Tuesday 10 March 2020

The "Cosmetic Exercise" Of Matthiessen and Bateman


Fawcett (2010: 135):
To summarise: it seems clear that that Matthiessen and Bateman's only purpose in generating the Mood elements is to generate a second line of interpersonal structure, and so to make available a visual representation that looks a little more like an IFG analysis. In other words, the generation of the 'Mood' element is simply a cosmetic exercise. Essentially, then, the Nigel generator that Matthiessen and Bateman describe here is one that generates single structures, just as Halliday's earlier models do (e.g., Halliday (1969/81). In other words, their generator conflates 'functions to generate multiple elements, as shown above, but it does not generate multiple structures. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The reason why Matthiessen and Bateman generated Mood elements is because the Mood element is a structural function of the clause, according to the theory they used.

[2] This is misleading, because, in Fawcett's own terms, it is untrue. The text generator of Matthiessen and Bateman produces Subject and Finite as components of the Mood element, which for Fawcett, constitutes "two lines of structure".

[3] To be clear, the conflation of functions does not generate "multiple elements". For example, the conflation of Theme, Subject and Actor does not generate a "multiple element". Each of these is an element of a different structure, a different configuration of relations, and so the notion of a "multiple element" of structure is nonsensical. What is true, in terms of SFL Theory, is that conflated elements are realised by the same unit at the rank below, such as a nominal group, as previously explained.

[4] This is misleading, because it it is untrue. The text generator of Matthiessen and Bateman produces each of the metafunctional structures of the clause: namely, those of theme, mood and transitivity.

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