Saturday 11 April 2020

The Systemic History Of An Unfolding Text

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 601):
Logogenesis pertains to the entire meaning potential of a language – all the strata and all the metafunctions. For example, alliteration in a poem is an example of logogenesis at work at the stratum of phonology. … In this book, we are largely limiting ourselves to the lexicogrammatical subsystem, and within this subsystem we have had to focus on the grammatical part of the lexicogrammatical continuum. But since our focus is on grammar rather than on semantics, the concept of logogenesis is all the more important: it allows us to explore how local grammatical selections accumulate to create logogenetic patterns that become part of the systemic history of an unfolding text. As we have noted, we can identify phases of selections within such logogenetic patterns; and we can then match them up with contextual and semantic structures of a more global nature (or, alternatively, let these emerge as interpretations of the lexicogrammatical logogenetic patterns).