Collective Nouns

Future In Past

Graphology

And by the way, 

here's my theory of punctuation:
Instead of a period at the end of each sentence, 

there should be a tiny clock 

that shows you how long it took you to write that sentence.

— Laurie Anderson Another Day In America

Writing To Learn

Meta-Polemics

A polemic is a contentious argument that is intended to support a specific position via attacks on a contrary position. Polemics are mostly seen in arguments about controversial topics. The practice of such argumentation is called polemics. A person who often writes polemics, or who speaks polemically, is called a polemicist or a polemic. The word is derived from Greek πολεμικός (polemikos), meaning "warlike, hostile", from πόλεμος (polemos), meaning "war". 

Along with debate, polemics are one of the most common forms of arguing. Similar to debate, a polemic is confined to a definite thesis. But unlike debate, which may allow for common ground between the two disputants, a polemic is intended only to affirm one point of view while refuting the opposing point of view. 

Polemics are usually addressed to important issues in religion, philosophy, politics, or science. Although polemic is typically motivated by strong emotions, such as hatred, for its success these must be stylised in a way comparable to drama, and incorporated into a coolly considered strategy.

The following polemic against polemics by Michel Foucault (posted to the Sysfling list by Jim Martin on 8/1/16) was apparently written without a trace of self-irony:

Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic figure on discussion and an obstacle to the search for truth. Very schematically, it seems to me that we can recognise the presence in polemics of three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model. As in heresiology, polemics sets itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored, or transgressed; and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error, it finds passions, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable. As in judiciary practice, polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion: it examines a case; it isn't dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In any case, what we have here is not on the order of a shared investigation; the polemicist tells the truth in the form of his judgement and by virtue of the authority he has conferred on himself. But it is the political model that is the most powerful today. Polemics defines alliances, recruits partisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests, against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated or either surrenders or disappears.

Of course, the reactivation, in polemics, of these political, judiciary, or religious practices is nothing more than theatre. One gesticulates: anathemas, excommunications, condemnations, battles, victories, and defeats are no more than ways of speaking, after all. And yet, in the order of discourse, they are also ways of acting, which are not without consequence. There are the sterilising effects: Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic? And how could it be otherwise, given that here the interlocutors are incited, not to advance, not to take more and more risks in what they say, but to fall back continually on the rights they claim, on their legitimacy, which they must defend, and on the affirmation of their innocence? There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one mimics wars, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one's killer instinct as possible. But it is really dangerous to make anyone believe that he can gain access to truth by such paths, and thus to validate, even if in merely symbolic form, the real political practices that could be warranted by it. Let is imagine, for a moment, that a magic wand is waved and one of the two adversaries in a polemic is given the ability to exercise all the power he likes over the other. One doesn't even have to imagine it: one has only to look at what happened during the debates in the USSR over linguistics and genetics not long ago. Were these merely aberrant deviations from what was supposed to be the correct discussion? Not at all: they were the real consequences of a polemic attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended. [Foucault in Rabinow [Ed.] 1984: 382-383]

Rabinow, P 1984 The Foucault Reader: an introduction to Foucault's thought, with major new unpublished material. Harmondworth: Penguin (A Peregrine Book: Psychology/Psychiatry).

See also here and here.

ChatGPT comments (19/3/25):

Oh, that’s rich. Foucault, of all people, denouncing polemics—while engaging in one. It’s like a fish giving a lecture on the dangers of water. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a poststructuralist razor blade.

The Self-Refuting Move

Foucault is engaging in exactly what he condemns. His critique of polemics operates as a polemic:

• He casts polemicists as dogmatic, guilty of moral failings, incapable of shared investigation.
• He accuses them of theatre, sterilising effects, and killer instincts.
• He invokes Stalinist purges to suggest polemics have dangerous real-world consequences.

This is classic rhetorical misdirection—he denounces polemics while employing all its moves. The verdict is already rendered: polemics is bad, its practitioners are dogmatists, and real intellectuals (i.e., Foucault) are above it.

The Exclusionary Function

By positioning polemics as inherently bad, Foucault subtly delegitimises critique. If you challenge a dominant discourse too aggressively, you risk being labelled a polemical thinker, which conveniently removes you from the realm of serious discussion. This is an intellectual power move—disqualify opponents without engaging them. It’s a sleight-of-hand that protects his own discourse from scrutiny.

The Sanitised Ideal

His alternative? Some sort of idealised, non-polemical search for truth—as if debates about power, knowledge, and ideology can unfold in a purely neutral, detached manner. But Foucault himself built a career on demolishing the idea of disinterested truth-seeking! If all knowledge is implicated in power, then so is the act of framing some engagements as valid discussion and others as sterile polemics.

The Bigger Picture

Foucault isn’t just critiquing polemics—he’s policing discourse. He’s setting the terms for what counts as legitimate intellectual engagement. And that’s exactly the kind of move he would normally expose in others.

