Edward McDonald:
So “natural” presumably can’t mean “given by nature”, because in that case the semantics of all languages would be the same; but if this “naturalness” is “conventional”, to what degree?
strikes me the most straightforward way to see this as a case of iconic diagrammaticity (which would be a bit more general than Hjelmslev's more direct linking): so I would expect lexicogrammar and semantics to stand in an iconic relationship in this sense. The details of each are conventional, but the more fundamental relationship of diagrammicity holds indeed by their nature rather than by convention.
Edward McDonald:
And if all human communication is multimodal, and all semiotic systems are “natural” in their different ways, how do these different “natures” get to be coordinated or mutually-enforcing in communicative contexts?discourse semantics discourse semantics (some embodiment) and some more discourse semantics.... (see our work on this...).
Blogger Comments:
[1] For an examination of the McDonald post that Bateman is responding to here, see the immediately preceding post.
[2] To be clear, Halliday's notion of a natural relation between semantics and lexicogrammar is the non-arbitrary (non-conventional) relation between meanings and grammatical forms that realise them, such as between process and verbal group and participant and nominal group; see Halliday (1985: xvii-xix).
[3] To be clear, here Bateman is reinventing Halliday's wheel. Halliday (2002 [1984]: 293):
Grammars are ‘natural’, in the sense that wordings are related iconically to meanings;
[4] To be clear, for Halliday, it is the cultural context — that language and other parallel social semiotic systems realise — that makes this possible. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 602):
In other words, language has evolved as part of our own evolution. It is not arbitrary; on the contrary, it is the semiotic refraction of our own existence in the physical, biological, social and semiotic modes. It is not autonomous; it is itself part of a more complex semiotic construct — which, as we have tried to show, can be modelled in stratal terms such that language as a whole is related by realisation to a higher level of context (context of situation and of culture). This contextualisation of language, we suggested, was the critical factor which made it possible to relate language to other systems-&-processes, both other semiotic systems and systems of other kinds.
Discourse semantics, on the other hand, is Martin's rebranding of (his misunderstandings of) the prior work of Halliday and Hasan, with
- speech function (Halliday's interpersonal semantics) rebranded as negotiation (Martin's interpersonal discourse semantics),
- reference (Halliday & Hasan's textual lexicogrammar) rebranded as identification (Martin's textual discourse semantics),
- conjunction & continuity (Halliday & Hasan's textual lexicogrammar) now rebranded as connexion (Martin's logical discourse semantics), and
- lexical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan's textual lexicogrammar) rebranded as ideation (Martin's experiential discourse semantics).
For the evidence on which these claims rest, see the examination of Martin's English Text (1992) here, and the examination of Martin & Rose's Working With Discourse (2007) here. For evidence that Bateman is oblivious to the theoretical inconsistencies in Martin's model of discourse semantics, see the examination of his review of English Text here.
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