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Teaching

Disagreeing versus Reasoning

From Earned Privilege To Costly Entitlement

Buyer Beware!

Scholars who are new to SFL Theory should note that this new publication mainly features papers by Jim Martin and his former students.

Evidence of Jim Martin's serious misunderstandings of SFL Theory is available here (English Text 1992) and here (Working With Discourse 2007).

The only way to get a solid grounding in Halliday's theory is to read Halliday (± Matthiessen).

Intracultural Communication

Intercultural Communication

Collegiality

External vs Internal Cohesive Conjunction

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 611):

Relations between representations of segments of experience are called external relations, and conjunctions marking such relations are called external conjunctions. … 

Relations linking text segments in their interpersonal guise are called internal relations – internal to the text as a speech event, and conjunctions marking such relations are called internal conjunctions.

The Interpersonal Is Realised By Parodic Structure

The Importance Of Irreverence In Intellectual Life

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; 

they are not here to worship what is known, 

but to question it.

— Jacob Bronowski

This Could Never Happen In The SFL Community

Sharing The Dream

Collaboration

Intellectual Integrity

What every strong intellect wants to be is a guardian of integrity.
 — Jacob Bronowski

Intellectual integrity is the discipline of striving to be thorough and honest to learn the truth or to reach the best decision possible in a given situation. A person with intellectual integrity has a driving desire to follow reasons and evidence courageously wherever they may lead.

How To Be An Innovator In The SFL Community

When Is Emotion Not Affect?

When it is not used to enact the self or intersubjective relations through an interpersonal assessment. For example, the clause

She was surprised that the answer was thirteen

construes a process of emotion, but on its own, does not enact an appraisal, since nothing is assessed positively or negatively.

On the other hand, the clause

She was pleasantly surprised that the answer was thirteen

both

1. construes a process of emotion (was surprised), and 
2. enacts a positive appraisal of that emotion by reference to a Quality of emotion (pleasantly), and so constitutes an instance of affect.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 7):

The ideational metafunction is concerned with construing experience — it is language as a theory of reality, as a resource for reflecting on the world. The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with enacting interpersonal relations through language, with the adoption and assignment of speech roles, with the negotiation of attitudes, and so on — it is language in the praxis of intersubjectivity, as a resource for interacting with others.

What Is A Connotative Semiotic?

For Hjelmslev, connotation is a second-order of signification which uses the denotative sign (signifier and signified) as its signifier and attaches to it an additional signified.

Applied to SFL theory, the expression plane (signifier) of language and the content plane (signified) of language together constitute a denotative semiotic.  And language as a denotative semiotic is the expression plane (signifier) of the culture as semiotic system (signified).  It is this relation between language and culture that constitutes a connotative semiotic.

connotative semiotic (culture ↘ language)

signified	culture as content
signifier	language as expression

denotative semiotic (language)

signified	content plane of language
signifier	expression plane of language

Note that Martin, while claiming to be 'following Hjelmslev' (1992: 493), misinterprets varieties of the content of a denotative semiotic — genre, register — as (the content of) a connotative semiotic.

Supervision

The Undoubted Importance Of Jim Martin's Opinion

Jim Martin wrote to Sysfling on 31 Aug 2019 at 11:10:

For my part, after thinking about several exchanges on the list and off, it seems to me that having plenary talks in languages other than English matters far more for people for whom it matters than not being able to follow such talks matters for people who wouldn’t be able to follow them… and so we should defer to the people for whom this matters most.

Predictive Text

Jim Martin Was Also Working On The Project

From the Penman website:

Penman is the result of work by many people. Important contributions were made by Drs. Christian Matthiessen and William Mann (the two principal architects of the system), Drs. John Bateman, Robert Kasper, Cécile Paris, Peter Fries, Michael Halliday, Norman Sondheimer, Susanna Cumming, Cecilia Ford, William Swartout, Ms. Lynn Poulton, Messrs. Robert Albano and Mick O'Donnell, and by the current Penman staff. In addition, for many years the Penman project has benefitted from the work of visitors too numerous to list.

Making Meaning: Verbal Writing vs Mental Reading

Subjunctive 'Mood' In SFL Theory And Description

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 143n):

Note that the system of MOOD is a system of the clause, not of the verbal group or of the verb. Many languages also have an interpersonal system of the verb(al group) that has been referred to as ‘mood’: it involves interpersonal contrasts such as indicative/subjunctive, indicative/subjunctive/optative. To distinguish these verbal contrasts from the clausal system of MOOD, we can refer to them as contrasts in mode. The subjunctive mode tends to be restricted to the environment of bound clauses – in particular, reported clauses and conditional clauses having the sense of irrealis. In Modern English, the subjunctive mode of the verb is marginal, although there is some dialectal variation.

The Minor Speech Function Of 'Well-Wishing'

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 196):

Greetings include salutations, e.g. Hullo!, Good morning!, Welcome!, Hi!, and valedictions, such as Goodbye!, See you!; together with their responses, largely the same set of forms. Under this heading we could include well-wishings, like Your very good health!, Cheers!, Good shot!, Congratulations!. Both calls and greetings include some that are structured as clauses or nominal groups.

Cf. The Lord be with you, God forgive you your sins and God bless you.

Negotiating Truth

Decolonising Vs Hegemonic

David Rose wrote to SYSFLING on 13 Aug 2019 at 09:12:

May I add that adopting SFL as a metalanguage is already a decolonising act, against the hegemonic universalist metalanguage of north American formal linguistics?

at the end of a conversation on SYSFLING begun by Jim Martin on 28 Jul 2019, 22:47:

… I would encourage the ISFLA executive to develop guidelines to the effect that in the absence of simultaneous interpreting English be used as a lingua franca for plenary addresses, that programs are clear about which language will be used for parallel presentations, and that where possible an English alternative be made available.

The People's Front Of Systemics

The Chomskyan People's Front (The Enemy Movement)

Respecting Language Diversity In The SFL Community

International Conferences

International Conferences are institutional devices whereby
those with the greatest capacity to pay (savvy senior academics with expense accounts)
have their international (business class) air travel and accommodation paid for (as plenary speakers)
by those with the least capacity to pay (naïve students and junior academics).