Respectful Solidarity In The Systemic Functional Linguistics Community
Using Appraisal Theory To Reveal Primate Dominance Strategies In The Systemic Functional Linguistics Community
Friday, 7 March 2025
Monday, 3 March 2025
Bateman Likening Analyses Of His Rhetorical Strategies To Racist And Misogynist Texts
As it is, the posts that have been allegedly produced by a ChatGPT instance are similar to any other racist, sexist, mysogynist, violence-advocating sequence of tokens produced by such devices, and having them placed into the discourse of the list as if they were genuine positions or analyses is similarly unsound in so many ways as to offer a good use case scenario for folks to do projects on.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, the ChatGPT analyses of Bateman's rhetorical strategies — and those of O'Donnell and Rose — were genuine analyses carried by ChatGPT in response to the prompt:
Please provide a systematic analysis of the rhetorical strategies used in the following text <quoted email>.
CLÉiRIGh did not alter any settings on the ChatGPT to skew any responses. See How My ChatGPT Became Different.
[2] The choices of the words 'racist' and 'mysogynist' are not accidental. They invoke negative judgements of CLÉiRIGh through intertextual reference. See:
- Yaegan Doran Falsely Accusing The Sys-Func Moderator Of Racism
- Mick O'Donnell Falsely Accusing The Sys-Func Moderator Of Misogyny
"As it is, the posts that have been allegedly produced by a ChatGPT instance are similar to any other racist, sexist, mysogynist, violence-advocating sequence of tokens produced by such devices."
- Judgement: Propriety (negative) – Strongly condemns the posts by associating them with socially unacceptable discourse.
"Having them placed into the discourse of the list as if they were genuine positions or analyses is similarly unsound in so many ways as to offer a good use case scenario for folks to do projects on."
- Judgement: Veracity (negative) – Frames the inclusion of the posts as invalid and epistemically flawed.
- Appreciation: Valuation (negative, invoked) – The phrase "as if they were genuine positions or analyses" implies that they lack authenticity or intellectual worth.
Tuesday, 25 February 2025
O'Donnell Negatively Judging CLÉiRIGh Through Deception
Michael O'Donnell wrote to Sysfling on 18 Feb 2025, at 22:36:
Chris,
I am glad you are responding in person, rather than using your automated attack dog. Less toxic.And you may be right about 2020 and what happened there. David mentioned 2012, so I responded to that. Around 2020, a different fight about your toxicity, and I don't want to go into that again.You claim you are the defender of the list, and only attack the toxic. You tried that on your list Sysfan, but Asflanet was set up, and many abandoned your list for the more moderated list.You then moved into Asflanet, and "defending" from that list from toxicity earnt you multiple warnings to desist or be banned.So, it seems you moved your attention to Sysfling, as your new home for "anti-toxicity". And you say myself, John Bateman and David Rose are the toxic voices on the list.To this, we could add those for whom you have built hate pages on your blogsite, and who no longer post because of you, Jim Martin and Lise Fontaine, Carlos Gouveia, Ellissa Asp, Robin Fawcett and others who are named in your Mistakes blogs. It must be difficult for you to need to defend SFL from all these "toxic" people, many of them major voices in SFL.But my main concern is for all those who are not yet on your "toxic" list. After my post the other day, 3 people emailed me offlist to say "thank you, I was afraid to say anything, for fear of drawing his wrath" (my paraphrase). Only 3, but I take these 3 to represent a larger silent majority, who are not posting to sysfling for fear of getting the kind of aggressive responses you have been sending to those who do have the courage to post. Or of becoming a target of your hate-blog.On a different issue: "The "persecution" since 2020 has been a reasoned review of Lise's paper"
- I saw your blog Chris. You mined her Facebook, found things she was telling her friends and relatives (a concern about putting on weight), and posted this on your blog, with a commentary about how silly she was. She sent you an email asking you to take this down, and you posted that email on your blog, again saying what a stupid woman she was. You are not the "reasoning" defender of SFLers here. You are the problem. Maybe this was before 2020, so your response as written may be true, but deceptive. You attacks since then have assumed a veneer of reason, but contain the same underlying sense of predator preying on the lamb.
