Bateman (1998: 1):
The study of the semantics of discourse has grown immensely over the past decade or so — approaches from ‘mainstream’ linguistics, formal semantics, pragmatics, educational linguistics, computational linguistics and many others have all placed increasing emphasis on their treatments of discourse. Researchers, students and teachers alike therefore no doubt scan eagerly the lists of newly published books and articles in the area. Which, curiously enough, could well be a pity, since they may just then miss what is one of the most significant books on the discourse functional motivation of linguistic phenomena to have appeared in the last decade: Martin’s English Text from 1992. …
The issues and approach set out in English Text are, if anything, even more relevant and appropriate today than they were 6 years ago, the potential consumers of its ideas wider and more needful not only of its insights but also of its questions.
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As this blog develops, it will be seen that Bateman uncritically accepts Martin's theorising — despite occasional appearances to the contrary — without checking the provenance of the ideas, and without examining the consistency of the theorising with Systemic Functional Linguistic theory or even the self-consistency of Martin's own theorising.
In the meantime, the 2,000+ thoughts that did not occur to Bateman in his review can be viewed at Martin's Discourse Semantics, Register & Genre.
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