David Rose On Martin's Approach To SFL

David Rose replied to Annabelle Lukin and Mick O'Donnell on SYSFLING on 16 Sept 2023 at 20:34:

It’s important that people know that the approach is always SFL, as developed by Halliday and colleagues through the 60s-70s, and applied by himself and others to different regions of meaning making over the following decades. The theory has been extended as descriptions have expanded, but the approach is the same... linguistic(/semiotic), functional, systemic.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, for Rose, it is enough that Martin's work is in SFL. Questions of whether the work is consistent with SFL Theory or with itself are immaterial. This is SFL as a faith, rather than a theory. See The Culture Of 'Faith' In The SFL Community.

Field, Tenure & Mode

The Community Of Bluff

Positive Discourse Analysis

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
— Thomas Paine

Wording As The Overlap Of Form And Meaning

SFL Collegiality

Collegiality

Circumstances Inherent In A Process

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 243):

There are also, in fact, certain circumstances that are construed as inherent in a process. This happens with [transformative] ‘enhancing’ clauses construing movement through space of a participant: here a circumstance of Place represents the destination of that movement and may be inherent in the process. For example:

Did these books and articles put groceries on the table?

They carved its image into stone || and placed it on their temples and palaces.

Interpersonal Graphology

Woofer As Tweeter

English for Aliens

Hypothesis Testing

Genre vs Subverting The Genre

Paralanguage

Engagement

Meaner At Risk

command^F

Presentations

Inciting Debate

Demanding Information

Arguing On The Basis Of Evidence

Cancel Culture

 

Your Right To Speak

David Rose Attempting To Deceive The Asflanet And Sysfling Communities

 David Rose wrote to asflanet on 30 April 2023, at 12:57:

In order to have open public discussions about language and pedagogy could I please ask people to use this official discussion list for ASFLA.

asflanet@freelists.org

The “sys-func” address is now a privately managed blog site which I keep trying to block (because of how it has been used), but keeps popping up in my feed because all our colleagues and friends are in my contact list.

 

David Rose later wrote to Sysfling on 30 April 2023 at 22:17:

In another thread (unfortunately conducted on the private “sys-func” blog, instead of sysfling or asflanet), William Armour asked the age old question …

 

David Rose then wrote to Asflanet on 4 May 2023, at 12:42:

The jig’s up Chris

Just be kind to people and most people will be kind to you

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here Rose has resorted to telling what he knows to be an outright lie in order to knowingly deceive his colleagues on the Asflanet and Sysfling email lists. The Sys-Func email list is demonstrably not a blog, private or otherwise, as shown by the public discussions that have taken place over the last 30 years.

An ethical intelligent reader might ask why Rose would want to betray the trust of his colleagues.

[2] Here Rose repeats and compounds the lie by further claiming that he is not the one who has been caught out, without a defence.

[3] To be clear, here Rose is explaining that the reason he told deliberate lies was in order to be deliberately unkind. That is, it was an act of bullying. See, also David Rose Negatively Judging My 'Behaviour'.

See also Rose's Deceptive Use Of Wikipedia.

Liar Profile

 

Ideation vs Attitude

Insincere And Very Nice

The Head Teacher

Personal Reference

Debater

Paradigmatic Lexicogrammar vs Syntagmatic Lexical Collocation

Graham Lock wrote to SYSFLING on 23 Mar 2023, at 11:21:

A question for the theorists among us. Like so many I have been trying out ChatGPT and have been astounded at what it can do. For example, I asked it to translate into English passages from an obscure Buddhist text in Classical Chinese that I am 99.9% sure has never been translated before and it produced a reasonably good translation. That is not particularly surprising. What did surprise me is that when challenged on parts of its translation, it was able to engage in a discussion of why it had translated in a certain way, including unpacking some metaphors (I can upload some screen shots if anyone is interested). It was also able to consider and evaluate alternative translations. How does it do this without some semantic “understanding”? I know nothing about AI, but from everything I have read and heard its language processing is entirely connectionist. It trawls through huge amounts of text identifying and matching patters, and making predictions. It can do some basic parsing of syntax but, I am assured, cannot do any kind of semantic analysis, including semantically oriented functional analyses.. Any semantic “understanding” it comes to must be gleaned through identifying and comparing intra text relations, i.e. collocations. So here’s my question. Was John Sinclair right when he said that SFL greatly exaggerated the role of (paradigmatic) lexicogrammar and greatly underestimated the role of (syntagmatic) lexical collocation in generating coherent text?

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the claim attributed to John Sinclair misunderstands SFL Theory. The syntagmatic juxtaposition of words is the realisation of choices in paradigmatic lexicogrammatical systems in logogenesis. So it is not a matter of "underestimating the role" of one and "exaggerating the role" of the other. One is the (less abstract) realisation of the other.

Postscript:

There have been more than 50 replies to this post on Sysfling, not one of them answering Graham Lock's theoretical question.