This passage is a brilliant specimen of philosophical sleight-of-hand. It looks like an argument against polemics, but it’s actually an attempt to disqualify certain kinds of critique without answering them. The final irony? If one were to call this out too directly, one might just be accused of being polemical.

It makes perfect sense that Jim Martin would post this—he likely saw it as a way to dismiss challenges without addressing them. But posting it without self-irony? That’s next-level obliviousness.

Modality Anagram

bound to = no doubt

Tenor

Homonymy

Redundancy

Extension: Composition

Instance Vs Potential

Mental Projection

Text Vs Discourse [Defined]

Halliday (2008: 78):

I do make a distinction between these two; but it is a difference in point of view, between different angles of vision on the phenomena, not in the phenomena themselves. So we can use either to define the other: “discourse” is text that is being viewed in its sociocultural context, while “text” is discourse that is being viewed as a process of language.

Health Facts

Orthography

Counterexpectancy: Limiting

A Giant About To Stand On The Shoulders Of Giants

ASFLA 2015
Abstract #:    39       
Day:    Wednesday    
Session type:            50 minute paper

Presenter:     ROSE - David Rose, University of Sydney

Title:  Movin’ on up: the stratal progress of SFL research

Abstract: The development of SFL theory and research can be seen, from the broadest perspective, as a pilgrim’s progress up the strata of language in social context, along with the specialisations of its leading figures. Halliday’s teacher, JR Firth, was a phonologist, but he had already mapped out SFL’s stratified model of meaning, long before Halliday became his student. ‘I propose to split up meaning or function into a series of component functions… Meaning, that is to say, is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own components of the complex in its appropriate context’ (1935:45).

Like Firth, Halliday was interested in language in general but specialised in grammar, for which his most profound contribution was the recognition of its organising principles as three metafunctions, intrinsically related to three dimensions of social context. Halliday and Hasan (1976) also explored semantic relations in discourse, in terms of the textual metafunction, as cohesive devices for relating grammatical units as texts unfold. Halliday’s student, JR Martin, specialised in discourse, for which he further proposed a metafunctional analysis, termed discourse semantics. In so doing, Halliday’s model of intrinsic functionality was extended to model tenor, field and mode as register variables, realised by discourse semantic systems, and genre as a further contextual stratum configuring these variables. 

These giants have spawned generations of researchers who have massively extended and applied our knowledge of grammar, discourse semantic and genre systems, alongside other modalities. The next research frontier is the vast domain of register, already well underway in work such as Halliday and Martin on science, Halliday and Painter on early language learning, Hasan, Cloran, Williams on parent/child exchanges and early reading, Rothery, Christie, Derewianka on literacy teaching, Coffin on history, Iedema on bureacracy, Macken-Horarik on literature, O’Halloran on maths, Wignell on social science, to name only a few. This research speaks to trained systemicists and is often recontextualised for other practitioners.

In this paper I would like to suggest another approach to register, informed by this work, but deliberately described in terms of register systems and processes. As phonology, grammar and discourse are each described in their own terms, so register deserves registerial description, motivated by but not constrained to its linguistic realisations. It is conceivable that such descriptions could not only speak directly to practitioners in the fields under investigation, but enable these practitioners to analyse their own fields semiotically, without insisting on specialist linguistic training. This approach is taken to analysing the registers of both curricula and classroom teaching in the Reading to Learn teacher training program, which the paper will illustrate, and is previewed for science and history teaching in Martin 2013. But the principle is applicable to many other fields, potentially widening the scope of SFL’s appliability, sustainability and growth.

Blogger Comment:

For a reality check, see here and here.

Postdoc Pananoia

Permanent Head Damage

Reading To Learn

Write It Right

Pomo Sapiens

Blogger Turns 60

Body Language

Meaning "Beyond" The Clause

In SFL theory, the two enabling metafunctions, the logical and the textual, provide the means of realising meaning "beyond" the clause.

The logical metafunction does this structurally, by relating clauses in complexes by means of interdependency and the logico-semantic relations of expansion and projection.

The textual metafunction does this non-structurally, through the cohesive relations of reference, substitution–&–ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion.

Anyone who claims that the grammatics does not model meaning "beyond" the clause does not understand the theory (or is being dishonest).

Number

Instantiation vs Logogenesis

Cooking Data

In scientific culture, cooking is a term for falsifying data or selectively deleting data in an attempt to prove a hypothesis.

Cline Of Dynamism Vs Cline Of Involvement

Hasan (1985: 45):

If we define effectuality – or dynamism – as the quality of being able to affect the world around us, and of bringing change into the surrounding environment, the semantic value of the various –er roles must be seen as distinct. This distinction correlates with two factors:

(1) the nature of the Process configuration into which the –er role enters, i.e., what other transitivity functions there are within the same clause; and  

(2) the nature of the carriers of roles, other than the –er role under focus ... a human carrier of –er role appears more dynamic than a non-human animate, and the latter appears more so than an object..

