The Thought Occurs

Tuesday 29 December 2020

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. Individuals who strongly manifest intellectual integrity value objectivity, evidence-based decision making, and the courageous, fair-minded, and complete pursuit of the best possible knowledge in any given situation.

Friday 13 November 2020

Origins Of The Reading to Learn (R2L) Program

The Reading to Learn (R2L) Program starts in Australia in the late 1990s, with the purpose of addressing one of the central problems for education at the time (and why not mention at all times): unequal participation in learning activities in school during reading and writing practices, caused by various factors, among them, family origin and social class. Rose and Martin (2012) argue that educational inequality persisted because the dominant approach did not explicitly teach the skills needed for literacy.


Blogger Comments:

This is incorrect. The Reading to Learn (R2L) Program did not start in the late 1990s. In the late 1990s, David Rose's 'Reading To Learn' was still known as Brian Gray's 'Accelerated Literacy'. 

After completing his PhD thesis on an indigenous language in Sydney in 1998, David Rose was employed by Brian Gray to work on his 'Accelerated Literacy' program in Adelaide. It was only after David Rose finished working under Brian Gray, around 2001-2, that David Rose took credit for Brian Gray's ideas by renaming 'Accelerated Literacy' his 'Reading to Learn'.

Thursday 1 October 2020

The Slang Meaning Of 'Woke'

From The Urban Dictionary

Woke

The act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue

"Wokeness" occurs when a white, upper-class person pretends to hold opinions they imagine a black lower-class person might hold. The word itself is an incorrect tense of "awake" — referring to the perception that the black working class have a poor grasp of grammar.

Self-righteousness masquerading as enlightenment.

Thursday 17 September 2020

Halliday's Definition Of Mode

Halliday (2002 [1981]: 225):
Halliday has suggested (1975) that the “textual” properties of a text – the cohesive patterns and those of ‘functional sentence perspective’ – tend to be determined by the “mode”, the function ascribed to the text in the given context of situation, the purpose it is intended to achieve.

Saturday 22 August 2020

Halliday On The Natural (Not Arbitrary) Relation Between Semantic And Grammar

Halliday (1985 & 1994: xvii-xix):

Halliday (2002 [1984]: 293):
Grammars are ‘natural’, in the sense that wordings are related iconically to meanings.

Tuesday 7 July 2020

The Purpose Of Martin & Doran (eds)

From Stanley E. Porter's review of the 5-volume Systemic Functional Linguistics (2015) edited by Martin & Doran (p27):
The emphasis of the selected chapters is upon the stream of SFL that originated with Halliday’s precursors and then moved to Halliday (with thirteen authored articles included, dating from 1961 to 1998) and then to Martin (with 12 of his! Dating from 1983 to 2012), and hence the traditional or standard SFL and Sydney school SFL. As a result, the flow of the essays apparently frames these volumes as representative of Martin’s succession to the place of leadership within the SFL community or at least within the set of volumes (and near equality with Halliday?).

Wednesday 10 June 2020

Uses Of The Term 'Social' In SFL Theory

Hasan uses 'social' to refer to parameters that classify language users in terms of age, gender, class, ethnicity, etc. Such parameters are relevant to both tenor, the interpersonal dimension of context (the culture as semiotic system) — not register — and the semantic variation that correlates with social difference.

Halliday's use of 'social' as an order of complexity refers to the social systems like those of eusocial insects (ants, bees, termites), which are organised on the basis of value, not semiosis.

Halliday's notion of language as a 'social semiotic' distinguishes language from other semiotic systems that are not social, such as the perceptual systems of the brain, as described by Gerald Edelman.

Friday 28 February 2020

Why Martin's Notion Of A Monostratal Semiotic System Is Nonsensical

[This old post has been made relevant again by Martin's nonsensical claim being confidently reasserted by Yaegan Doran at today's seminar at the University of Sydney.]

Jim Martin claims that in a semiotic system where content conflates with paradigm and expression conflates with syntagm, there is only one stratum. Note, incidentally, that by this logic, it could be alternatively argued that there is only one axis, and therefore no system–structure cycle.

This is a bit like saying because all my squares are ('conflate with') blue and all my triangles are ('conflate with') red, there is only one shape (or only one colour).

If content conflates with paradigm and expression conflates with syntagm, then:

content/paradigm is realised by expression/syntagm.

This conflates
content is realised by expression
with
paradigm is realised by syntagm.

There are still 2 strata and 2 axes in this conflation.

By definition, a semiotic system has at least two levels of symbolic abstraction.
By definition, a symbol is something that means something other than itself.

Monday 3 February 2020

Lise Fontaine's Right To Stop Me Saying It

Sun, 2 Feb 2020 20:31:11
You have been removed from the SYSFLING list (Systemic Functional Linguistics).
The change was carried out by a list administrator (Lise Fontaine).

To be clear, Lise Fontaine unsubscribed me from the Sysfling list when she was alerted to the existence of my blog The Cardiff Grammar by Robin Fawcett posing as Dmytro Poremskyi (to praise his own work) on the Facebook site of the NASFLA. The blog provides evidence that the architecture of language proposed by the Cardiff Grammar is invalidated by internal inconsistencies and that Fawcett repeatedly misrepresents Halliday in ways that always suit his own argument. Fontaine is a proponent of the Cardiff Grammar.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
— George Orwell

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