Bateman (1998: 17):
He then turns to Sinclair’s (e.g, 1987) counter-position that collocation is in fact the better model to start from:
“collocation patterns may map more closely onto contextual ones than caution may have first led linguists to expect: ‘there is a great deal of overlap with semantics, and very little reason to posit an independent semantics for the purpose of text description’ (Sinclair, 1987:331).’’ [p277]
Since the entire point of English Text is to provide an independent linguistic semantics that is primarily for the purposes of text description, Sinclair’s claim can be seen as something of a challenge — at least in the area of lexis and IDEATION. But, in direct answer to the challenge, Martin not only proposes a model of an independent discourse semantics for lexical relations but then provides several convincing examples of its use in text analysis, both alone in this chapter and, in the chapter following, in coordination with the other discourse semantic regions discussed.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, the source of "Martin's" model is Halliday & Hasan's (1976) lexical cohesion, a non-structural resource of the textual metafunction at the level of lexicogrammar. Martin relocates this model to his own discourse semantic stratum, misunderstands it as experiential rather than textual, confuses it with 'lexis as most delicate grammar' (and with clause nuclearity), and rebrands the confusion as his own system of IDEATION, all of which is demonstrated in great detail here.
[2] For some of the problems with Martin's text analyses, unnoticed by the 'convinced' Bateman, see:
- Misconstruing Extension As Elaboration
- Misconstruing General Lexical Cohesion As Instantial
- Misconstruing Mode As Genre (1)
- Misrepresenting Processes As Subclasses Of Clause
- Misconstruing Enhancement (And Complementarity) As Extension
- Misconstruing Mode As Genre (2)
[3] For the cornucopia of theoretical misunderstandings in Martin's Chapter 6, see the evidence here.
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