The Dunning-Kruger Effect

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

Giving And Demanding Goods–&–Services

Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory Vs Systemic Functional Linguistics

Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory ('Systemic Functional Grammar') is a scientific theory with a precisely defined architecture that provides the means of identifying misinterpretations of it.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, on the other hand, is a movement, the members of which have responded to a call to improve humanity by teaching students and/or analysing texts.  Because it is the movement that is paramount, it is not so much the theoretical consistency of the work that matters, but merely the fact that the work is 'Systemic' (i.e. 'us' not 'them'). When members of the movement die, they are chiefly praised for the extent to which they served the 'cause'.

Blind Trust

University.com

Meeting Preparation

The Difference Between ASFLA & The Australian SFL Community

A: Australian Systemic Functional Linguistic Association
B: The Australian Systemic Functional Linguistic Community

Division Of Labour

Conference Calls

Collegial Collaboration

Evoked Attitude

"Well Within Registerial Norms"

Choosing A Mentor

What's Wrong With The Design Of This Diagram?

Martin, 1997 (p.7) , Analysing Genre: Functional Parameters, in Christie and Martin, Genre and Institutions - Social Processes in the Workplace and School, Continuum.

Answer:

Martin uses two spatial dimensions, vertical and horizontal, to represent one theoretical dimension, stratification.  This leads to the absurdity of presenting the realisation relation between levels — represented by the double-headed arrow — as a level in itself (expression form of the "connotative semiotic").  The representation of levels of lower and higher abstraction, strata, along the horizontal dimension only adds to the confusion.

Note also that Martin thinks that a connotative semiotic consists only of its content plane, and that varieties of a denotative semiotic, genre and register, constitute (the content of) a connotative semiotic.

Mentoring

The Bullying Of PhD Students By Their Supervisors

Teaching

From Earned Privilege To Costly Entitlement

Buyer Beware!

Scholars who are new to SFL Theory should note that this new publication mainly features papers by Jim Martin and his former students.

Evidence of Jim Martin's serious misunderstandings of SFL Theory is available here (English Text 1992) and here (Working With Discourse 2007).

The only way to get a solid grounding in Halliday's theory is to read Halliday (± Matthiessen).

Intracultural Communication

Intercultural Communication

Collegiality

External vs Internal Cohesive Conjunction

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 611):

Relations between representations of segments of experience are called external relations, and conjunctions marking such relations are called external conjunctions. … 

Relations linking text segments in their interpersonal guise are called internal relations – internal to the text as a speech event, and conjunctions marking such relations are called internal conjunctions.

The Interpersonal Is Realised By Parodic Structure

This Could Never Happen In The SFL Community

Sharing The Dream

Collaboration

How To Be An Innovator In The SFL Community

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.

What Is A Connotative Semiotic?

For Hjelmslev, connotation is a second-order of signification which uses the denotative sign (signifier and signified) as its signifier and attaches to it an additional signified.

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.