Interpersonal Consensus Vs Experiential Consistency

Black & White Pronouns

Team Player

 

Professing

Supervision

Reputation And Reliability

Self-Importance

Temporal Meanings And SFL Worlds Of Experience

Temporal meanings and SFL worlds of experience

Rosemary Huisman

Later this year, Routledge is publishing my book, Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time, a Social-Semiotic Perspective. The general blurb - no doubt more intended to be impressive than informative - says:

This book brings together a model of time and a model of language to generate a new model of narrative, where different stories with different temporalities and non-chronological modes of sequence can tell of different worlds of human – and non-human – experience, woven together (the ‘texture of time’) in the one narrative.

The model of language referred to is that of SFL, especially as developed in the publications of M.A.K. Halliday and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. The model of time, of different temporalities in natural levels of complexity, is that of J.T. Fraser. Both Halliday and Fraser are influenced by Gerald Edelman's model of the brain, which links human consciousness with the development of language and temporal awareness. And for most narrative theorists, narrative is, at least, the way humans organise their awareness of time.

In this paper I focus on the contribution of SFL to the development of the narrative model. (In the book, the narrative model developed is then used to compare the "texture of time" in English literary texts of different historical periods.)

Blogger Comments:

In this seminar, time was equated with sequence. The problem here is that sequence is not time, but the ordering of processes in time. In SFL Theory, time is a circumstance of processes, and in physics, quantified as a dimension. See also Making Sense Of Time.

Tech Support

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

Expertise

The Joy Of Whistleblowing

Yaegan Doran On Sundanese Nominal Groups

Sundanese nominal groups: A textual grammar

Yaegan Doran

The Australian Catholic University

This talk considers the nominal group in Sundanese, a Malayo-Polynesian language of West Java, Indonesia. In particular, it builds a meaning-based description of Sundanese nominal groups, focusing in particular on textual meaning. Born of educational concerns associated with literacy programs, this talk describes the nominal group not only in terms of the formal syntagms at play, but also their functions; not only the paradigmatic choices that are available, but how they are taken up in text; and not only the grammar by itself, but how it realises meanings in discourse. The aim is to develop a richly co-textualised and metafunctional description of Sundanese nominal groups that can explain text patterns from a range of genres and registers.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this paper did not discuss the textual meaning of the nominal group. Instead, it was concerned with reference, which is not a system of the nominal group, though the nominal group, along with the adverbial group, is a grammatical domain in which reference items are located.

One reason why reference is not a system of the nominal group is that it is not realised by a structural relation within the nominal group. Instead, reference is realised by a non-structural relation between a reference item and a referent which may not even be in the text (exophoric reference), let alone in the same nominal group.

This confusion was compounded by the fact that Doran used Martin's model of reference (identification), though without acknowledging the fact, which is (purportedly) discourse semantics, not grammar. Moreover, as explained in great detail here, Martin's model mistakes nominal groups for reference items, mistakes ideational denotation for textual reference, mistakes interpersonal deixis for textual reference, and mistakes non-reference ("presenting reference") for reference.

Ellipsis And Textual Prominence

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 635):

Ellipsis marks the textual status of continuous information within a certain grammatical structure. At the same time, the non-ellipsed elements of that structure are given the status of being contrastive in the environment of continuous information. Ellipsis thus assigns differential prominence to the elements of a structure: 

if they are non-prominent (continuous), they are ellipsed; 

if they are prominent (contrastive), they are present. 

The absence of elements through ellipsis is an iconic realisation of lack of prominence.

Deixis Vs Reference

Personal and demonstrative DEIXIS is a system of the nominal group, personal and demonstrative REFERENCE is not a system of the nominal group.

Personal and demonstrative DEIXIS serves an interpersonal function, personal and demonstrative REFERENCE serves a textual function.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 367):

Many languages embody these two forms of deixis in the structure of the nominal group. The two are closely related, both being (as indicated by the term ‘deixis’) a form of orientation by reference to the speaker – or more accurately, to the ‘speaker-now’; the temporal-modal complex that constitutes the point of reference of the speech event.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 623):

The textual status at issue in the system of reference is that of identifiability: does the speaker judge that a given element can be recovered or identified by the listener at the relevant point in the discourse or not? If it is presented as identifiable, then the listener will have to recover the identity from somewhere else. If it is presented as non-identifiable, then the listener will have to establish it as a new element of meaning in the interpretation of the text.

Everyone Thinks

Criteria For Distinguishing Process Types

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 354):

Speaking Truth To Power

Buyer Beware!

Modelling Paralanguage using Systemic Functional Semiotics: Theory and Application.

by Thu Ngo, Susan Hood, J.R. Martin, Clare Painter, Bradley A. Smith and Michele Zappavigna.

This book is the first comprehensive account of 'body language' as 'paralanguage' informed by Systemic Functional Semiotics (SFS). It brings together the collaborative work of internationally renowned academics and emerging scholars to offer a fresh linguistic perspective on gesture, body orientation, body movement, facial expression and voice quality resources that support all spoken language.

