David Rose Misunderstanding Firth

David Rose replied to Ed McDonald On Sysfling on 28/8/23 at 10:34:

Firth’s famous disavowal begs more discussion...

1 Our schematic constructs must be judged with reference to their combined tool power in a way our dealings with linguistic events in the social process.
2 Such constructs have no ontological status
3 and we do not project them as having being or existence.
4 They are neither immanent nor transcendent,
5 but just language turned back on itself. (Firth 1957 [1950]: 181)

The first clause is the argument for an appliable lx

While the 2nd clause is unarguable (they're constructs)...

3 contradicts another position on SFL theory, that its architecture is designed to mirror the phenomena it construes

4 seems unarguable but lx history q... what currents of the time is he countering?

5 foreshadows a mimetic meta language despite his mere modesty

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Rose's gloss misunderstands Firth. Firth's first point is that theory must be judged according to its explanatory power in modelling language in context.

[2] To be clear, Rose's gloss is misleading, because the claim that theoretical constructs have no ontological status is arguable, since it depends crucially on what is encompassed by the meaning of 'ontology'. 

[3] To be clear, Rose's gloss has nothing to do with Firth's point. Firth's third point follows from his second point: having no ontological status entails having no being or existence. So it doesn't contradict Rose's misunderstanding that a theory mirrors the theory it construes (for which, see the previous post).

[4] To be clear, again Rose's gloss has nothing to do with Firth's point. Firth's fourth point is that theoretical constructs are outside the distinction between meaning as immanent and meaning as transcendent. This is at odds with SFL Theory, where all meaning is taken to be immanent, including meaning used to model meaning. At this point Rose is totally lost.

[5] To be clear, Firth's fifth point is simply that linguistic theory is the use of language to model language; linguistic theory is language about language: a metalanguage.