Sunday 9 July 2017

On The Purpose Of Bateman's Review Of Martin's 'English Text'

Bateman (1998: 1-2):
In this review article, therefore, I seek to provide a bridge and a motivation for engaging with the book in depth. I also attempt to position somewhat the book’s concerns and possible applications; English Text should, for example, be required reading for any student concerned with the organisation of (particularly, but not exclusively, English) text or the functional motivation of lexicogrammatical phenomena. This can sometimes be difficult without appropriate support or introduction to the premises and methodology on which the book rests, but the effort involved is more than worthwhile. At the very least, an improved understanding of the sheer breadth and systematicity of the relations between discourse construction and lexicogrammatical phenomena would be hard to avoid. And this can only encourage a significant increase in the maturity and sophistication of the questions asked in and by text analysis.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Engaging with English Text in depth reveals that its theorising is based on misunderstandings of SFL theory, at macro and micro scales, and is inconsistent with itself, as demonstrated in great detail here.

[2] Because of its fundamental and pervasive misunderstandings of SFL theory, English Text should not be required reading for anyone seeking to understand SFL theory.

[3] English Text does not provide the functional motivation for lexicogrammatical phenomena.  Instead, Martin's model of discourse semantics takes the lexicogrammatical systems of cohesion, the non-structural resources of the textual metafunction, and relocates misunderstandings of them on a different stratum — with strata misconstrued as modules — and creates further theoretical inconsistencies by misinterpreting them as structural and distributing them among the four metafunctions, also misconstrued as modules.  None of the system networks introduced by Martin provide realisation statements that specify lexicogrammatical realisations.

[4] The premises on which English Text rests are misunderstandings of SFL theory, and the methodology on which English Text rests is largely taking Halliday's model of grammar, misunderstanding it, and then relabelling those misunderstandings as 'discourse semantics'.

[5] Given the above, the effort of engaging deeply with English Text is not worthwhile for anyone seeking to understand SFL theory.

[6] Given the above, English Text does not provide an improved understanding of 'the sheer breadth and systematicity of the relations between discourse construction and lexicogrammatical phenomena'.

[7] Given the above, English Text cannot 'encourage a significant increase in the maturity and sophistication of the questions asked in and by text analysis', as demonstrated by the absence of same in the 25 years since its publication.

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