The authors create a framework for distinguishing non-semiotic behaviour from paralanguage, and provide a comprehensive modelling of paralanguage in each of the three metafunctions of meaning (ideational, interpersonal and textual). Illustrations of the application of this new model for multimodal discourse analysis draw on a range of contexts, from social media vlogs, to animated children's narratives, to face-to-face teaching. Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics offers an innovative way for dealing with culture-specific and context specific paralanguage.

Blogger Comments:

If you buy or reference this book, you will be supporting plagiarism.

See Martin's Model Of Paralanguage.

The Proud Authors: Clare Painter, Jim Martin, Sue Hood And Thu Ngo At The Book Launch

Textual Meaning In The Nominal Group

Halliday (1985: 170):

Textual meaning is embodied throughout the entire structure, since it determines the order in which the elements are arranged*, as well as patterns of information structure just as in the clause (note, for example, that the unmarked focus of information in a nominal group is on the word that comes last, not the word that functions as Thing: on pantographs, not on trains [in those two splendid old electric trains with pantographs]). 

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 387-8) add to the foregoing as follows: 

This means that there is a certain potential for assigning experientially similar meanings different textual statuses within the structure of the nominal group. In particular, they may be presented either as Classifier or as Qualifier (e.g. wooden table ~ table of wood) and as either Deictic or as Qualifier (e.g. my brother’s house ~ house of my brother), with the Qualifier having the greater potential as news.

* On the order in which the elements are arranged, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 381) explain:

So there is a progression in the nominal group from the kind of element that has the greatest specifying potential to that which has the least; and this is the principle of ordering that we have already recognised in the clause. In the clause, the Theme comes first. We begin by establishing relevance: stating what it is that we are using to introduce this clause into the discourse, as ‘this is where I’m starting from’ – typically, though by no means necessarily, something that is already ‘given’ in the context. In the nominal group, we begin with the Deictic: ‘first I’ll tell you which I mean’, your, these, any, a, etc. So the principle that puts the Theme first in the clause is the same as that which puts the Deictic first in the nominal group: start by locating the Thing in relation to the here-&-now – in the space-time context of the ongoing speech event. From there we proceed to elements that have successively less identifying potential – which, by the same token, are increasingly permanent as attributes. By and large, the more permanent the attribute of a Thing, the less likely it is to identify it in a particular context.

The Natural Relation Between Grammar And Meaning

Con Game vs Incompetence

"What is the relationship between story, the material world, and consciousness?"

From the perspective of SFL Theory, language construes experience as two domains of first-order meaning:

1. an outer material-relational domain,
2. an inner mental-verbal domain ('consciousness').

Processes of the mental-verbal domain 

1. project second-order meaning (metaphenomena, including stories),
2. range over — or are impinged on by — first-order meaning (phenomena) and second-order meaning (metaphenomena, including stories).

Turn-Taking In Dialogue

Inappropriate Use Of The Colon

The Main Traditions In Western Thinking About Meaning

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 415-7):

We can identify two main traditions in Western thinking about meaning (see Halliday, 1977):

(i) one oriented towards logic and philosophy, with language seen as a system of rules; 

(ii) one oriented towards rhetoric and ethnography, with language seen as resource.

… the orientations differ with respect to where they locate meaning in relation to the stratal interpretation of language:

(a) intra-stratal: meaning is seen as immanent — something that is constructed in, and so is part of, language itself. The immanent interpretation of meaning is characteristic of the rhetorical-ethnographic orientation, including our own approach. 

(b) extra-stratal: meaning is seen as transcendent — something that lies outside the limits of language. The transcendent interpretation of meaning is characteristic of the logico-philosophical orientation.

… The modern split within the "transcendent" view is between what Barwise (1988: 23) calls the world-oriented tradition and the mind-oriented tradition, which he interprets as public vs. private accounts of meaning …

The world-oriented tradition interprets meaning by reference to (models of) the world; for example, the meaning of a proper noun would be an individual in the world, whereas the meaning of an intransitive verb such as run would be a set of individuals (e.g. the set of individuals engaged in the act of running). 

The mind-oriented tradition interprets meaning by reference to the mind; typically semantics is interpreted as that part of the cognitive system that can be "verbalised".

Martin's Subjacency Duplexes

Blogger Comments:

A duplex is a two-unit complex. 

A complex is an expansion of a rank scale unit.

Martin's proposed new structure violates both principles.

(β# does not expand α, and α is not restricted to single rank unit.)

Re-Education

Education

Education, n, That which discloses to the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of understanding.

— Ambrose Bierce 'The Devil's Dictionary'.

Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

— Ambrose Bierce 'The Devil's Dictionary'

Education is what’s left when you’ve forgotten everything you ever learned.

— Alan Bennett ‘Forty Years On’

I count exams, even for Oxford and Cambridge, as the enemy of education.

— Alan Bennett 'The History Boys'

The chief enemy of culture, in any school, is always the headmaster.

— Alan Bennett 'The History Boys'

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

— Oscar Wilde

Rhyme Without Reason

Bondicons, Heroes And Ideology

Bertrand Russell History Of Western Philosophy (pp 21-2):

Throughout this long development, from 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them.  With this difference, others have been associated.   

The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be, in greater or lesser degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically.  They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that ‘nobility’ or ‘heroism’ is to be preferred.  They have had a sympathy with irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion.   

The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists, have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion.   

This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of what we recognise as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought.  In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.