Discourses of Hope and Reconciliation

On J. R. Martin's Contribution to Systemic Functional Linguistics

Michele Zappavigna, Shoshana Dreyfus, Michele Zappavigna, Shoshana Dreyfus

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350202597
• eBook ISBN: 9781350116085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bringing together leading and emerging scholars in Systemic Functional Linguistics, this book explores the contributions made to SFL theory by James Robert Martin. A leading light in the field for 40 years, this book reviews, explores and develops the theoretical agendas set out in his momentous body of work. Focussed around the four themes of systemic functional theory, linguistic typology, educational linguistics and (positive) discourse analysis, chapters debate and develop the key concepts of Martin's work. Engaging with cutting edge theoretical debates in areas such as discourse-semantics, register and genre and affiliation, Discourses of Hope and Reconciliation examines Martin's lasting impact on the field, developing his momentous contributions to point the way to exciting future research directions in SFL.

1

J. R. Martin, language and linguistics

Y. J. Doran

The University of Sydney

By any measure, J. R. Martin is a major figure in linguistics. A brief look at Martin’s impact quickly shows this. If quantitative measures are anything to go by, at the time of writing, his Google Scholar citation count is 46,579 with an h-index of 85, which puts him eighth in the world in terms of citations for the tag ‘Linguistics’ and third in the world for ‘Literacy’, with a number of those above him no longer active (or alive). This numerical impact is accompanied by the fifty-six and growing PhD students he has supervised (plus innumerable Masters and undergraduate honours students), his forty-odd authored and edited books (or more, depending on when you are reading this), his eight volumes of collected works, plus the twenty-odd books of school-teaching materials he has co-produced, and the roughly 250 journal articles, book chapters, special issues, working papers and the like he has written. Couple this with the fact that research he has driven strongly underpins literacy curricula and pedagogy in both Australia and worldwide and that this festschrift has appeared while he is in his prime with many years of major contributions to come, and the significance of Martin’s work becomes clear.

The role of this chapter is to give some account of Martin’s work and influence. An obvious way of coming at this is by overviewing the enormously broad and varied work he has engaged in thus far and the descriptive, theoretical and applied models and interventions he has developed. This would highlight the range of Martin’s work, from Systemic Functional theory and metatheory to description and application across language and semiosis, from educational linguistics to clinical and forensic linguistics, from critical discourse analysis to positive discourse analysis, from language variation and development to identity and affiliation, from genre to register to discourse semantics to lexicogrammar to phonology, from language description and typology involving English, Tagalog, Korean and Spanish, to multimodality of images and body language and Powerpoint and space, from the language of science to that of history and literature and music and administration and news and opinion and tragedy and hope and activism and schizophrenia, from classrooms to conversations, from written language to spoken language and a wealth of interdisciplinary ventures throughout. Such an overview would emphasize the diversity of objects of study and give a sense of the richness and detail for which Martin is renowned. But to give such an overview would give little sense as to why these objects occurred and what we can learn from them; it would tell us little about how these come together or the unity in diversity of Martin’s work. More practically, if this chapter were written ten years ago, a number of these objects would be missed; or by writing it today, I am surely missing the new focuses and developments of the years to come. To give an overview of the objects of Martin’s work is to give a list. But it says little about how the list holds together, how it came to be or the principles upon which new things are added to it. Put simply, we learn little from such an overview that can help us reflect on our own work.¹

Another point of departure is to emphasize not the breadth and diversity of Martin’s work, but its stability. From this perspective we may say that Martin has firmly positioned his work within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This gives a good insight into the unity of his work and a sense that he has developed the tradition pushed forward by his teacher Halliday and by Firth before him. But again, this would miss the enormous change that this field has had during his lifetime. For one, the name of this approach has continually changed from its earliest days, from neo-Firthian linguistics, to scale and category grammar, to systemic grammar to systemic functional grammar, to systemic functional linguistics to social semiotics and systemic functional semiotics. This name change of course reflects the continuous change that has marked the field. For a student of current Systemic Functional Linguistics to read Gregory’s scale and category grammar of English that Martin was trained on in his undergraduate years (Gregory, 1966–72) would be like a modern English speaker reading Middle English; although there is some vague semblance for those who understand the relation, for other than historical reasons, it would be best to consider it a different linguistic approach.

