David Rose Endorsing Martin's Misunderstanding Of Stratal Relations As Axial

David Rose wrote to sys-func and sysfling on 7/8/22 at 8:14:

5. Re ‘ how this helps us with other semiotic systems’ 

Martin 2011 on Kress & van Leeuwen's Reading Images...

...the greater influence of Reading Images on the field of multimodal discourse analysis stems precisely from the provision of explicit system/structure cycles that give rise to a community of scholars who can confidently share this lingua franca as far as image analysis is concerned. Kress & van Leeuwen's relatively modest axially motivated proposals turn out to be far more powerful than alternatives not explicitly founded on system/structure complementarities.

Painter, Martin & Unsworth 2013 describe system/structure cycles in detail for visual images, for the register of picture books. Here their basic ambience system...

Axis is sufficient...

...to date, for these greyscale systems (and all our other picture book systems in fact) we have not been able to uncover a distinctive system of valeur underlying the systems in Fig. 10 and functioning as ambient semantics. As with SFL MDA work in general, we are proposing one system/structure cycle, with further specification of meaning at this stage dependent on its interaction with co-text in specific instances of a specific genre (Martin 2011).

 

Blogger Comments:

This is misleading, because it is untrue. To be clear, the realisation statements in Figure 10 specify systemic features on the expression plane (colour, black only, texture, lighting effects, outline drawing) not structures on the content plane. The system itself represents content plane distinctions: the meanings purported to be thus realised.