAKH) is also the primary data gatherer and data interpreter, and he explicitly rejects this possibility. …
See also David Rose Denying The Revisionism Of Martin's Discourse Semantics.
Thursday 2 June 2022
David Rose Evoking Negative Assessment By Inscribing Positive Judgement
David Rose wrote to sys-func on 2 June 2022 at 7:01: