Confusing Mode With Endophoric Reference

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 198):

Distribution can also occur within texts. The clearest instance of this involves drawing on anaphora – whereby an instance refers backwards in a text, often via pronouns. In the following text, the teacher first puts forward the entity ‘nucleolus’, and then each subsequent reference uses it to indicate the information being sought is distributed across the text:

Phoricity resources such as those noted above are one of the key means of distributing information. But they are by no means the only resource for doing this. In the text above, the two questions put forward by the teacher and student: Do you know what the nucleolus is? And Isn’t that where it make ribosomes? also make clear that the information of the text is to be distributed – in this case that another move is needed for closure.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] This simply confuses the contextual parameter of mode, 'the part played by language' in terms of the culture, with a linguistic system two strata below: the lexicogrammatical system of endophoric reference (Halliday and Hasan 1976).

[2] To be clear, here the authors propose that exchange structure (interpersonal semantics) is a resource of mode (textual context), which, as well as confusing context with language, contradicts their claim  that their model conforms to (their misunderstanding of) context-metafunction resonance,.

Most Pageviews by Country

Confusing Mode With Ideational Reference

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 197-8):

This contrasts with a number of instances at the beginning of the class, where the teacher is establishing what they are going to do. In these instances, marked in bold, the teacher is indicating that there is no relevant information elsewhere that is needed to follow what is going on – the information is not distributed but immediate.

What we’re going to do today is model a representation of mitosis as a point of reference to explain these stages. I’m going to give you some materials so when we jump into our groups you’re going to construct a model for the stages.

The immediacy of the information is established in three of these instances through presenting reference (Martin 1992) – a representation of mitosis, some materials, a model, where the indefinite Deictics indicate that these participants are being introduced and are not to be recovered from elsewhere in the text or the situation. The fourth possible instance, our groups, draws on homophora (Halliday and Hasan 1976); in this case the entity’s identity is presumed, and so does not need to be recovered from anywhere else.

Reviewer Comments:

This confuses the contextual parameter of mode, 'the part played by language' in terms of the culture, with two misunderstandings of a linguistic system two strata below: the lexicogrammatical system of reference (Halliday and Hasan 1976).

On the one hand, Martin's 'presenting reference' misunderstands reference in the sense of ideational denotation; see the evidence here. On the other hand, the authors misunderstand what is not a reference item, the first person determiner our, as a homophoric reference item.

Confusing Mode With Exophoric Reference

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 197):

Finally, mode offers resources for distributing information across a text, via a system called DISTRIBUTION. The basic distinction is between an instance of language that indicates that there is further information needed to understand what is being said (i.e. that the information is in some sense distributed) or that all the information is given in the immediate instance. 

Distribution of information occurs throughout the classroom example we have been looking at, where the teacher refers across modalities to the slides they are using (in bold below):

I have this image here of the cell undergoing mitosis for two replicated daughter cells. You’ve got here DNA replication with the cell cycle – what part is that called?

In this example, the teacher is specifying that the information needed is distributed between the spoken language and the slide they are looking at. She does this by drawing on exophoric reference to the infographic (Halliday and Hasan 1976; Martin 1992).

Reviewer Comments:

This simply confuses the contextual parameter of mode, 'the part played by language' in terms of the culture, with a linguistic system two strata below: the lexicogrammatical system of exophoric reference (Halliday and Hasan 1976).