Sunday, 3 September 2023

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

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:
[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:
[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.