But this constant change and diversity holds the key to understanding Martin’s work. It has been said that Chomsky has consistently been the first post-Chomskyan (Gregory, 1998). Such a description could also be applied to Martin (and to Halliday before him). This pithy remark holds the insight that the wavelength of academic change is often larger than can be noticed if one is engaging in detail with a field’s development for only a few years (as, say, a PhD student would be), while short enough for the field to be a little unrecognizable if one is away from the coal-face for a while (as, say, for a post-PhD scholar forced to move away and focus on securing a job for a number of years rather than on keeping up with and developing their field). In this continual but at a glance unnoticeable change, it becomes easy to take the principles of one’s field when one is trained as the principles forever more, and to then be frustrated and angered when the field seems to increasingly and irrevocably move away from its ‘true’ essence. It is in this sense that many look to the key books and the key knowers for answers – in the field of SFL/Social Semiotics these tend to be either Firth, Halliday, Hasan, Martin, Matthiessen, Kress and/or van Leeuwen, depending on when and where you were trained – and to shun new developments as vulgar. If Martin is regularly the first post-Martinian just as Halliday was consistently the first post-Hallidayan, then the question is what drives this change. What are the principles upon which Martin’s work has developed, and how can we understand its unity and diversity in a way that can enable a more sober understanding of the development of academic knowledge in general. It is these questions that this chapter will explore.

Linguistics and other things

In his 1992 English Text, Martin describes his linguistic upbringing as follows:

I first became interested in discourse analysis in 1968. I was a first year student at the time, in Michael Gregory’s English department at Glendon College in Toronto. Gregory began our course by introducing us to Hallidayan linguistics (grammar, register theory and stylistics) and hired Waldemar Gutwinski to join the department to teach ‘American’ linguistics. It was Gutwinski who first introduced me to discourse structure, and I have been shunting between clause grammar and cohesion analysis ever since.

Gutwinski was a student of Al Gleason’s, and after finishing my BA at Glendon I enrolled in an MA at the University of Toronto to study discourse analysis with him. After my MA I went to Essex to begin a PhD with Michael Halliday, returning to Toronto for 18 months to work with Gleason before finishing my degree in Sydney in 1977 … My debt to Al Gleason, and to Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan will be more than obvious to readers of this book. Readers familiar with systemic grammar will perhaps forgive me if I refer to Gleason as my meta-Theme and Halliday and Hasan as my meta-New. (1992, p. xiii)

There are a number of things striking about this training in linguistics. The first is the unusual scope this training would have been at the time, especially in North America, bridging scale and category grammar, register, stylistics and cohesion (in undergraduate at Glendon), stratificational linguistics, fieldwork-based language description and discourse structure (with Gleason in both his MA and during his PhD), and the enormously expansive socially, theoretically, descriptively and appliably oriented focuses of Halliday and Hasan that developed through the 1970s, which pushed much further than linguistics was generally assumed to cover at the time.

But there is another set of striking similarities between each of the people Martin notes in his training that he has carried through in his work. This is the openness in which linguistics, however it is defined, is conceptualized in relation to other things – other academic fields (e.g. sociology, literature, education), other arenas (e.g. non-research institutions such as schools, legal systems, family and healthcare contexts) and things typically considered ‘other than language’ (context, broader semiosis, society, etc.). Although at times, especially in the early 1960s, nods were made by a number of these teachers – especially Gregory (e.g. 1966–72) – to linguistics being the study of language for its own sake, each of these teachers all made regular reference to the need for linguistics to be useful for things outside of linguistics.

In the preface to the grammar of English that Martin was initially trained in, for example, Gregory (1966–72, p. 14) notes that:

to make statements about language in its own terms is not, nor should it be, the sole purpose for any linguist’s study. Unless his statements about language are useful, useful not only to other linguists, but also to other men, this has essentially been a trivial study. Inevitably the statements of the majority of linguists do have such value.

Similar sentiments, often arising from the problematics of various applied research goals, can be found in the work of Gleason (particularly in relation to translation, second language teaching and school education, e.g. 1965, 1968), Gutwinski (in relation to stylistics and literature, 1976), Hasan (across a range of areas associated with education, social transmission and verbal art, e.g. 1985, 2009, 2011) and, of course, Halliday who famously emphasized his commitment that ‘linguistics cannot be other than an ideologically committed form of social action’ (1985, p. 5).² This type of linguistics is one that involves a dialectic between theory and practice, where the theory is both developed to be appliable to any problem that arises in the real world and in research, and flexible enough for problems to drive its expansion and development.

This concern for an appliable linguistics has run deep in Martin’s work as well as those of his students and close colleagues (as strongly exemplified by the chapters in this volume; see also Caldwell et al. in press). As he describes:

I have tried to practice linguistics as a form of social action, a practice which Halliday (e.g. 1985) has suggested cannot be other than ideologically committed. This practice dissolves the linguistics vs applied linguistic opposition which has evolved in response to the hegemony of American formalism – whose idealizing reductivity comes nowhere near serving the need of language users and their aids around the world. In its stead, linguistics as social action engages theory with practice in a dialectic whereby theory informs practice which, in turn, rebounds on theory, recursively, as more effective ways of intervening in various processes of semogenesis are designed. (Martin, 2000, p. 116)

As Martin’s work has shown, practising linguistics in this way is not a simple task. It implicates a wide range of principles and practices that at times can be in tension with each other. We will explore these here.

