Jim Martin Falsely Accusing The Late Ruqaiya Hasan Of Plagiarism At The Symposium To Honour Her Lifetime Achievements

[sound recording available on request]

Martin:

Now Ruqaiya had read this paper [Mitchell (1957)] but when I checked with her she said she'd forgotten about it when she worked on text structure. However subliminally, it was there. Mitchell was also John Swales' teacher at Leeds and Swales also claims that he remembered nothing about Mitchell's work when he worked on genre. Well, I don't know, huh-huh, Mitchell is the classic, this is where it begins, this work. … So Hasan's work 77-79 is very very close to Mitchell, whether she remembers it or not.

In this third session of the symposium to honour the late Ruqaiya Hasan, Jim Martin insinuated that Ruqaiya Hasan had knowingly used the work of Mitchell on text structure without admitting it. That's right, Jim Martin actually impugned the integrity of a deceased colleague at a gathering convened to honour her.

However, a glance at Hasan's work on text structure reveals that the relevant Mitchell publication is cited in her list of references (Hasan 1985: 121):

Mitchell, T.F. (1957), 'The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica: A situational statement', Hesperis 26.  Reprinted in T. F. Mitchell Principles of Firthian Linguistics (Longmans Linguistics Library), Longman, London, 1975.

In his English Text (1992: 432), Martin had previously insinuated that Hasan's motivations for modelling texture were Chomskyan in orientation, as part of his critique of her model.  See my analysis of Martin's assessment here.

For a list of some of the misrepresentations of Hasan's work in Martin (1992), see here.

Martin ended his "honouring" of Ruqaiya Hasan by promoting his own work at the expense of hers. For detailed evidence demonstrating that Martin's theorising is based on multiple misunderstandings of SFL theory, see here.

Hasan (2011)

Hasan 1978/2011