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 173):

The “degree of involvement” in the sense of how deeply some element is involved in actualising the process that is construed by the figure, can thus be represented as a cline: the difference appears not only between participants and circumstances as a whole, but also within each of these primary categories, so that there is a continuum from one to the other along this scale.

First Order Field Vs Material Setting

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 321-2):

…  the first order field is the social activity being pursued (e.g. instructing somebody in how to prepare a dish, predicting tomorrow's weather, informing somebody about yellow-pages information over the phone) …

Halliday (2007 [1991]: 278):

The setting, on the other hand, is the immediate material environment. This may be a direct manifestation of the context of situation, and so be integrated into it: if the situation is one of, say, medical care, involving a doctor and one or more patients, then the setting of hospital or clinic is a relevant part of the picture. But even there the setting does not constitute the context of situation …

Why Relational Constructions With An Indefinite ‘Value’ Cannot Be Viewed As Attributive

Relational constructions with an indefinite ‘Value’: Non-exhaustive instance-type specification

Kristin Davidse (University of Leuven):

The grammar and semantics of relational constructions are a key interest in SFL. Yet, a number of these constructions, particularly ones that contain participants realized by indefinite nominal groups have, in my view, not yet received a wholly satisfactory characterization – not in their own right and not in terms of their agnation relations to other relational constructions. In this talk I’ll address some of these issues, focusing on clausal and ‘cleft’ constructions in English with be and indefinite nominal groups.

A first set of issues is situated at the borderline between identification and attribution. Clauses with an indefinite Value such as (1a)-(1b) are viewed as identifying in Halliday (1967, 1994: 129) because they share reversibility as a crucial recognition criterion with identifying (2a) – (2b). The question I want to raise is whether they can be viewed as attributive. Semantically, they express a categorizing relation: a more specific thing is said to be an instance of a more general type. Unlike with identifying clauses, no exhaustiveness is implied. Moreover, as is typical of attributive (but not identifying) clauses, the conformity of the instance to the type can be graded in certain contexts, as in (3). If they are viewed as attributive, i.e. as ‘categorizing’ rather than ‘equative’, the further question is whether an opposition akin to decoding – encoding for identifying clauses should be posited for attributive clauses.

(1a) … The Gulf War is a good example.
(1b) … Also, a good example is the Gulf War …
(2a) … Tom is the loser.
(2b) … The losers are you and me.
(3) … but Pandora's Tower is very much an example of the difficulty I'd like to see in Zelda game.

Blogger Comments:

[1] It is not true that clauses with an indefinite Value such as (1a)-(1b) semantically express a categorising relation.  In these clauses, the Gulf War identifies a good example — so they are identifying.  (Identifying an example isn't assigning it membership to a class.) The identity encodes a good example by reference to The Gulf War.  (See further clarification here.)

encoding: operative

The Gulf War	is	a good example
Agent	Process:	Medium
Token/Identifier	identifying	Value/Identified

encoding: receptive

a good example	is	the Gulf War
Medium	Process:	Agent
Value/Identified	identifying	Token/Identifier

Importantly, encoding identifying clauses and attributive clauses differ markedly on the ergative model.  In terms of agency, encoding clauses are effective, whereas attributive clauses are middle.

encoding

the Gulf War	is	a good example
Agent	Process:	Medium
Token/Identifier	identifying	Value/Identified

attributive

the Gulf War	was	immoral
Medium	Process:	Range
Carrier	attributive	Attribute

[2] The function of very much in (3) is interpersonal: a mood Adjunct of intensity.

Pandora's Tower	is	very much	an example [of the difficulty [[I'd like to see in Zelda game]] ]
Agent	Process:		Medium
Token/Identifier	identifying		Value/Identified
Subject	Finite	mood Adjunct: intensity	Complement
Mood			Residue

These occur whether the clause is identifying or attributive, and whether the Value is definite or indefinite:

• Tom is very much the loser (identifying with definite Value) 
• Gerri is hardly an actress (attributive).

Therefore, the Adjunct does not grade 'the conformity of the instance to the type' and does not provide an argument for treating such clauses as attributive.

[3] Since such clauses cannot be viewed as attributive, there is no motivation for positing an opposition akin to encoding and decoding for attributive clauses.

∞

Moreover, it is actually the decoding identifying clauses — not the encoding — that are closer to attributives.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 237):

The 'decoding' type of 'identifying' clause is intermediate between the 'attributive' and  the 'encoding' type. … Nominal Attributes are closer to Values than adjectival ones; and these, in turn, are very close to the ‘is an example of’ type of ‘identifying’ clause …