Problems With Key Resources For Text Analysis (By Strata And Metafunction)

 Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 293, 295):

In this chapter we've tried to build some bridges from the grammar analyses developed in Chapters 2-6 towards the analysis of discourse. An outline of these and related resources is presented in Table 7.9 below, which aligns columns by metafunction and rows by levels of abstraction (stratification).

 Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, it is the grammar that is the resource for discourse analysis. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 57):

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.

The grammar includes the systems of COHESION which the authors have ignored to make way for Martin's discourse semantics. 

[2] To be clear, there are many theoretical inconsistencies in Table 7.9.

a. Martin's stratum of genre confuses text type, rhetorical mode ('purpose') and semantic structure ('stages'), and contrary to the implication made by including structure types in the table, does not include the metafunctions in the model. See the evidence here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

b. Martin's stratum of register confuses diatypic variation in language with the cultural context that language realises. See the evidence here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

Here 'activity sequences' are located in field, contradicting their location in experiential discourse semantics in Martin & Rose (2007). For evidence of such contradictions, see here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

c. Martin's stratum of discourse semantics confuses, misunderstands, and renames lexicogrammatical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan 1976) and Halliday's semantic system of speech function. See the evidence here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

Here external conjunction is classified as ideational and internal conjunction as textual despite both being classified as logical in both Martin (1992) and Martin & Rose (2007). This reflects Martin's confusion of the external vs internal distinction with the structural (logical) vs cohesive (textual) distinction in the grammatical realisation of the semantic system of enhancement. See the evidence here Martin (1992) and here Martin & Rose (2007).