Sunday 24 September 2017

Crediting Halliday's Ideas To Martin

Bateman (1998: 4):
The answer that Martin sets out to develop in English Text is to ask how the larger-scale properties of text can be addressed in more detail. His starting point is to take Halliday and Hasan’s conception of ‘text’ as a semantic unit very seriously and to employ a stratal division, placing the linguistic stratum of grammar in an opposition with the linguistic stratum of semantics, rather than Cohesion in English’s opposition between structural and nonstructural linguistic resources‘Text’ is thus proposed as a semantic unit that is both larger than the units of grammar (e.g., clauses, nominal groups, prepositional phrases, words, etc.) and more abstract than grammatical units — i.e., placed at a higher stratum in the linguistic system.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is very misleading. Here Bateman misrepresents Halliday's stratification of grammar and semantics as Martin's proposal.  The 'stratal division' is even explicitly stated in Cohesion in English (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 5).

[2] This is very misleading.  Bateman's use of the replacive conjunction rather than wrongly implies that the 'opposition between structural and non-structural linguistic resources' in Cohesion in English is not theorised on the basis of the stratification of grammar and semantics.  Moreover, the opposition is one within the textual metafunction only.  In shifting and rebranding the systems of cohesion, Martin has mistaken a metafunction (the textual) for a stratum (discourse semantics).

[3] This is very misleading. Bateman's use of the conjunctive Adjunct thus serves to misrepresent what is, in effect, Halliday's notion of 'text' as Martin's proposal.

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