The Thought Occurs

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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