Cheers for this John, and yes I was "confusing a description of grammar (for some subset of human languages) with a metalanguage for talking about semiotics?" - in the sense that I was mixing them up together - deliberately, but probably very ill-advisedly in such a brief post and when I am still in the middle of teaching and marking. I'll take the coward's way out for now and not elaborate on my underdeveloped words, but tbc....
One point only (I can't resist):
curiously cognitive I found: surely it depends, as with all semiotic systems of any interest, on the community of practice?
Yes and no, my intended point was that cognition from this perspective is simply embodied associations and responses and intentionality is just our post-hoc reflection on this (itself a material process......), so that the line between symbolising and saying is in the language of the construer (hence the blurring of the lines in the first part).
A discussion (on my part at least) to be continued once teaching and marking have ended, preferably IRL and with a pint/cup of tea : )
Back to the virtual chalkface....
Blogger Comments:
[1] Bartlett's acceptance of Bateman's misunderstandings of his post as valid, and his reluctance to engage with Bateman on the issue, might reasonably be taken as evidence that Bartlett has only a very superficial understanding of the method he was deploying (using metalanguage to theorise).
[2] To be clear, the portion of Bartlett's original post that Bateman was commenting on is:
at what point does this move from an identifying relation to a verbal process? Does it depend on the intention of the speaker, the understanding of the hearer, or both?
[3] Here Bartlett has abandoned the SFL metalanguage perspective first taken in his original post, according to which cognition is the type of mental process through which propositional ideas are projected.
[4] Here again Bartlett has abandoned the SFL metalanguage perspective first taken in his original post. On this model, 'intention' is the type of mental process, which the grammar construes as either desiderative at clause rank (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 257), or cognitive ('resolving'/'considering') in projecting verbal group complexes (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 587).
On the other hand, Bartlett's claim that 'intentionality is just our post-hoc reflection on' 'embodied associations and responses' is a bare assertion, unsupported by argument or evidence. Moreover, the claim runs counter to the association of intention with planning and forethought. (It is reasonable to assume that, by '
intentionality', Bartlett actually means '
intention', since his original post was on intention, not intentionality.)
[5] From the perspective of SFL metalanguage, 'reflection' is a cognitive process, which the grammar construes as either mental or behavioural, but not material.
[6] To be clear, this is trivially true, since symbolising and saying are metalinguistic categories of language. However, the 'so that' here is unwarranted, because it does not logically follow as a conclusion from the two propositions that precede it, since it is unrelated to them; see [3] and [4] above.
[7] To be clear, the 'hence' here is unwarranted, since, as demonstrated above, none of the preceding clauses provide an argument regarding the blurring of "a description of grammar (for some subset of human languages) with a metalanguage for talking about semiotics", which, as explained in the previous post, is actually the distinction between using metalanguage to theorise and using language to theorise, respectively.
If it is not clear, here Bartlett was bluffing in an attempt to maintain his perceived status. The intellectual shortcoming of public dialogue MODE is that TENOR is more salient than FIELD.
