10 September 2021

[7] Misrepresenting "The Conflation Of Distinct Tiers Of Structure" As SFL Theory

Doran (2021):



Blogger Comments:

[1] These bare assertions are very misleading indeed, because on the one hand, there is no indeterminacy ("fuzziness") here — see the previous post — and on the other hand, there is no structure conflation in SFL Theory. As a consequence:

  • this non-existent indeterminacy is not "often described in terms of conflation of distinct tiers of structure",
  • conflation does not "work well in emphasising that there are tensions occurring between different strands of meaning",
  • conflation does not "give us a tool for understanding how this non-existent fuzziness works, or the parameters of variation of this non-existent fuzziness",
  • conflation does not "give us an explanation of why a structure occurs", and
  • conflation is not relevant to "a description of what the structure is".

[2] And, to be clear, the reason why structure markers are "simply left out of any structural description" is simply that they are not units in unit complexes.