WORKING WITH DISCOURSE: MEANING BEYOND THE CLAUSE

Extract

WORKING WITH DISCOURSE: MEANING BEYOND THE CLAUSE. J. R. Martin and David Rose (Eds.). New York: Continuum, 2003. Pp. 293. $125.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

As someone with only a scant background in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), acquired in passing through my work with teachers of English to speakers of other languages, I was curious to see how far this volume achieved its stated aims of describing a relatively accessible set of tools for discourse analysis informed by SFL and enabling discourse analysts to use them. My previous encounters with SFL suggested that these aims were worthy but ambitious. Indeed, although the back cover reassures us that the reader needs “no prior experience of functional linguistics,” the book is in fact written more like a handbook for readers already drawn to and familiar with the paradigm rather than as an introduction for those who are curious but uninitiated. This impression comes chiefly from the monologic stance that the authors acknowledge they have taken. That is, to make a particular “set of tools more available than they have been in the past” they have concentrated on “a tool-kit informed from just one point of view” (p. 273). The result is a resource that will be enormously useful for those who already know that they want to use these tools but less convincing for neophytes who need first to be persuaded of their usefulness.