John Bateman Positively Judging His Own Cognitive Capacity At The Expense Of Ed McDonald

When Edward McDonald responded to Brad Smith's post on 'Bureau-speak' on sys-func and sysfling:

What’s an “ontology of capabilities” when it’s at home? Or you could just as easily say a “capability of ontologies”

John Bateman replied to sysfling on 29 Nov 2019 at 21:17:

the capability of an ontology of capabilities is to formalise the notion of capabilities and set out subclasses and properties of such. 

or is a storeroom of potatoes the same as a potato of storerooms... duuh.... what's the problem? 

Beautiful prose it is not, but well within registerial norms for that discourse...
it certainly helps though if you are already comfortable with using the O-word :-)

Blogger Comments:

Appraised	Appraisal
	Polarity	Attitude
Ed McDonald	negative	judgement: capacity: cognitive
John Bateman	positive	judgement: capacity: cognitive

Incidentally, the 'Bureau-speak' in question was:

To recap, having a whole of govt architecture allows us to build an ontology of capabilities across govt. Coupled with a more agile funding model, it will allow us to move more quickly when trying new solutions and capabilities or scaling up platforms to address emerging needs.

To be clear, the reason Bateman sees no problem with the deliberate use of obfuscatory language is that he is a keen user of it himself.  See, for example, The Transitivity Of Bamboozlement.

As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 272) explain:

So the more the extent of grammatical metaphor in a text, the more that text is loaded against the learner, and against anyone who is an outsider to the register in question. It becomes elitist discourse, in which the function of constructing knowledge goes together with the function of restricting access to that knowledge, making it impenetrable to all except those who have the means of admission to the inside, or the select group of those who are already there.

It is this other potential that grammatical metaphor has, for making meaning that is obscure, arcane and exclusive, that makes it ideal as a mode of discourse for establishing and maintaining status, prestige and hierarchy, and to establish the paternalistic authority of a technocratic elite whose message is 'this is all too hard for you to understand; so leave the decision-making to us'.