Misunderstanding 'From Above' And Rebranding Speech Function As Discourse Semantics

Martin (2013: 82-3):

Blogger Comments:

[1] Again, here Martin misunderstands looking 'from above' as looking 'above' — i.e. from below. Again, this is the direct opposite of SFL methodology. Instead of being concerned with how meaning is realised, Martin is concerned with what wording realises.

[2] Here Martin misleads by rebranding Halliday's semantic system of speech function as Martin's discourse semantic system, which Martin himself proposes.

Misunderstanding Congruent vs Metaphorical As Encoding vs Symbolising [1]

Martin (2013: 80):

Blogger Comments:

[1] Again, here Martin misleads by misrepresenting Halliday's system of SPEECH FUNCTION as Martin's discourse semantics.

[2] To be clear, grammatical structure realises (not "reflects") choices made in the MOOD system.

[3] To be clear, 'congruent' is Halliday's technical term for the agreement between semantics and grammar.

[4] To be clear, this seriously misunderstands realisation and grammatical metaphor. Realisation is the relation of symbolic abstraction, and 'symbolising' refers to the relation between semantics and lexicogrammar, irrespective of whether the realisation is congruent or metaphorical. In encoding, the lower level of abstraction (lexicogrammar) is used to identify the higher level of abstraction (semantics), and does not depend on whether the realisation is congruent or metaphorical.

Misrepresenting Halliday's Speech Function As Martin's Discourse Semantics

Martin (2013: 78-9):

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, speech function is Halliday's system of interpersonal semantics. Here Martin misleads the reader by misrepresenting speech function as a system of his model of discourse semantics.

Rebranding Halliday's Work As Martin's

Martin (2013: 45-6):

Blogger Comments:

Again, this augmentation for devising the system network begins by taking the view 'from below': grammatical form and structure. 

The claim that the second perspective is 'discourse' semantic is misleading, because it rebrands Halliday's semantic system of SPEECH FUNCTION as Martin's system. Martin has made a career out of rebranding other people's work as his own, as demonstrated here and here, for example, and has even won a prize for it (recorded here).

Comparing Tagalog And English Person & Number Systems

Martin (2013: 24-5):

Our system network formulation of the revised paradigm is presented below, with PERSON and NUMBER as simultaneous systems, but with a different set of oppositions than those we distinguished when working on the English systems. From this we can see that although English and Tagalog have comparable regions of meaning as far as their pronouns grammar is concerned, no pronoun in one of the two languages can ever be the exact equivalent of a pronoun in the other — because the valeur, to use Saussure's term, is different. The systems are comparable but not equivalent.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin's revised paradigm is just Schachter & Otanes' paradigm with different labels:

Martin has replaced Schachter & Otanes' 'non-plural' and 'plural' with Schachter & Otanes' gloss of their own labels, and replaced their formal categories of person with Halliday's functional categories, as previously explained.

[2] This is misleading. Because Martin used formal categories for English and functional categories for Tagalog, the comparability of the meanings is obscured. For example, if English were presented in these functional terms, the only difference between the two would be the absence of the "speaker/addressee" feature in English.

Note that, from an SFL perspective, English does make a distinction in meaning between 'only' and '+others' for 'addressee', it is just that the same form you realises both feature combinations. The distinction in meaning is demonstrated, for example, by the dialectal use of youse and y'all as realisations for the '+others' meaning.

Misrepresenting Others' Work As Martin's Invention

Martin (2013: 24-5):

We've adjusted the labelling for the paradigm below, to better capture the proportionalities involved. Instead of using traditional PERSON and NUMBER labels we've turned to discourse semantics, and chosen more transparent terms to capture what is going on. One problem with this for some linguists is that our labels now sound more contextual than grammatical, and formal grammarians might object to them on such grounds; and they are perhaps less familiar to linguists than the traditional ones, and so outsiders might find them harder to understand. …

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is very misleading indeed, because discourse semantics is Martin's model, and so claiming to be drawing on discourse semantics here is claiming that this labelling is Martin's work, whereas the truth is that it is not. On the one hand, the PERSON categories are from Halliday's lexicogrammar, not Martin's discourse semantics. For example, Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 40, 41):

… there is a system of PERSON, based (in English, as in most other languages) on the opposition of ‘you-&-me’ versus ‘everyone (and perhaps everything) else’, and then on that of ‘you’ as opposed to ‘me’ (see Figure 2-2). …

On the other hand, the NUMBER categories are derived from Martin's source, Schachter & Otanes (1972: 88), not Martin's discourse semantics:

The plural pronouns have, as a group, the meanings of the corresponding non-plural pronouns with the additional meaning 'and others' (or 'and another'): thus the first-person plural is literally 'I and others', the dual plural 'you (singular) and I and others', etc.

[2] To be clear, the claim here is that a problem with more transparent terms is that they might be harder to understand.

[3] Trivially, in SFL Theory, 'context' is the culture modelled as a semiotic system, and formal grammarians do not use 'context' in this sense, so the labels that Martin has falsely claimed to be his own would not look more 'contextual' to them, and so would not be their grounds for objecting to them.