Problems With The Mode System Of Pulsing

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 196-7):

In addition to chunking up the text, mode also functions as a resource for foregrounding and backgrounding information, through a system called PULSING. In the excerpt above, this is most clearly realised through the Hyper-Themes and Hyper-News which foreground the key meanings that occur. In this case, what is foregrounded is the ideational category of archaea as a branch of life in the Hyper-Theme and the eventual interpersonal vindication of this category and Woese in the Hyper-New:

And now the third branch: archaea.

[…]

But decades later, we have largely accepted, validated, and vindicated his theory, so that archaea are now classified as a distinct, third domain of living creatures.

Foregrounding of this kind is potentially realised through a range of systems including PERIODICITY in discourse semantics, THEME in lexicogrammar, INFORMATION and SALIENCE in phonology, as well as paralinguistic vocal features of SOUND QUALITY, including loudness, tenseness, pitch height (van Leeuwen 1999), the use of gestural beating (Ngo et al. 2022b) and salience within visual multimodal texts (Kress and van Leeuwen 2020). It offers a resource for composing texts in terms of pulses of prominence, foregrounding, and backgrounding information as a text flows.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] This confuses mode, 'the part played by language' in terms of the culture, with Martin's discourse semantic functions hyper-Theme (topic sentence) and hyper-New (paragraph summary), and labels the confusion as the mode system of PULSING.

[2] This confuses mode, context, with the linguistic systems that mark textual prominence, and misconstrues the lexicogrammatical systems of INFORMATION and LEXICAL SALIENCE as phonology (!). This basic misunderstanding has its origin in Martin (1992: 384), where INFORMATION is displaced to phonology and misaligned with the interpersonal metafunction (NEGOTIATION):

[3] For the misunderstandings and plagiarism in Ngo et al. (2022), see the very detailed review here.