Brad Smith replied to ChRIS CLÉiRIGh on asflanet on 3 September 2024 at 9:43 :
… in the SFL material I was browsing through yesterday afternoon, the terms unmarked and congruent seemed to be used more or less interchangeably.I am not seeking to find the canonical definition to follow, but working out my own ideas on this (I believe, as a Doctor, this is not only my right but my responsibility!). The quoted passage from my YouTube lecture script, I think, is probably where I land on this: congruence, at least, relates, as you have said, to an inter-stratal relation, specifically what is being demanded of clause and tone group by the discourse semantics (that's my current take on this aspect). …There are other, similarly troublesome issues of terminology and symbolism in SFL: for example, the same symbol, with minor, inconsequential adjustment, is used for both structural ordering and for a silent Ictus! …In terms of intonation, however, unlike much of the rest of his work, this has not, relatively speaking, happened as much as I think Halliday wished or expected - for example, the functions of tonicity are still discussed in terms of (Given-New) structure; when the real game, for me, has always been, what gets chosen as focus against the background of what could have been chosen?...i.e. what is the systemic potential for a textual choice? (which, when you start to consider it, is a question with a lot of implications, including for theoretical accounts).
Markedness is not a systemic description, it is a post hoc account of the valeur of certain choices: we consider, for example, which systemic option in the system of mood is unmarked; but this assignment of markedness, however, is not itself a systemic description - the systemic description of mood is declarative, polar interrogative etc. - We still have to work out what the actual potential for choice is for systems of tonicity, salience etc. (eg within/outside of the mood block can, in some texts, be consequential).
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, as demonstrated in the previous post, Smith's 'current take' on the interchangeability of 'unmarked' and 'congruent' is a theoretically invalid misunderstanding.
[2] To be clear, the troublesome issue here is using the symbol ^ for ordering (a^b) and the symbol ‸ for silent Ictus (/‸ /).
[3] To be clear, every non-tonic salient syllable realises what could have been selected as the tonic that realises the Focus of New information. The choice of the Given + New structure of an information unit, on the other hand, is a grammatical selection: tonicity is the phonological means of realising it.
[4] This misunderstands 'valeur'. To be clear, 'valeur' (Saussure) is the value of a term in a system in relation to the other terms.
[5] To be clear, descriptive terms like 'declarative', 'polar interrogative' etc. are features that describe language, whereas theoretical terms like 'unmarked' describe the features.
[6] To be clear, a selection of tonic placement realises a selection of a Focus of New information, which gives textual prominence to one or more functional elements of mood (and transitivity and thematic) structure.
