Confusing Mode With Grammar And Discourse Semantics

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 193-4):

Mukherjee (2022: 68–69) draws on these resources in order to tell the story of the discovery of archaea we saw above. The excerpt we will explore follows reports of two of the branches of life: eukaryotes and prokaryotes. It begins by introducing the third branch archaea at the beginning of a new paragraph by saying:

And now the third branch: archaea (Mukherjee 2022: 68).

Before looking at the whole excerpt, we can note that this sentence functions as a clear demarcation of information from the previous chunks about eukaryotes and prokaryotes. 

From the perspective of PERIODICITY and THEME (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014; Martin and Rose 2007), it puts forward a Hyper-Theme that predicts what is to come (a stretch about archaea) and draws on both a marked and textual Theme (And now) in order to shift the text (Fries 1995). 

From the perspective of IDENTIFICATION (Martin 1992), it both presents a new participant that has not yet previously been mentioned (archaea) and splits an established participant chain (via the third branch) – making clear that there has been a first and second branch, and that this is a separate third branch. 

And finally, from the perspective of CONNEXION (Halliday and Hasan 1976; Martin 1992), the sentence-initial internal addition conjunction And signals a new stretch of language being connected to the previous. 

Three sets of textually oriented systems, then – PERIODICITY, IDENTIFICATION, and INTERNAL CONNEXION – work together to indicate that there is a new chunk of information coming up.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, mode is the part language is playing in terms of the culture. Chunks of information, on the other hand, are language, as too are Halliday's grammatical system of THEME, and Martin's discourse semantic systems of PERIODICITY, IDENTIFICATION and CONNEXION.

[2] To be clear, CONNEXION is termed CONJUNCTION in Martin (1992) and it is his discourse semantic system of the logical metafunction, not the textual metafunction. However, it is a rebranding of the textual lexicogrammatical system of cohesive conjunction (Halliday & Hasan 1976), though confused with the logical lexicogrammatical system of clause complexing (evidence here).