Lise Fontaine Personally Attacking Her Paper's Reviewer

Lise Fontaine wrote to Sysfling on 23 august at 01:11:

Dear fellow Sysfling members

Perhaps I should be flattered that 'The Blogger' has set up an entire blog for the sole purpose of discrediting me and the ideas I put forward in a paper from 2017. However, I don't appreciate it at all. I certainly have no objection to people disagreeing with those ideas, or to showing where I was wrong, misinformed or otherwise rubbish. However, this personal attack not only makes me feel very bad, I feel it is very bad for our community for a single person (presumably?) to anonymously attack someone without any recourse for dialogue.

I am pretty sure I know who has done this. This sort of thing has happened before. I can't imagine what I've done to deserve these repeated misrepresentations and personal attacks but I hope this person realises that this kind of thing has career destroying potential especially at a time when evaluations of work can be done by searching online. Luckily I'm at the end of my career so I don't care too much but if anyone who is an early career academic gets this treatment by 'The Blogger', it could ruin their chances of getting promotion, getting invited on projects etc.

If anyone is close to 'The Blogger' please encourage this person to think carefully about the damage they are doing to academic discussion in our community, not to mention to individuals.

Here is the website in question: https://lexisasmostlocalcontext.blogspot.com/

with best wishes

Lise

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading because it is untrue. The blog is a meticulous review of Fontaine (2017) which uses theory and reasoned argument as evidence to clarify and critique the ideas put forth in the paper. Any intelligent scholar can deepen their knowledge of SFL Theory by taking the trouble to read the review closely. If anything discredits Fontaine, it is the quality of her paper and her misrepresentation of the review as a personal attack.

personal attack (plural personal attacks)

1. An abusive remark on or relating to somebody's person instead of providing evidence when examining another person's claims or comments.

[2] This is misleading, because it falsely claims that the blog does not show "where I was wrong, misinformed or otherwise rubbish", and falsely claims that Fontaine has no objection to this being shown.

[3] This is misleading, because it dismisses all the carefully reasoned argumentation in the review as a personal attack. More importantly, Fontaine has chosen to negatively judge ("personally attack") the reviewer instead of addressing any of the argumentation in the review of her publication.

[4] This is misleading because it is untrue, since the review is not anonymous and "recourse for dialogue" is afforded for every post by the provision to make comments.

[5] This is misleading in two respects. On the one hand, it falsely claims that the reasoned arguments in the review are repeated misrepresentations and personal attacks. On the other hand, it falsely claims that Fontaine has only acted at all times with propriety, despite having previously abused her position as Sysfling manager to unsubscribe her reviewer from the list when she was made aware of the review of Fawcett (2010), by Robin Fawcett posing as 'Dmytro Poremskyi' on the NASFLA site; see here.

[6] This is misleading because it is inconsistent with Fontaine's claim that the content of the review is repeated misrepresentations and personal attacks, rather than reasoned argumentation. On the one hand, this is an unintentional acknowledgement of the validity of the argumentation, and on the other hand, it argues that institutional promotion should not be based on the academic standards demonstrated by the candidates.

[7] This is misleading, because it is the lack of reasoned argumentation that threatens the academic and intellectual standards of work by members of the SFL community.

∞

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

— Thomas Paine

Without freedom of thought, 

there can be no such thing as wisdom,

and no such thing as public liberty 

without freedom of speech.

— Benjamin Franklin

Mick O'Donnell And David Rose Positively Judging Jim Martin

Mick O'Donnell wrote to sys-func on 14/7/22 at 9:16:

Jim Martin has always impressed me as someone who, while respecting the whole, is willing to change core assumptions, when the needs of linguistic modeling require it. … what is important is that Jim has been (and continues to be) willing to throw out established ideas (even his own) if they don't fit new data. And anyone who is not willing to do similarly is kidding themselves if they think they are doing linguistic science.

and David Rose replied at 9:23:

At great personal risk

 

Blogger Comments:

Cf. Martin & Rose (2007: 62) on Martin:

His communion with Mandela, at such a distance in so many respects …

For an examination of Martin's theorising, see the review of Martin (1992) here.

For an example of Martin's "propriety", see his falsely accusing Ruqaiya Hasan of plagiarism at a symposium convened to celebrate her life's work after her death here.

Mick O'Donnell Misrepresenting The Content Of A Blog He Thinks No Longer Exists

Mick O'Donnell replied to David Kellogg on sys-func on 29/6/22 at 00:43:   

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Chris's quotes from MAKH. it is not the positive presentation of the center, but rather the continual negative portrayal of the differing views. But not usually on sys-func, more typically on one of Chris's blogs, I think intended most for his friends. I see he has dropped http://thoughts-that-cross-my-mind.blogspot.com, a site that regularly snidely put down anyone he didn't like (I was sometimes there), but more importantly, he got negatively personal regarding people I care about, including unethical things (lifting stuff from a friend's Facebook, putting it on his blog, and when she asked him to take it down, he didn't, just posted on the blog her privately-sent request to remove it.)

This is not what MAKH was about: he was always fair, did not attack other views (with rare exceptions), but rather painted a picture of what he believed was best.

So, positive quotes, good, reasoned arguments, good, snide comments on semi-hidden blogspots, not so good.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here O'Donnell misrepresents as "snidely putting down anyone he didn't like" the reasoned arguments on Thoughts That Cross My Mind that explain why the confidently expressed views of colleagues are in fact inconsistent with SFL Theory.

[2] To be clear, the blog is intended to help anyone who wants to improve their understanding of SFL Theory, especially those who are taught by colleagues who do not understand it. To date, the blog has been viewed 82,254 times, which is equivalent to about 100 views for every subscriber to Sysfling, the largest SFL email list.

