Misunderstanding Lexis As Most Delicate Grammar

Martin (2013: 97):

Blogger Comments:

This is misleading. To be clear, each lexical item is the synthetic realisation of a set of the most delicate grammatical features, as in Hasan's approach, not the realisation of a single grammatical feature, as in Martin's approach. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 198-9):

Note that it is not (usually) the lexical items themselves that figure as terms of the systems in the network. Rather, the systems are systems of features, and the lexical items come in as the synthetic realisation of particular feature combinations.

An analogy can be found in phonology. For example, the phoneme /b/ is the synthetic realisation of the set of features [voiced, bilabial stop], not the realisation of a single articulatory feature.

Not Recognising The Distinction Between Word As Grammatical And Word As Lexical

Martin (2013: 95): 

Blogger Comments:

This is misleading, because SFL Theory also uses a constituency model, a rank scale, in which the word is a grammatical constituent. But SFL Theory also models the word as a lexical item, wherein it is the synthetic realisation of the most delicate grammatical features. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 568-9):

The folk notion of the "word" is really a conflation of two different abstractions, one lexical and one grammatical.

(i) Vocabulary (lexis): the word as lexical item, or "lexeme". This is construed as an isolate, a 'thing' that can be counted and sorted in (alphabetical) order. People "look for" words, they "put thoughts into" them, "put them into" or "take them out of another's mouth", and nowadays they keep collections of words on their shelves or in their computers in the form of dictionaries. Specialist knowledge is thought of as a matter of terminology. The taxonomic organisation of vocabulary is less exposed: it is made explicit in Roget's Thesaurus, but is only implicit in a standard dictionary. Lexical taxonomy was the first area of language to be systematically studied by anthropologists, when they began to explore cultural knowledge as it is embodied in folk taxonomies of plants, animals, diseases and the like.

(ii) Grammar: the word as one of the ranks in the grammatical system. This is, not surprisingly, where Western linguistic theory as we know it today began in classical times, with the study of words varying in form according to their case, number, aspect, person etc.. Word-based systems such as these do provide a way in to studying grammatical semantics: but the meanings they construe are always more complex than the categories that appear as formal variants, and grammarians have had to become aware of covert patterns.

Misunderstanding Delicacy And Prioritising Structure

Martin (2013: 56):

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, on the one hand, this misunderstands delicacy as "privileging". Delicacy is simply a hyponymic relation (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 145), and a hypernym (e.g. ape) is not more "privileged" than any of its hyponyms (e.g. human). Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 14):

the paradigmatic network is ordered in delicacy (subsumption, classification, specialisation), from the least delicate (most general) to the most delicate (most specific types).

On the other hand, this, once again, misrepresents SFL methodology by taking the view 'from below', structural similarity, in determining how to organise a system.