Jim Martin Spruiking His Group's Work On Systemic Functional Semiotics

Jim Martin wrote to Sysfling on 25/8/23 at 11:43:

Cute, but let’s not be too cavalier about dismissing work that can reasonably be counted as SFS (such as that noted below). This work is explicit enough and comprehensive enough with respect to a range of semiotic modes that probing questions can be raised (and have been), including…

• Has enough attention been paid to materiality (the ‘etics’ materialising ‘emics’)?
• Has enough attention been paid to ‘constituency’ (ranks and taxis)?
• Has enough attention been paid to the interdependency of systems and their possible correlation with types of structure (re ‘metafunctions’)?
• Has enough attention been paid to stratification (is one stratum being made to do too much work)?
• Has enough attention been paid to instantiation (especially the modelling of abductive inferencing as texts unfold)?

The answer to each of these questions is some degree of “no”; in some cases extant SFL theory makes room for improvement (cf. van Leeuwen on the ‘materiality’ of sound or colour) and in other cases it is sorely lacking (e.g. how to model coupling, commitment and the abductive inferencing highlighted in the dynamic take on discourse semantics propagated by John and his colleagues).

The paper attached from the 2010 UTS ICOM meeting touches on many of the issues raised in this thread:

Multimodal semiotics: theoretical challenges. S Dreyfus, S Hood & M Stenglin [Eds.] Semiotic Margins: meaning in multimodalities. London: Continuum. 2011. 243-270.

images

Kress & van Leeuwen Reading Images

picture books

Painter et al. Reading Visual Narratives

animations

He ‘Towards a stratified metafunctional model of animation’ Semiotica 2021; 239; 1-35

paralanguage

Ngo et al. Modelling paralanguage using SFS

emoji

Zappavigna & Logi Emoji and Social Media Paralanguage (in press CUP)

infographics

Martin & Unsworth Reading Images for Knowledge Building

space

McMurtrie The Semiotics of Movement in Space

math symbolism

Doran The Discourse of Physics

chemistry symbolism

Yu Multimodal Knowledge Building in Secondary School Chemistry Textbooks (forthcoming Bloomsbury)

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin's concern here is not with whether theory has been understood and consistently applied in such work, but simply with whether the work is explicit and comprehensive enough to ask questions about what else needs to be done. The academic quality of the work is immaterial.

[2] To be clear, coupling and commitment are two of Martin's misunderstandings of SFL Theory. The notion of coupling derives from Martin's misunderstanding of metafunctions and strata as interacting modules (Martin 1992: 390ff). In fact, it merely makes the banal observation that features are selected with other features in instantiation. 

The notion of commitment derives from Martin's misunderstanding of delicacy and instantiation, namely: that speakers can choose the degree of delicacy they traverse in systems during instantiation, with greater delicacy corresponding to greater commitment. In fact, it is only by traversing the entire system to the most delicate features that lexical items can be specified.

[3] To be clear, abductive inferencing is not the best available mode of reasoning:

Abductive reasoning (also called abduction, abductive inference, or retroduction) is a form of logical inference that seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from a set of observations. It was formulated and advanced by American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce beginning in the last third of the 19th century. Abductive reasoning, unlike deductive reasoning yields a plausible conclusion but does not definitively verify it. Abductive conclusions do not eliminate uncertainty or doubt, which is expressed in retreat terms such as "best available" or "most likely".

In later years his view came to be: 

Abduction is guessing. It is "very little hampered" by rules of logic. Even a well-prepared mind's individual guesses are more frequently wrong than right.

Moreover, abductive reasoning is formally equivalent to a logical fallacy:

Abductive reasoning allows inferring a as an explanation of b. As a result of this inference, abduction allows the precondition a to be abduced from the consequence b. Deductive reasoning and abductive reasoning thus differ in the direction in which a rule like "a entails b" is used for inference. As such, abduction is formally equivalent to the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (or Post hoc ergo propter hoc) because of multiple possible explanations for b.

[4] Trivially, the papers in this publication are from the 2007 conference at the University of Sydney titled 'Semiotic Margins'. Non-trivially, Martin's paper in this collection includes his classic misunderstanding of Saussure and Hjelmslev. Martin (2011: 245):

To be clear, Saussure's signifié and signifiant correspond to Hjelmslev's content and expression, and it is these that are the focus of linguistics. The relation between these two levels of symbolic abstraction is simply realisation. 

[5] With regard to the work by Martin and his colleagues on paralanguage, see:

• Buyer Beware!
• Martin's Model Of Paralanguage

[6] For a critique of some of the theoretical misunderstandings in these works, see the earlier post Yaegan Doran On The Metafunctions In Mathematical And Chemical Symbolism.