On Martin's Notion Of Congruent And Incongruent Lexical Items

Bateman (1998: 19):

Also considered in this chapter are how particular message parts, although they serve as the semantic expression of particular field-stratum ‘participants’, may or may not be realised by single lexical items (congruent and noncongruent realisations): e.g. ‘champion’ and ‘tournament winner’ — again suggesting some of the value of maintaining stratification and providing one important difference with Hasan’s own extension of the position in Halliday and Hasan (1976): cohesive harmony [p372].

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, 'message part' is Martin's unit of IDEATION, described (p293) as 'the discourse semantic unit underlying lexical item'.  Martin's claim is that it is congruently realised as one lexical item and incongruently realised as more than one lexical item.  This means, in terms of SFL theory, champion would be a non-metaphorical realisation, whereas tournament winner would be a metaphorical realisation.  (A genuine example of lexical metaphor would be construing the champion as a 'dynamo'.)  For further evidence that Martin does not understand (in)congruence, see here; for further evidence that Martin does not understand lexicogrammatical metaphor, see here.

[2] To be clear, the semantic expression of a "field stratum participant" is meaning that realises one of the speakers producing a text — but this is not what Martin means.  As previously explained, Martin confuses field (context) with the ideational meaning that realises it (semantics), and confuses context (the culture as semiotic system) with register (a sub-potential of language).  The theoretical inconsistencies are thus in terms of stratification and instantiation.

[3] To be clear, it wasn't Martin who stratified the content plane, but Halliday, though the naïve reader could be forgiven for thinking it was Martin's idea, given his presentation (e.g. pp14-21).  As demonstrated by the misunderstandings identified above in [1], the "in/congruent" realisations of Martin's 'message part' do not demonstrate "the value of maintaining stratification".

[4] Here Bateman is merely parroting Martin's claims (p372) without question.  To be clear, Hasan's (1985: 94) cohesive harmony is concerned with the harmony between the 'outputs' of two metafunctions, the textual and the experiential, at the level of lexicogrammar:

The output of the textual function are the chains and the interactions; the outputs of the experiential function at the rank of clause and group is what the interaction is built upon. Thus cohesive harmony is an account of how the two functions find their expression in one significant whole.

That is, where Hasan's model is concerned with harmony between the textual and experiential metafunctions, Martin's model, in rebranding lexical cohesion as an experiential system, is concerned with confusing the textual and experiential metafunctions.

For more details on Martin's misunderstandings of cohesive harmony, see the clarifying critiques here.