But even assuming that your review is reasoned, I am more concerned with your motivation to write "reasoned" reviews of pèople's work, how are the people selected for review, and why is it only their faults are "discovered", not their strengths. You are selectively choosing particula people to target, and selectively choosing which aspects of their reality to place on the public web. You are choosing to negatively appraise certain people at length.
Now, you are free to write as you like, but you should be aware that you are choosing to textually deface fellow member of your community. And that is the problem: instead of building on Halliday's heritage, you are shooting down those you don't like. Being publically-posted negative reviews, these "rational reviews" can cost people job or funding opportunities, so a real world effect of you actions. So you "defend" SFL by tearing it down.
And there are a lot of people on your target list who do not deserve that. Carlos, who has spent his life supporting SFL in Portugal and beyond, earnt his attack on your bad side because your proposal was not accepted for a conference. You then examined the programme committee of that conference for possible culprits of the crime against you. And launched attacks on at least one of those. This is not "rational" behaviour. Lise who re-united a fragmented SFL community in Europe, she does not deserve this. John Bateman, in my view a continual voice of reason on the list, does not deserve this.
So, an appeal to you Chris, please continue to respond to any points made on this list, or open questions, as you do so well. but please, stop AI-bombing any response of those you don't like, and secondly, tone down the persecuting nature of your blogs.Mick
Blogger Comments:
Monday, 24 February 2025
O'Donnell Negatively Judging Himself Through CLÉiRIGh
Hi David,David Rose
Dear Moderator and fellow subscribersCan I ask why the decision by the international committee to ban this person from sysfling since 2012 has been overturned?This is a lie propagated by Chris, which I see is widely adopted in Sydney. There has not been a single case in the 30 year history of Sysfling of a person being "banned" (forcefully unsubscribed) from sysfling.Back in 2012 or so, the server hosting sysfling changed from my university to a listserv in the UK. This listserv had a default setting such that if messages sent from sysfling bounced so many times (could not reach the intended recipient), then that subscriber was automatically unsubscribed. This affected a number of people, unfortunately including Chris, but the setting was changed, and anyone who was unsubscribed could at their will re-subscribe. At the time, many service providers were experimenting on rejecting what it thought was spam, not just tagging it as spam, but bouncing it back. Unfortunately, some of these systems had sysfling on their naughty list. So, Chris was unsubscribed by an automated system because his service provider was over-protective.That is not how Chris tells it. He claims to have been victimised by the then moderator of Sysfling, and has launched a holy crusade against that individual, besmirching her good name whenever he can. he has lost contact with reality, but unfortunately is dragging others down the rabbit hole with him.As for whether Chris should become the first ever ban on sysfling, that is open to debate. His behaviour is destructive to the list's community to a level that as not been seen before.Your own behaviour a decade ago, David, was considered a problem (as hinted at by Maria). But you took the hint and have been generally well behaved for a decade. But your voice them was not silenced (unsubscribed), and you submitted to the community code of cooperation.The present case is different though. Chris oiginally took on the role of David standing up to Goliath (with Rose being goliath), but David has supplanted Goliath as the menace to the community. Just because he started his activity for good reason does not mean that his bullying obsessive behaviour should be tolerated.Now, given the nature of this list, the first response of people has been to voice their protest by unsubscribing. Even those who have long argued for reason on this list, such as John Knox. But some don't want to unsubscribe from their community list because of one flamer. They have suggested forcefully removing the abuser instead of watching victims, and innocent bystanders, flee the scene.But look what happened last time, when a faulty listserv setting dropped Chris off the list. That lead to 13 years of Chris bad-mouthing someone who has dedicated their life to serving the SFL community, who has done nothing but good for us, building the SFL community in Europe and beyond. What would this maniac do if he was actually banned in truth? I pèrsonally would not want to be part of that decision.And why then am i writing this? Basically because I don't like seeing bullies get away with their abuse. I like to live in a community which is mutually constructive and supportive. I will not unsubscribe myself from sysfling, but hate to see what it is becoming recently. So I speak out my views, and will ignore Chris's chatgpt-mediated responses, which are not worth the bile they are printed on.
mick
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is entirely fictitious. For this, and the many other dishonest fabrications in this email, see here.
[2]
To be clear, Cléirigh's "holy crusade" was publicising the fact that he had been unsubscribed by Fontaine in 2020 and reviewing one of her papers on the basis on evidence. It can be read here.
