Misrepresenting "The Theoretical Map Within Which Halliday's Grammar Of English Has Been Proposed"

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 295, 298):

 

 

Our tour of the levels outlined in Table 9 is far from complete. Our main point here is to give some indication of the theoretical map within which Halliday's grammar of English has been proposed. As far as text analysis is concerned, every cell in the Table affords a glimpse of what is going on; and we have to take care in privileging one cell over another – for reasons of time, or interest, or familiarity with analysis of one kind or another. Halliday has given us a far richer grammar than any other grammarian of ours or any other time, and thus a sound foundation, and a resounding mandate, to push on.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is very misleading indeed. Table 9 presents Martin's misunderstandings (evidence here) of "the theoretical map within which Halliday's grammar of English has been proposed". The theoretical map that Halliday (2005 [1995]: 254, 255) proposes for his systemic theory of grammar is:

elaborated as:

[2] To be clear, as far as Halliday is concerned, text analysis is carried out using the grammar, including the systems of cohesion, which the authors have ignored and replaced with Martin's rebranding of them as discourse semantic systems. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 57, 731):

The description of English grammar presented here is not designed as a reference grammar. However, unlike the recent reference grammars — or all previous ones for that matter, this description has been designed as one that can be used in text analysis — a task that imposes quite stringent demands on the description. …

A text is meaningful because it is an actualisation of the potential that constitutes the linguistic system; it is for this reason that the study of discourse (‘text linguistics’) cannot properly be separated from the study of the grammar that lies behind it.