David Rose Negatively Judging The Late Ruqaiya Hasan

David Rose wrote to sys-func on 17/6/22 at 12:04:

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

More importantly, after Hasan's death, a symposium was organised to celebrate her life's work, and Martin was one of the speakers. In his talk he falsely accused Hasan of plagiarism, and urged his audience to use his model instead of hers. When pressure was later put on Martin to retract his claim, he only acknowledged his factual error; there was no apology. See Jim Martin "Honouring" The Late Ruqaiya Hasan. The truth, of course, is that it was Martin who practiced the plagiarism, and at Hasan's expense.

[2] Rose then accuses his own reviewers of the type of behaviour he himself engages in: disparaging work he does not align with. Again, Rose is not at all concerned with the question of whether the review had any validity. 

[3] Rose next positively appreciates Hasan for her work that he misrepresents as discourse semantics (Martin's model) so that he can negatively appreciate her for her subsequent (non-Martinian) work which he falsely reduces to mere 'message semantics'.

[4] Rose then negatively judges Hasan for forcing Halliday to choose between her and Jim Martin, whom Rose positively appreciates as the 'leader of the next SFL generation'. On the first point, Halliday's "choice" is his own model. On the second point, Halliday "chose" Matthiessen, not Martin, to edit later editions of his seminal work Introduction to Functional Grammar.

[5] Rose next negatively judges Halliday for not adopting Martin's discourse semantics, and for not recommending it highly enough. On the one hand, the acknowledgement was added by Matthiessen — it does not appear in Halliday's editions — and on the other hand, it generously endorses the work of Martin and Rose, without judgement.

[6] Rose then negatively judges Hasan by misrepresenting her intention in critiquing Martin's model to be to 'split' the SFL community. On the one hand, Rose is again uninterested in the validity of her critique, and on the other hand, any 'splitting' of the community arises from the 'splitting' of the theory — by Martin.

[7] Rose finishes by contrasting a positive appreciation of Hasan's career with a negative appreciation of her legacy.

∞

Rose's post proved so outrageous that he was forced to apologise in order to staunch the flow of condemnation from colleagues on the sys-func list. And, for this very pragmatic response, Rose was then congratulated for being 'brave'. However, as his apology, below, demonstrates, Rose only acknowledges that his post was 'poorly framed', and continues blaming Hasan's critique of Martin's model for 'the split in the community':

Her contribution was enormous and a huge influence on all of us. I was lamenting the split in the community and the place of that paper. Very poorly framed. I apologise to everyone offended by my poor judgement, and thanks for pulling me up on it.