Periodicity

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 17):

PERIODICITY comprises resources for composing text as waves of information. The basic idea here is that there is a hierarchy of periodicity, extending from the small wavelengths of tone group and clause up through an indefinite number of indefinitely long phases of discourse. In the example that follows we have a topic sentence introducing what has been happening to the vlogger in parking lots and a retrospective comment on the frequency of this annoying behaviour. A wide range of resources, including text reference (in bold) and generalised ideation (in italics), along with internal conjunction and ideational grammatical metaphor in more abstract registers, cooperate with one another to scaffold information flow along these lines.

(55)

Oh another thing that has been really annoying this summer is 

you know when you go to a parking lot and it’s a busy place. You get in your car and you – you don’t necessarily want to leave immediately. Like you might wanna – I might want to have Henry test his blood sugar, give the kids snacks. Or if we were at the pool, like change or look at my phone or send a text message or whatever. It drives me crazy when a car is like sitting there following you through the parking lot and then they just wait for you to leave. I cannot stand that.

And that has happened so many times.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, PERIODICITY is a discourse semantic system incongruously named after a type of structure instead of a type of meaning. More importantly, it is writing pedagogy misrepresented as linguistic theory, in which

• introductory paragraph is rebranded as macro-Theme,
• topic sentence is rebranded as hyper-Theme (a misunderstanding of Daneš 1974),
• paragraph summary is rebranded as hyper-New, and
• text summary is rebranded as macro-New.

Moreover, its structures are not relations, but single functions. That is:

• macro-Theme does not relate to a macro-Rheme
• hyper-Theme does not relate to a hyper-Rheme
• hyper-New does not relate to a hyper-Given
• macro-New does not relate to a macro-Given.

[2] To be clear, waves in phonology, lexicogrammar and semantics are of different levels of symbolic abstraction. Here that difference is ignored, as if all waves can be compared at the same level.

[3] To be clear, the claim that text reference, "generalised ideation", internal conjunction and ideational grammatical metaphor "scaffold" this type information flow is a bare assertion without supporting evidence: the logical fallacy known as ipse dixit.