Cléirigh's messages to Sysfling were analyses of the rhetorical strategies used by Rose, Bateman and O'Donnell to bully. For reasons why O'Donnell projects his own toxic behaviour onto Cléirigh, see here. For reasons why O'Donnell received collegial support for his toxic behaviour, see here.
Sunday, 23 February 2025
O'Donnell Judging CLÉiRIGh As A Flaming Psychotic Arsehole
Chris,...and I am talking to you, not to that parrot your have trained to say what you want it to say (note when I put David or John's messages into ChaGPT I do not get anything close to what your version produces. You have trained it to put down whatever message you put in. If you put your own, or Halliday's texts into it, it would be just as critical).Please stop being an arsehole. You are not trying to "defend" the group from dominating voices. You are just trying to fuck over people you don't like. And yes, for a full list of the people you don't like in SFL, I can look at your various blogs. I know I am on it.You are not God's appointed protector of Michael's word. He would have been appalled at how you are behaving. He built by supporting others, not by attacking, and certainly not by attacking in such an idiotically annoying way you are doing. You are not even brave enough to put your responses in your own words, you have to hifr brhinf [sic] the "authority" of am AI.Please, argue with points made by the dominant ones that post to this list, but do it in your own words, and not in the psychotic way you are acting now. You are threatening this community, people are unsubscribing, while others are silent, afraid to enter the debate for fear of getting flamed by you.You are NOT protecting the community, you are damaging it. Please, stop.
Mick
Blogger Comments:
Saturday, 22 February 2025
O'Donnell Negatively Judging CLÉiRIGh for Using ChatGPT to Analyse Rhetorical Strategies
On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 at 06:18, Michael O'Donnell wrote to Sysfling:
Chris,
the only one dominating "the SFL community through intimidation"
is you. Every time anyone opens their mouth, you shoot them down with
your bazooka.
You are single-handedly destroying the community.Mick
Blogger Comments:
To be clear, O'Donnell was here objecting to CLÉiRIGh using ChatGPT to analyse the rhetorical strategies deployed by bullies in a Sysfling discussion. O'Donnell rightly felt threatened by this sort of analysis. CLÉiRIGh was testing the hypothesis that toxic behaviour could not be eradicated by reasoned argument. O'Donnell was one of several who confirmed the hypothesis.
ChatGPT advises:
If you wanted to refine it further, you could make explicit that analysing rhetorical strategies is not the same as deploying them, which is where O'Donnell’s misrepresentation comes in.
Wednesday, 15 January 2025
David Rose Positively Judging The Questioning Of Textbooks
… I imagine you’d agree with one little message though, that people shouldn't be afraid to question our canonical textbooks. …
Blogger Comments:

For two examples of how Rose reacts when Martin's (presumably non-canonical) textbooks are questioned, see:
Thursday, 2 January 2025
David Kellogg Negatively Judging ChRIS CLÉiRIGh as 'Obsequious'
David Kellogg wrote to sys-func on 31 Dec 2024, at 12:11:
I recognise, with appreciation and even gratitude, the strong framing and strong classification that Chris brings to bear on keeping the material-semiotic dialectic and the stratal relation between culture and language separate, not least because it is a refreshing change from the obsequiousness and the refusal to engage with my actual arguments of his ChatGPT stand-in.
Blogger Comments:
Saturday, 13 April 2024
David Kellogg Negatively Judging ChRIS CLÉiRIGh Without Cause
and again on 10 Apr 2024, 16:12:Well, Chris, I very much doubt if you are sufficiently familiar with the quality of my own work to pass any judgement on its theoretical consistency.
You certainly did not pass any judgement on the theoretical consistency of my work: you would need a phenomenal mastery of the Korean language to do that. Precisely for that reason your remark "You can analyse it anyway you want to if don't care about theoretical consistency or the quality of your own work" was as impertinent as it was ungrammatical.
and again on 12 Apr 2024, at 9:04:
What really happened was that I asked a question about clause complexing. … Then I got a bunch of ungrammatical gobbledygook about the quality of my work in reply.
To be clear, Kellogg had asked :
But why can't I consider the clause She tore up the letter, which upset me to be a Circumstance of "She tore up" or some way of complexing the verbal group in the main clause? Why do I have to consider it a ranking clause in its own right?
