Lise Fontaine Negatively Assessing Chris' Blog Of Halliday Quotes

Lise Fontaine wrote to SYSFLING on Mon 29 Sept, at 22:20:

To be clear, Chris, your blog is used to present your very biased views and is not truly representative of the SFL community internationally.

You are entitled to your opinion, and I am entitled to mine.

There are many SFL scholars from this list who you claim to cite and then claim to prove their work as wrong.

To be clear, your blog is not a type of academic "community" I would encourage people to join.

To be clear, your blog is not a good example of a healthy academic community.

Blogger Comments:

[1] The blog in question, Systemic Functional Linguistics, which has now had more than 2,027,830 page views, consists solely of quotes of Halliday ± Matthiessen. As noted on the blog, the source texts are:

• HALLIDAY MAK 1994 An Introduction To Functional Grammar London: Edward Arnold
• HALLIDAY MAK 2008 Complementarities In Language Beijing: The Commercial Press
• HALLIDAY MAK & MATTHIESSEN CMIM 1999 Construing Experience Through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach To Cognition London: Continuum
• HALLIDAY MAK & MATTHIESSEN CMIM 2004 An Introduction To Functional Grammar London: Edward Arnold
• HALLIDAY MAK & MATTHIESSEN CMIM 2014 An Introduction To Functional Grammar London: Routledge

As such, it does not present any of my views, biased or otherwise, and it is "truly representative of the SFL community internationally". That is, what Fontaine says is the direct opposite of what is true.

[2] Quite obviously, Fontaine does not believe what she says here. She is entitled to her (unbiased) opinion, but Chris is clearly not entitled to his (biased) opinion, even on a blog which does not include his opinions.

[3] To be clear, Chris does not "claim" to cite SFL scholars and "claim" to prove their work as wrong. On a series of other blogs, he quotes the exact words of scholars and provides reasoned evidence as to why they have misrepresented SFL Theory. This is a teaching device, and the number of page views across the blogs number in excess of one million.

[4] To be clear, like all other blogs, Systemic Functional Linguistics is not a community, academic or otherwise, and members of the SFL community can only use it singly, not as a community. On the other hand, an academic community whose members are keen to understand the theory they apply is very healthy indeed. And for the record, the blog was built, daily, for a 14 year period, without any funding, by a person without a wage. (Like his sister and her daughters, Chris inherited a neurological impairment from his father that made a career of lecturing impossible.)

For more untruths, see:

Lise Fontaine Personally Attacking Her Paper's Reviewer