David Rose Endorsing Jim Martin's Misunderstandings Of Structure ("Subjacency Duplexes")

 David Rose wrote to sys-func on 13 Aug 2021, at 20:35:

Thank you to Jim for challenging our thinking again. Although you downplay it as just ‘relaxing’ the associations of multivariate and univariate structures, the idea of subjacency actually looks like a pretty big claim that could resolve a lot of conflicts, contradictions and blindspots in lg description. When I looked at Pitjantjatjara again recently, it was everywhere at group and word ranks.

Blogger Comments:

[1] In the seminar (13/8/21), Martin falsely claimed that Halliday (1965) associated recursive systems with univariate structures and non-recursive systems with multivariate structures, despite producing a diagram from Halliday (1965) that associated recursive systems with both multivariate and univariate structures:

[2] In the seminar, Martin presented a new type of structure, a subjacency duplex, which he claimed is a univariate structure that realises a non-recursive system, thus violating the association he falsely ascribed to Halliday (1965); see [1]. However, the claim does not survive close scrutiny.

To be clear, the term 'subjacency' is from Chomsky (1973), and the term 'duplex' is from Matthiessen (1995: 161) and simply means a univariate complex of two units. In his talk, Martin attributed 'duplex' to Rose (2001), instead of Matthiessen, and although Rose (2001) acknowledges Matthiessen, Rose did not correct Martin on the point during the seminar, or in this public response.

Martin presented the following as an example of a duplex structure:

Here Martin interprets the structure marker, of, as a clitic, and interprets the clitic and the preceding nominal group as a hypotactic duplex. Martin provided no argument in support of this interpretation. The problems here are as follows.

Firstly, the preposition of is the generalised marker of a structural relation between nominals (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 394). In this instance, it marks a structural relation between the nominals two litres and water. In Martin's analysis, however, of is misinterpreted as a Modifier of just one of those two nominal groups.

Secondly, the preposition of does not function as a Modifier, because it does not subcategorise the nominal group two litres; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 389). Nor does of hypotactically expand the nominal group in terms of any other subtypes of elaboration, extension, or enhancement.

Thirdly, the nominal group two litres and the structure marker of do not form a duplex (a 2-unit complex). That is, they do not form a nominal group complex, a structure marker complex, a clitic complex, or any other type of complex.

In short, the reason why this type of univariate structure is not generated by a recursive system, is simply that it is not a univariate structure in the first place.

Martin then went on to compound the error by interpreting both the multivariate structure of prepositional phrases and paratactic nominal group complexes in terms of his subjacency duplexes:

∞

In the same seminar, Martin claimed that a nominal group with multiple Epithets is a multivariate structure realising a recursive system, thus also violating the association he falsely ascribed to Halliday (1965); see [1]. His supporting argument was that each Epithet is independently related to the Thing:

The major theoretical problem here is that, in SFL Theory, recursive systems specify an iterative relation between formal units (e.g words), not functional elements (e.g. Epithets). The logical structure of the nominal group construes it as a group of words, rather than as an organic configuration, such that α is modified by β, which is modified by γ, which is ... , where the α word serves as the Head of the nominal group, and the series of subcategorisations of the Head serves as its Modifier. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 389):

However, there are also problems in using Martin's model of structure to make the argument:

The problem here is that Martin's structural distinction between experiential and logical meaning actually construes the distinction between unequal status (of nucleus vs satellite) and equal status (of multiple nuclei). That is, Martin's structure typology misconstrues the metafunctional distinction between experiential (multivariate) and logical (univariate) as the interdependency distinction between hypotaxis and parataxis.

So, in interpreting the nominal group as an orbital structure, Martin is not actually interpreting it as a multivariate structure, but as a univariate structure, with each Epithet hypotactically related to the Thing.

A final internal inconsistency is that, in applying his model of orbital structure, Martin reverses the direction of the relation from nucleus to satellites to satellites to nucleus (Epithets to Thing), because it suits his argument to do so.