You can analyse it anyway you want to if [you] don't care about theoretical consistency or the quality of your own work.
That is, CLÉiRIGh had simply stated that it is the desire to maintain the quality of one's work that restricts one's analyses to those that are valid in terms of the theory. The assumption was that Kellogg would desire to maintain the quality of his work. CLÉiRIGh made no reference whatsoever to the quality of Kellogg's actual work.
With respect to Kellogg judging his senior as "impertinent", see
Sunday, 24 March 2024
David Rose Likening A Cancer Survivor Disfigured By Life-Saving Treatment To The Elephant Man
David Rose replied on asflanet at 10:01:But the parson's nose image itself was prompted by seeing my own nose on Friday, just two weeks after its reconstruction following four unsuccessful attempts to remove a basal cell carcinoma plus one final, successful, but radical attempt. I currently have part of my forehead attached to the side of my nose — and it literally looks like nothing more than the rear end of a stuffed chook.
I hope you’re following Joseph Merrick’s lead to put your head in a bag.

Thursday, 14 March 2024
David Kellogg Characterising What ChRIS CLÉiRIGh Was Doing As Cowardly
Here are two arguments against posting "informal logical fallacies" instead of actual linguistic (theoretical and practical) work on our list. See which you find more convincing.a) The posting of informal logical fallacies facilitates petty one-up-manship; it's something people (overwhelmingly white men) do instead of real research, because it yields smugness and self-satisfaction without responsibility — and without results. (It is also cowardly because, as we saw with your very first example, it means you can insinuate and hint at names instead of engaging flesh-and-blood thinkers and their actual arguments!)b) Informal logic, like formal logic, is simply one form of logic. But logic is, by its very nature, an abstraction based on millennia of historical generalisation. Logic always requires some kind of mediating system of concepts — always domain specific — before it can be applied. This is why one kind of logic obtains in arithmetic (where differences are always significant) and a different kind in statistics (where differences can be insignificant). This is why we have one kind of logic in the human sciences (where societies that look after the old, the poor, and the sick are considered more evolved) and a different kind in biology (where the survival of the infirm tends to devolution and extinction). As Vygotsky said, a "Marxist psychology" would be as sterile as a Marxist mineralogy:(Personally, I find BOTH of them convincing; I suppose that means I am either tone-deaf or tone-unpoliced....)
Notice that ALL of the responses to my initial response to Chris's "tone policing fallacy" have been responses to a). That was the argument which included words like "one-up-manship", "smug", "self-satisfaction", "cowardly" to characterise what Chris was doing. …
A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many.
[3] To be clear, these are examples of the argumentum ad hominem fallacy:
Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
[4] This is the exact opposite of what is true, since it is not possible to identify the fallacies in an argument without engaging with the actual argument in order to determine its validity.
[5] To be clear, this mistakes different fields in which logic is applied for different types of logic. Logic is reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity, wherever it is applied. The examples provided for the human sciences and biology are not different types of logic. The former is a value judgement of types of societies, and the latter is a self-contradictory misunderstanding of evolution which posits that survival leads to extinction.
[6] This misunderstands the fallacy of tone policing – which is arguing by
focusing on emotion behind (or resulting from) a message rather than the message itself as a discrediting tactic.
Saturday, 24 February 2024
Yaegan Doran Falsely Accusing ChRIS CLÉiRIGh Of Impropriety
I understand that you disagree with David’s characterisation, and that is fine. Can I request though that when discussing it in asflanet you avoid sarcasm or ridicule such as this?We have had multiple people get in contact who have said they are not comfortable participating in the forum specifically because of a small set of people such as you, who at times writes in a way that people read as condescending, dismissive or ridiculing.I am writing this privately so as to avoid calling you out publicly, but I do request that you tone your messages down in this regard.
Blogger Comments:
[1] Here Doran grants CLÉiRIGh permission to disagree with Rose. But see also
But in this case, contrā Doran's claim, CLÉiRIGh wasn't disagreeing with Rose, and Rose wasn't presenting a characterisation. Rose had written:
Perhaps we need to consider theories in relation to the communities that affiliate around them.
[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue. CLÉiRIGh was not using sarcasm or ridicule; he seriously meant what he said:
Yes, good idea. Let's consider Creation Science and Natural Selection in relation to the communities that affiliate around them. It may not tell us much about the theories, but it will tell us a lot about the communities.
