David Rose On Why Language Needs A Stratified Content Plane

David Rose wrote to Sysfling on 28 Mar, 2023 at 9:11:

The way GPT ‘reads’ and ‘writes’ text as probabilistic strings of tokens highlights the question of why language needs a stratified content plane. It sounds something like dynamic processes of DS, as foreshadowed by Firth’s notion of ‘mutual expectancy’. The multiple ‘levels’ of its design could enable it to simultaneously predict and review appropriate structures at several scales and various functions, e.g. figures and figure sequences, lexical strings, reference chains, method of development, evaluation prosodies, exchange roles... [just *predicting structures* not making meanings as persona semiotica].

But lang requires these various scales of DS processes to be (re)organised in local processes of LG. Why?

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, it is not that language "needs" a stratified content plane, but that, on the SFL model, a stratified content plane is what distinguishes language from other socio-semiotic systems.

[2] To be clear, here Rose is merely promoting Martin's discourse semantics, which confuses Halliday's textual grammar (lexical cohesion, reference etc.), Fries' textual grammar (method of development), Halliday's ideational semantics (figures and sequences), inter alia.

More importantly, the dynamics of one stratum, discourse semantics, are irrelevant to the stratification of content, because stratification is the relation between levels of abstraction, and so what stratification affords is the decoupling of congruent relations between strata to open up the enormous semogenic potential of grammatical metaphor. Moreover, as Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 237) point out:

If the congruent form had been the only form of construal, we would probably not have needed to think of semantics and grammar as two separate strata: they would be merely two facets of the content plane, interpreted on the one hand as function and on the other as form.

[3] This is misleading. Martin's discourse semantics is not organised into 'multiple levels' and 'several various scales'.

[4] On the one hand, this misunderstands the relation between strata, and on the other hand, it is very misleading. Semantics and lexicogrammar constitute different levels of symbolic abstraction, so the lower level (Token) is not a local reorganisation of the higher level (Value): the lower level (lexicogrammar) is a realisation of the higher level (semantics). 

In all of Martin's work, which Rose continually promotes, there is a failure to understand strata as different levels of symbolic abstraction. For example, Martin (1992) misunderstands strata as modules (of the same level of abstraction), and confuses stratification with semogenesis ('all strata make meaning').

The reason why this is misleading is that it presents Halliday's lexicogrammar as a "reorganisation" of Martin's discourse semantics, whereas, in terms of theorising, Martin's discourse semantics is a reorganisation of Halliday's lexicogrammar (cohesion) and semantics (speech function).