Linguistics and practice

The most obvious feature of an appliable linguistics is its use in solving problems outside linguistics. Importantly, this is not a one-way street; an appliable linguistics in Halliday’s sense is one where outside problems in turn drive the development of linguistics (2008).³ As far as Martin’s work is concerned, the area in which he has worked most deeply in this sense is his concern for designing and implementing literacy pedagogy. This pedagogy has become known as ‘Sydney school pedagogy’ or ‘genre pedagogy’. Twenty years ago Martin (2000, p. 116) described the ongoing development of pedagogical work in the ‘Sydney school’ as follows:

The transdisciplinary literacy research to which I am referring evolved as an action research project in and around Sydney from 1979 … involving at key stages the Linguistics Department at the University of Sydney and the Metropolitan East Region of the New South Wales Disadvantaged Schools program. Our goal, as educational linguists, was to intervene in the process of writing development in primary and secondary school across various depths of time. As far as logogenesis was concerned, we attempted to provide students with knowledge about language … that they could use in reading, writing and editing. As for ontogenesis, we worked with teachers on the design of curriculum (learner pathways) and pedagogy (classroom activity). Finally, with respect to phylogenesis, we were committed to a redistribution of literacy resources and critical language awareness … which we hoped would emancipate the meaning potential of the students we were working with, with a view to giving them ways of redesigning their world. To date, we have had some impact on the first two of these frames for intervention; only time will tell the extent to which the work been socially empowering for the non-mainstream students involved.

This description gives a sense of the multifaceted pedagogy that has been developed, concerned not only with what students write, but with what they can know to help them write; not just what the curriculum should be, but how teachers can effectively teach this curriculum at every level of granularity, from the largest-scale lesson-sequences down to the small-scale exchanges that take place in the classroom; and not just an individualist perspective where each student can ‘attain their potential’ but an explicitly social and political one, concerned with the redistribution of cultural capital traditionally horded by the ruling classes in a way that enables students not just to succeed in their world, but to change it.

As far as the role of linguistics is concerned, this quote makes clear that Martin and colleagues’ work in this area does not begin from the perspective of linguistics, per se. Rather, it begins with educational, social and political issues at stake and, in a sense, ‘works back’ to linguistics. It does not ask ‘what can linguistics do to help education?’, which is likely to lead to the help being limited to what linguistics can do at the time, but rather begins with questions of education and asks ‘how can we develop a linguistics that can help solve this problem?’ This is a profoundly different question that puts the onus back on linguistics to develop itself in a way that can be useful – not just develop a linguistics on its own terms and then find a use for it once it has been developed.

In this chapter we will not go into detail into the various components of the Sydney School pedagogy that has developed (and is still developing), other than to indicate that coming at the issue from the perspective of education implicates a highly multifaceted understanding of education as a social practice and a highly intricate design of pedagogy (see also Humphrey, Hao and Rose this volume for a cutting-edge view of this in science education). Rose and Martin (2012) and Martin (1999a, 2012e) give extensive overviews of the programme as it developed at various points. Here we shall simply exemplify the dialectic of theory and practice by giving a small overview of the role of genre in this pedagogy and how it fits within Martin’s framework. This overview is necessarily simplified but should hopefully give a taste as to what it means to develop an appliable linguistics.

The first thing to say about the notion of genre in SFL is that, in contrast to the oft-repeated story of its development, it did not arise purely from educational work. In Martin’s conception, genre has its roots in, amon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 J. R. Martin, language and linguistics
• 2 Attitudinal alignments in journalistic commentary and social-media argumentation: The construction of values-based group identities in the online comments of newspaper readers
• 3 The foundational role of discourse semantics beyond language
• 4 Construing entities through nominal groups in Chinese
• 5 Launching research: A Martinian perspective on science pedagogy
• 6 Familiarity for the unfamiliar: Thailand, kinship, culture and language
• 7 Intermodal relations, mass and presence in school science explanation genres
• 8 Engaging readers and institutionalizing attitude: A social semiotic perspective on multimodal EFL pedagogic materials
• 9 Uncovering ‘The Story’ behind meaningful texts: Bilingual students’ intentions and linguistic choices
• 10 We are all one: Shifting reference in reconciliation talk
• 11 A nation remembers: Discourses of change, mourning and reconciliation on Australia Day
• Name index
• Subject index
• Imprint