David Rose Seriously Misrepresenting Halliday's Model Of Context

David Rose responded to ChRIS CLÉiRIGh on sys-func on 14/6/22 at 9:57:

It’s illuminating to follow the path of his model. …

Despite the empirical developments you mention, in metafunctions and axis, his stratal model remained essentially identical for the next 40 years... 1961 ‘situation’ becomes ‘context’ and 1961 ‘context’ becomes ‘semantics’... semantics remains an ‘interlevel’ between lexicogrammar and ‘extra-textual’ context.

The symmetry of the model was appealing and persuasive, with (lexico)grammar at the centre. In 1961, phonology was also an ‘interlevel’ with phonetics. By 2004, phonetics becomes the ‘interlevel’, to maintain the symmetry...

[2004 On Grammar as the Driving Force from Primary to Higher-Order Consciousness]

This is the same model drawn by CMIMM in IFG3/4, as co-tangential circles.

As ‘context’ is modelled as an asemiotic ‘extra-textual’, ‘eco-social environment’, this model is incommensurable with semiotic models such as JRM’s 1992 description of register and genre as connotative semiotics.

Blogger Comments:

[1] See Rose's previous misrepresentations of Scale & Category Grammar (Halliday 1961):

David Rose Misrepresenting Michæl Halliday On Meaning
David Rose Crediting Jim Martin With Michæl Halliday's Ideas
David Rose Misunderstanding Halliday's Distinction Between Value And Meaning
David Rose On Exchange, Marxian Theory And Halliday (1961)

[2] To be clear, the sys-func post that Rose is responding to made no mention of empirical developments nor 'axis'. Instead, it listed aspects of Halliday's second theory, Systemic Functional Grammar, that did not feature in Halliday's first theory, Scale & Category Grammar; specifically:

The theory does not include system networks, nor metafunctions, and the elements of clause structure are simply Subject, Predicator, Complement and Adjunct. The theory also does not distinguish realisation from instantiation, the word 'exponence' being used to cover both of the later concepts.

[3] To be clear, for some, Halliday's stratal is model "appealing and persuasive" because of its explanatory power and its consistency with the rest of the theory, rather than its "symmetry". Symmetry does not guarantee either explanatory power or theoretical consistency.

[4] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The figure from Halliday (2004) relates language to its material order environments, ecosocial and bodily, whereas the figure from IFG is only concerned with the semiotic order: language and its semiotic context (culture).

[5] This is very misleading indeed. Halliday's 'context' is the culture as a semiotic system. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 375):

Context is the 'semiotic environment' of language (and other sociosemiotic systems such as image systems [maps, diagrams, etc.]);

Halliday (1978: 2):

This in summary terms is what is intended by the formulation 'language as social semiotic' It means interpreting language within a sociocultural context, in which the culture itself is interpreted in semiotic terms…

[5] This is true. Moreover, Martin's derived model is not only inconsistent with Halliday's original model, it is inconsistent with itself, as demonstrated many times here and elsewhere on this blog.