But my main reason for commenting is just to say how great it is to see someone reasoning grammatically. More power to you.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realise it. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast, the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people.
∞
Tuesday, 20 February 2024
David Rose Positively Judging And Appreciating Brad Smith
Brad, your generosity, skill and humility are the soul of this community.
thanks
Saturday, 10 February 2024
Shooshi Dreyfus Falsely Accusing ChRIS CLÉiRIGh Of Impropriety
Dear Kieran and Chris,One of the reasons a wide range of people in the SFL community don’t post to this discussion list is because of the public chastising that seems to happen sometimes when one does post.Perhaps if that could be toned down, or left out entirely, then people might feel more encouraged to join the conversation.
The adverbial group has an adverb as Head, which may or may not be accompanied by modifying elements. … Premodifiers are grammatical items like not and rather and so; there is no lexical premodification in the adverbial group. … The items serving as Premodifiers are adverbs belonging to one of three types – polarity (not), comparison (more, less; as, so) and intensification. … Postmodification is of one type only, namely comparison.
Saturday, 2 December 2023
Ed McDonald Positively Appraising The Winners Of The Inaugural MAK Halliday Prize
Can I add my congratulations to the authors of the winning book on paralanguage. Although I have not yet got round to reading the book itself — too much interesting stuff coming out at the moment! — I did attend the launch last year at the ACU in North Sydney, where it shared the stage with the book on science teaching co-authored by Len Unsworth and his team. As I remember remarking to my landlady afterwards, the launch itself was one of the first such events I had attended post-lockdown, and it was no fluffy PR exercise but a serious academic session, with (from memory) all of the authors of both books either present or attending via Zoom and talking about their experience in doing the research and writing it up.Speaking personally, I am delighted to see such products of multidisciplinary team projects getting published. Given the enormous range of relevant knowledge, it is not feasible anymore for one or two authors from the same discipline to cover it all, and it was very clear from the launch of both books how much the participants had benefited from the cross-fertilisation and collegiality that such collaborations encourage.My congratulations again to the co-authors of the winning book — as well as to the runners up, all of whose books look like must reads — and to the organising committee for carrying through such a worthy — and frankly very cheering! — project.
Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the authors' model of "paralanguage" is Cléirigh's model of body language, rebranded as their own work. See The Inaugural MAK Halliday Prize Awarded To Cléirigh's Plagiarisers.
[2] To be clear, what the authors talked about was the meetings they had in order to try and understand Cléirigh's very simple model.
[3] To be clear, the model was created by one person, Cléirigh, using just one theory in one discipline, SFL.
Monday, 6 November 2023
Vinh To Positively Appreciating David Rose
Saturday, 2 September 2023
Jim Martin Positively Assessing His Misunderstandings Of Axis
Axialist and proud!
- David Rose Misrepresenting Axis As Key To Semantics-Grammar Relations
- David Rose Misrepresenting Halliday's Development Of SFL Theory
- David Rose Misrepresenting Axis
- David Rose Misrepresenting Halliday On Axis
- David Rose Misunderstanding Halliday's "Axial Breakthrough"
- David Rose Endorsing Martin's Misunderstanding Of Stratal Relations As Axial
- David Rose Endorsing Martin's Misunderstandings Of Protolanguage
- David Rose Misrepresenting The Basis Of Systems
- David Rose Confusing Axis With System
- David Rose Misunderstanding Axis And Realisation (Inter Alia)
- David Rose Misunderstanding Axial Relations And Connotative Semiotics
- David Rose Misunderstanding Axial Relations
- David Rose Misunderstanding Metafunctionality And Axis (Inter Alia)
Monday, 21 August 2023
Robin Fawcett Negatively Judging Hostility
One certainly cannot but agree with Lise in that this environment should not be hostile. I believe that the whole X-Bar thread (opening with your question marks) should have been taken off list right from the start (at the very least).
Blogger Comments:
Here Fawcett is attempting to shift blame from himself to Bateman. For Fawcett's hostility 'in this environment', see his multiple ad hominem attacks on Bateman at:
Robin Fawcett Negatively Judging And Negatively Appreciating Halliday And Matthiessen (1999)