Secondly, a recommendation for an obligatory multi-semiotic theoretical approach whichever semiotic system we're examining.
(2) What can they know of [metafunctions] who only [language] know
Given that those of us working in SFL, whatever else we are, are almost inevitably linguists, we can take it that we will always be "aware of" language - but at the same time we need, I believe, to acknowledge that other semiotic systems may not necessarily show the same configuration of stratification and metafunction as we take to be characteristic of language.…
McDonald (Understanding BL dramas / discourse analysis... in draft):
Although I said that a social semiotic perspective is a useful one here, in practice I find much of the actual analysis carried out within social semiotic frameworks inadequate for the purpose [of accounting for the text as a whole, in all its complexity but at the same time coherence], largely because scholars have struggled to free themselves from the theoretical influence of linguistics, and from the analytical practice of continually invoking the meanings of language in order to explain those of other semiotic systems....
My general criticism would be that while the social semiotic frameworks currently in use are very good at dealing with the “combination”, of delineating the whats and hows of the multimodal text as a whole, they are less good at accounting for the “contribution”, at capturing the basic duality of each semiotic system, what I like to call interpretation and expression, without constant resource to language as the ground of explanation.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, for those working in SFL, according to SFL Theory, following Hjelmslev, all semiotic systems are stratified into content and expression planes and, following Halliday, only the content plane of language is stratified into semantics and lexicogrammar. The fact that other semiotic systems do not include a lexicogrammatical stratum is demonstrated by the fact that they cannot be read aloud as language can. (It is the stratum of wording that is projected by the process of saying.)
With regard to the metafunctions, in SFL Theory, these are very general functions that lie behind all meaning making. Although different social semiotic systems can be expected to vary in the systems of each metafunction, the metafunctions themselves can be expected to be recognisable in virtually all adult social semiotic systems. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 532-3) write:
These three "metafunctions" are interdependent; no one could be developed except in the context of the other two. When we talk of the clause as a mapping of these three dimensions of meaning into a single complex grammatical structure, we seem to imply that each somehow "exists" independently; but they do not. There are — or could be — semiotics that are monofunctional in this way; but only very partial ones, dedicated to specific tasks. A general, all-purpose semiotic system could not evolve except in the interplay of action and reflection, a mode of understanding and a mode of doing — with itself included within its operational domain. Such a semiotic system is called a language.
[2] To be clear, the use of 'largely because' here presents a bare assertion (the logical fallacy known as ipse dixit) as if it were a reasoned argument. McDonald's unsupported claim is that social semiotic analyses of non-linguistic social semiotic systems are inadequate because they apply models theorised on the basis of linguistic social semiotic systems.
[3] To be clear, this is another bare assertion (ipse dixit). Here the previous bare assertion about the inadequacy of social semiotic analyses of non-linguistic social semiotic systems is elaborated by an unsupported claim of what they are 'less good at'.
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