The Thought Occurs

Friday 13 September 2019

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.

Tuesday 10 September 2019

What Is A Connotative Semiotic?


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.

Tuesday 3 September 2019

The Undoubted Importance Of Jim Martin's Opinion


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.