Another Thing Up With Which A Teacher Will Not Put

Ignorance Of Incompetence Explained

Arranging Language Data To Fit Discourse Semantic Theory

Halliday On Discourse Analysis

Halliday (1985/1994: xvi-xvii):

The current preoccupation is with discourse analysis, or 'text linguistics'; and it has sometimes been assumed that this can be carried on without grammar — or even that it is somehow an alternative to grammar.  But this is an illusion.  A discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text … the exercise remains a private one in which one explanation is as good or as bad as another.

A text is a semantic unit, not a grammatical one.  But meanings are realised through wordings; and without a theory of wordings — that is, a grammar — there is no way of making explicit one's interpretation of the meaning of a text.

Standards