Misrepresenting Martin (1992) And Halliday & Hasan (1976) In A Footnote

Fawcett (2010: 56n):

The reason why the coverage in Cohesion in English was limited was not, of course, that the authors were unaware that other factors also contribute to the 'cohesion' of a text, but because they explicitly confined their goals in that work to covering those aspects of 'cohesion' that are not realised in structures — and Halliday takes the position that TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on are all meanings that are indeed realised in structures. (But see my discussion of the reasons for disagreeing with this view in Chapter 7.) Yet the fact is that TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc. can also contribute to the 'cohesion' of a text, as Martin (1992) clearly demonstrates. Perhaps one of the reasons for the popularity of Cohesion in English is the fact that its ideas can be applied to the analysis of texts without having a full understanding of the SFL approach to understanding language. The re[s]ult is that most studies of cohesion do only part of the job. This has in turn had an unfortunate effect on work in some areas where SFL can usefully be applied, such as psychiatric linguists, where the two major areas of study are cohesion and syntax (the latter being of the 'phrase-structure' type).

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading and misrepresents Halliday & Hasan (1976: 7), who explicitly define their term 'cohesion' as only referring to non-structural text-forming resources:

In other words, a text typically extends beyond the range of structural relations, as these are normally conceived of.  But texts cohere; so cohesion within a text — texture — depends on something other than structure.  There are certain specifically text-forming relations which cannot be accounted for in terms of constituent structure; they are properties of the text as such, and not of any structural unit such as a clause or sentence.  Our use of the term COHESION refers specifically to these non-structural text-forming relations.

[2] See the critique of Chapter 7 for the misunderstandings on which  Fawcett's views are based.

[3] On the one hand, this is misleading because it gives the false impression that Fawcett uncovered something unacknowledged in Halliday & Hasan (1976: 6-7):

Structure is, of course, a unifying relation.  The parts of a sentence or a clause obviously 'cohere' with each other by virtue of the structure.  Hence they also display texture; the elements of any structure have, by definition, an internal unity which ensures that they all express part of a text. … In general, any unit which is structured hangs together so as to form text.  All grammatical units — sentences, clauses, groups, words — are internally 'cohesive' simply because they are structured.

On the other hand, it confuses the general notion of 'cohesive' with the technical term 'cohesion' that refers only to non-structural text-forming relations; see [1] above.

To be clear, Halliday (1994: 334) identifies the structural and non-structural resources of the textual metafunction — theme, information and cohesion — as the creators of texture:

 

[4] This is misleading because it misrepresents Martin (1992), in as much as Martin has nothing at all to say about these grammatical systems contributing to the cohesion of a text, as demonstrated here.

[5] These are bare assertions, unsupported by evidence, and based on misunderstandings of cohesion, including those outlined above.