Edward McDonald wrote to sys-func on 27 Nov 2023, at 10:05:
In this regard, members of this and other lists may have noticed that I seem to talk about my own experience a lot. But I hope they will also have noticed that I do so not to stress the particularity of my experience but rather its representativeness. I don't think my own experiences are special: I just think we're all far more affected by our own experience in the process of developing our academic thinking than we often like to admit. For example, in observing and reflecting on how people take up and adapt ideas of all kinds, including theories of language, I have become convinced that, whatever may be the purposes for which such ideas end up being used, the reasons for which they're taken up are far more likely to be interpersonal than ideational: because people you admire hold them, or because they're held by a group you want to join, or because they're being used for a practical/political/ideological project with which you're aligned.
Blogger Comments:
To be clear, this is indeed a very serious problem within the SFL community, given that SFL theory, as created by Halliday, is a scientific theory; see What Lies Beneath.
See also, from The Evolution Of Models on The Life Of Meaning:
Controlling Variation: Institutions As Model Reproduction Nurseries
Acting On Each Other: Modulation And Modalisation
Metafunctional Consistency And Selection
Ideational Consistency As Overtly Influencing The Probability Of Selection
Interpersonal And Textual Consistency As Covertly Influencing The Probability Of Selection
Communities As Bodies Organised By Shared Construals, Values And Attentions
