Misrepresenting Halliday On Grammar And Confusing Strata

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 272):

Functional grammar analysis of the kind supported by this workbook enables a rich semantically oriented reading of clause, group and phrase structure. This is a critical step in text analysis since, as Halliday comments in his introduction to the 2nd edition, ‘A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text...’ By the same token, an analysis based solely on grammar, however rich, is not a complete analysis, since relationships between sentences (between clause complexes) still have to be accounted for. To interpret these relations beyond the clause, we need a model of text structure, and a model of social context. In this chapter we will take grammar as the point of departure and demonstrate how it can be extended in the direction of text structure¹ and context, drawing specifically on Martin & Rose's Working with Discourse (2nd edition, 2007) and Genre Relations (2008) to do so.

¹ For an alternative extension see Halliday & Hasan's 1976 Cohesion in English, which elaborates Chapter 9 of IFG (3rd edition).

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is very misleading indeed. The grammar includes the systems of cohesion, which are concerned with relations that obtain within and beyond clause complexes.

[2] This is misleading. Relations 'beyond the clause' are lexicogrammatical, and therefore require a lexicogrammatical model (cohesion). Text structure, on the other hand, is a semantic model, and 'social context', in SFL Theory, is a model of the culture as a semiotic system.

[3] For the serious theoretical inconsistencies in Working With Discourse (Martin & Rose 2007), see  the close examination of the publication here.

[4] For the theoretical confusions in Martin's model of genre, see here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

[5] This is misleading. Halliday & Hasan's 1976 Cohesion in English is the intellectual source of both Chapter 9 of IFG (3rd edition) and the "extension" of it as discourse semantics (Martin 1992); see here.