Friday 6 January 2017

The Depth Of Texts

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 43-4):
Texts have ‘depth’ – ordered layers of semantic patterns, ranging from the global semantic domain of the whole text to local semantic domain corresponding to domains of lexicogrammatical patterning. This depth is reflected in traditional accounts within composition and rhetoric in notions like rhetorical paragraph and topic sentence, and linguists and other scholars concerned with the analysis of texts and the description of the systems that lie behind them have proposed various frameworks for accounting for the ‘depth’ of texts, including pioneering contributions from the broad tradition of tagmemic linguistics …


Blogger Comment:

Notions like 'rhetorical paragraph' and 'topic sentence' are the concern of writing pedagogy.*  Writing pedagogy is a "macro-proposal" for the writing of texts, whereas linguistic theory is a "macro-proposition" for the modelling of language.

*Note that Martin (1992) rebrands 'introductory paragraph' as 'macro-Theme' and 'topic sentence' as 'hyper-Theme' and presents them as linguistic theory.