Tuesday 2 August 2022

The Discourse Semantic System Of Participant Identification

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 285):
Textually, from the discourse semantic perspective of participant identification (Working with Discourse Chapter 5), we also have to keep track of which wave we're talking about, since the text involves more than one of them. Decitic [sic], Post-Deictic, Numerative and Thing functions make important contributions to this process. The comparative another introduces the second wave in relation to the first and the third set of waves in relation to the second; and more presents further waves in relation to these.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the discourse system of IDENTIFICATION (Martin 1992) is a confusion of two grammatical systems: cohesive reference and deixis, further confused with reference in the sense of ideational denotation. Evidence here.

[2] For a close examination of some of the theoretical problems with the discourse system of IDENTIFICATION in Chapter 5 of Working with Discourse (Martin & Rose 2007), see the clarifying critiques here.

[3] To be clear, it is not the speaker who has to "keep track" of which wave he is talking about, but the addressee.

[4] To be clear, this confuses subcategorisation of the Thing in nominal group structure (Deictic, post-Deictic, Numerative, Thing) with the cohesive relation between a reference item and its referent, and the lexically cohesive relation between repeated instances of the same word (wave).

[5] To be clear, in SFL Theory, this is known as comparative reference; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 632-4).

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