Shooshi Dreyfus Falsely Accusing ChRIS CLÉiRIGh Of Impropriety

Shoshana Dreyfus wrote to asflanet on 9 Feb 2024, at 10:33:

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.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this is pure invention on Dreyfus' part. Firstly, the number of people willing to publicly discuss matters of theory or analysis on email discussion lists is typically about 1% of the total number of subscribers, and these usually being the same very small set of people, and this does not vary with CLÉiRIGh's extremely rare participation on lists other than Sys-func.

Secondly, of the two posts sent, the first expressed admiration for an insightful post that everyone else was ignoring, and the second provided assistance to the list members by quoting Halliday on the adverbial group. They are repeated below.

(1)

Colm,

I can see where you're coming from, because, in terms of meaning, the vast cloud of gas and dust did turn into the Earth, under the influence of gravity, 4,600 million years ago, and so the relation is one of identity, from that perspective. It's just that here it is worded as a material clause (e.g. unmarked present tense) with a circumstance of Manner: means.

But my main reason for commenting is just to say how great it is to see someone reasoning grammatically.

More power to you.

Sláinte,

ChRIS

(2)

Dear Scholars,

The following might be helpful to anyone who has difficulty in distinguishing nominal groups from adverbial groups.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 419-22):

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.

ChEeRS,

ChRIS

∞

Tone policing – focusing on emotion behind (or resulting from) a message rather than the message itself as a discrediting tactic.