On Martin's Model And Critical Discourse Analysis

Bateman (1998: 21):

And, even if the reader is not yet ready to follow Martin’s proposal that English Text is to be read “(in part) in the context of projects oriented to de-naturalising hegemonic discourses and, ..., facilitating intervention in the political process’’[p2], one essential lesson that remains is that socially, culturally, and ideologically informed discussions should, and now can, be linguistically responsible. No critical discourse can really stand without such a model in place. It should in fact no longer be acceptable for such discussions to omit linguistic detail; any such omission compromises the exactitude of the discussion and raises the likelihood that what is being discussed is more opinion than empirical result. This should also have substantial pedagogical implications within discourse theory and critical discourse. Without proficiency in the tools necessary to become linguistically responsible, an analysis cannot aim at being so. Blunt tools yield rough analyses.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, as demonstrated in great detail here, Martin's discourse semantics is largely Halliday & Hasan's lexicogrammatical cohesion, misunderstood, rebranded and relocated to his module of discourse semantics.  Martin's context consists of language varieties, register and genre — misunderstood as different levels of symbolic abstraction — and ideology misunderstood as Bernstein's coding orientations.  For these reasons, and more, the tools Martin provides for discourse analysis are  demonstrably "without proficiency" and "blunt".

To be clear, it is the source of Martin's discourse semantics, Halliday's model of lexicogrammar, that provides the tools of "linguistically responsible" text analysis.  As Halliday (1985: xvi-xvii) argues:

The current preoccupation is with discourse analysis, or 'text linguistics'; and it has sometimes been assumed that this can be carried on without grammar — or even that it is somehow an alternative to grammar.  But this is an illusion.  A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text … the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.

A text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one.  But meanings are realised through wordings; and without a theory of wordings — that is, a grammar — there is no way of making explicit one's interpretation of the meaning of a text.