[3] The question here is why O'Donnell raises the issue of a blog which he believes no longer exists. To be clear, it is because O'Donnell falsely believes that the blog no longer exists that he feels safe in being able to misrepresent its content. The incident that O'Donnell regards as "unethical" was the downloading of Fontaine's image from her university website so it could be placed next to her two posts on the blog. Fontaine wasn't singled out in this regard. All posts on the blog feature an image of the colleague whose views are examined. The image at the time was simply:

As regular viewers of the blog in the intervening 10 years can testify, no private request for the picture to be removed appears on the blog. It might be added that this incident "blew up" at the same time as I was being dishonestly vilified on the Sysfling list in the week of my mother's funeral:

David Rose Negatively Judging My 'Behaviour' and

Robin Fawcett Negatively Judging My SFL Blogs

[4] To be clear, currently there are 22 posts on the blog that examine O'Donnell's understanding of SFL Theory, all of which can be viewed here.

[5] Again, O'Donnell misleads by implying that the reasoned arguments that explain why colleagues' views are misunderstandings of theory are not reasoned arguments, but merely an "attack on other views" that do not "paint a picture" of what is consistent with theory.

[6] This is misleading. To be clear, the blog  Thoughts That Cross My Mind is not "semi-hidden", as demonstrated by the fact that it has been viewed more than 80,000 times. A link to the blog also appears at least once a week on the Sys-func list. O'Donnell's complaint here is that what he misrepresents as 'snide comments' are not as publicly available as they should be.

∞

Again, O'Donnell engages in the very act that he deplores in others: making personal attacks instead of reasoning on the basis of evidence.

Mick O'Donnell Falsely Accusing The Sys-Func Moderator Of Misogyny

Mick O'Donnell wrote sys-func on 28/6/22 at 19:37:

Chris, your blogspot is a place where you choose to insult those who are not as pure as you. In some cases, your misogynist tendencies shine through. This is the worst of what we have become.

Blogger Comments:

1. Here O'Donnell indulges in the behaviour he falsely accuses his colleague of doing: insulting.

2. 'Pure' here means being true to theory (theoretically consistent).

3. There is no misogyny on the blog Thoughts That Cross My Mind, as the blog itself demonstrates, and with regard to gender, the blog treats males and females equally. Here O'Donnell has told an outright lie in order to vilify.

4. A few years ago, O'Donnell, supported by John Bateman, tried to deceive ChRIS into writing a paper for a non-existent collection they dishonestly claimed to be putting together.

5. As a postgraduate student, O'Donnell and his former collaborator, Peter Sefton, routinely ridiculed a female student from another country to her face, taking advantage of the fact that she trusted them to act sincerely and was unable to recognise the ridicule. This behaviour was observed not only regularly in the Sydney University Linguistics Department but more publicly at the 1992 ISFC at Macquarie University. She subsequently dropped out, and soon after had a nervous breakdown.

6. For some, dishonest vilification like O'Donnell's is "the worst of what we have become". See also:

David Rose Negatively Judging My 'Behaviour'.

7. To throw O'Donnell's dishonest nastiness into sharp relief, here's an email ChRIS received from a close friend of his partner Deb (who is suffering from early onset dementia):

Chris I think you are amazing. Your resilience and the way you have been able to manage these huge changes in your life have been incredible. I admire you very much and I’m so glad my dear Deb has you there. I know it’s been very challenging but you face those challenges.

Love from Anne.

and from another friend following Deb's premature death:

But even more importantly you cared for Deb through all of the days of her life with dementia in the most loving way I can imagine. The world would be a better place if more of us could be so compassionate & caring.

Ann Xx

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.

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.

David Rose Judging 'Old Man' Halliday

David Rose wrote to sys-func on 3/6/22 at 11:08:

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.

and on 8/6/22 at 17:10: 

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

David Rose Evoking Negative Judgement Of David Kellogg

 David Rose responded To David Kellogg on sys-func on 8/6/22 at 17:10:

DK’s argument seems reasonable until perhaps point e) when for some reason, judgement overtakes reason (which DK himself might admit;).

Blogger Comments:

David Kellogg had written on sys-func on 8/6/22 at 6:50:

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.

David Rose Evoking Negative Assessment By Inscribing Positive Judgement

David Rose wrote to sys-func on 2 June 2022 at 7:01:

Can I also express gratitude to Chris for his courage and grace in stimulating this forum. I have missed it.

Blogger Comments:

Since "stimulating this forum" requires neither courage nor grace, the only purpose in raising these qualities is to set up the insinuation that they are othertimes lacking, while implying that they are not lacking in one who has missed them (a positive self-assessment).

See also David Rose Negatively Judging My 'Behaviour'.

Jim Martin And David Rose Recommending Martin et al.

James Martin wrote to SYSFLING on 3 Mar 2022, at 23:02:

Alongside notional reasoning from above we could explore reactances (such as those reviewed in detail in Deploying Functional Grammar, Chapter 4 Section 3 Troubleshooting).

David Rose wrote to: SYSFLING on 4 Mar 2022, 09:58:

For a practical introduction to SFG, Deploying Functional Grammar provides a helpful clear model.

and then on 6 Mar 2022, at 22:20:

See also IFG Table 5-45 Criteria for distinguishing process types. (Chapter 5 of IFG discusses these thoroughly, for each process type. Deploying Functional Grammar makes them easy)

Blogger Comments:

For a reality check, see the close examination of Deploying Functional Grammar here, especially Chapter 4 here. This work is inconsistent with IFG with regard to distinguishing behavioural from verbal processes, the experiential structure of the nominal group, and most especially, the logical structure of the verbal group.