Doran (2021):
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, on the basis of Martin's term 'discourse semantics', Doran here presents the distinction between discourse and grammar as stratal. However, in SFL Theory, 'discourse' refers to one angle on language as instance. Halliday (2008: 78):
“discourse” is text that is being viewed in its sociocultural context, while “text” is discourse that is being viewed as a process of language.
And analysing discourse means relating the text to the grammar as potential. Halliday (2008: 192):
The system and the text are not two different phenomena: what we call the “system” of a language is equivalent to its “text potential”. Analysing discourse means, first and foremost, relating the text to the potential that lies behind it.
Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 731):
A text is meaningful because it is an actualisation of the potential that constitutes the linguistic system; it is for this reason that the study of discourse (‘text linguistics’) cannot properly be separated from the study of the grammar that lies behind it.
And it is the textual component within the grammar that is the resource for creating discourse. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 528):
The “textual” metafunction is the name we give to the systematic resources a language must have for creating discourse: for ensuring that each instance of text makes contact with its environment. The “environment” includes both the context of situation and other instances of text.
And the systems of cohesion constitute the non-structural textual resources of the grammar for creating discourse.
[2] To be clear, covariate structures are not types of structure at all, as Lemke (1988: 159) soon realised:
My own 'covariate structure' (Lemke 1985), which includes Halliday's univariate type, is for the case of homogeneous relations of co-classed units, and should perhaps be called a 'structuring principle' rather than a kind of structure.
Martin's covariate structures are not structures in the sense of units with internal structure, nor in the sense of units forming complexes.