James Martin wrote to sysfling on 19 Jun 2019, 14:52:
During the 70s Halliday is something of an intellectual, institutional and political refugee, not concentrating on grammar, but turning his attention to cohesion …
Blogger Comments:
To be clear, in SFL theory, cohesion is a (non-structural) resource of the textual metafunction on the lexicogrammatical stratum.
The reason why it serves Martin to misrepresent cohesion as a resource distinct from the grammar, as he has at least since Martin (1992: 1), is that his model of discourse semantics takes the model of cohesion from Halliday & Hasan (1976), and removes it from the grammar by rebranding it as his own model of discourse semantics:
- Martin's IDENTIFICATION is his rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's REFERENCE (confused with ELLIPSIS–&–SUBSTITUTION);
- Martin's CONJUNCTION/CONNEXION is his rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's CONJUNCTION;
- Martin's IDEATION is his rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's LEXICAL COHESION.
Moreover, Martin's misunderstandings of his source material serve to differentiate his model from Halliday & Hasan's, creating the false impression of genuine theoretical originality. Evidence here.
