Friday, 31 July 2020

"It Is Not Yet Clear That System Networks Are Appropriate For The Analyst Or The Understander"

Fontaine (2017: 14):
There is often a conflict for the analyst when trying to determine what the speaker has done with language and how the model used by the analyst can fit the instances of language being analysed. The speaker is generating language, while the analyst is parsing language, and doing so for very different reasons. In psycholinguistics, the problem of viewing these two processes (production vs understanding) as separate process is referred to by Pickering and Garrod (2013:347) as “the ‘cognitive sandwich’, a perspective that is incompatible both with the demands of communication and with extensive data indicating that production and comprehension are tightly interwoven”. Reconciling the role of language producer and language understander is important for many reasons, not least of which is the development of a better tool for text analysis. Since it is not yet clear that the system networks are appropriate for the analyst or for the understander, as noted by Tucker (2009:424) above, this development is needed for those using the framework for analysis.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this passage is irrelevant and unconnected to all that has been previously written in this paper.

[1] To be clear, there is no conflict here, because the theory is a model of the language that is used in both speaking and analysing. The different purposes of the speaker and analyst have no impact on the language of the speaker that the analyst is "parsing".

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, system networks are as "appropriate" for the "understander" and the analyst as they are for the speaker. In logogenesis, the speaker produces an instance of the system, a text, and the "understander" and the analyst relate the instance to the system. 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 (1999: 384):
If we look at logogenesis from the point of view of the system (rather than from the point of view of each instance), we can see that logogenesis builds up a version of the system that is particular to the text being generated: the speaker/writer uses this changing system as a resource in creating the text; and the listener/reader has to reconstruct something like that system in the process of interpreting the text — with the changing system as a resource for the process of interpretation. We can call this an instantial system.
[3] Trivially, this was not noted above.