John Bateman Negatively Judging 'Us'

On 10/10/13, John Bateman wrote on the sysfling list:

I'm afraid we know rather less than we might hope (or think?) on some of these issues though.

Appraised	Appraisal
	Polarity	Attitude
we	negative	judgement: capacity: cognitive

The patronising 'we' in this judgement of negative capacity proved to be accurate only as a self-assessment, as demonstrated here.  It can be interpreted as an instance of Schoolteacher Syndrome.

David Rose Positively Judging Himself And Negatively Judging Michael Halliday

On 2/10/13, David Rose wrote on sysfling:

There is also a social division of labour within the field of production of SFL theory, organised along the lines of the theory itself. Some of us are specialist phonologists, others grammarians, others discourse analysts, and many others are specialists in fields beyond linguistics.

It is a matter of interest to me, and perhaps worth researching further, that the latter two groups have provided the bulk of contributions to the explosion of research generated over the last 30 years by the discovery that the contexts of language are also stratified as register and genre. On the other hand, of those among us who still seem to find most difficulty with accepting this concept, the first two groups seem to predominate.

Any thoughts?

Blogger Comments:

Appraised	Appraisal
	Polarity	Attitude
phonologists, grammarians = those among us who still seem to find most difficulty with accepting stratified context	negative	judgement: tenacity
discourse analysts, and specialists in fields beyond linguistics	positive	judgement: capacity

That is, the group of linguists that Rose judges negatively includes Michæl Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, Christian Matthiessen and Bill Greaves. Rose's wording "still seem to find most difficulty with accepting" suggests his judgement of them is of negative tenacity, that is: obstinacy.

The group of linguists that Rose judges positively includes himself.  Rose's wording "provided the bulk of contributions" suggests his judgement is of positive capacity.

Cf Halliday (2008: 84-5):

I would like to avoid getting trapped in those same disjunctions.  I shall refer from time to time to "the grammarian" and "the discourse analyst", which makes it sound as though these have to be different people; but it is obvious, I hope, that the same person may take on both rôles, and probably most of us do, unless we adopt a rigidly formalist approach.

Cf Halliday (2008: 126):

… the power of the text resides in the system, because it is the system that determines the meaning and the significance of the ongoing choices made by writers and speakers. It is a mistake to restrict our angle of vision to just one perspective or the other, or to treat the discourse analyst and grammarian as if they inhabited two different realms of intellectual being.