Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 58, 59, 60):
Looking from ‘above’, proposals and propositions also allow us to distinguish different types of genre. Looking at persuasive texts, for example, analytical expositions such as Text 3.1 argue for a stance of some sort – in this case that the world’s best animal is a butterfly. That is, analytical expositions argue for a proposition. …
By contrast, hortatory expositions argue for action … . Hortatory expositions therefore argue for a proposal. …
Texts in the political sphere in particular often tender multiple proposals. …
Moving beyond persuasive texts, the distinction between proposition and proposal allows us to distinguish different types of factual text as well. Procedures, for example, put forward series of activities as proposals, in order to step through how to do something. …
By contrast, explanations present activities as sets of interconnected propositions …
Reviewer Comments:
To be clear, 'looking at a given stratum from above means treating it as the expression of some content' (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 504). So looking at the semantic stratum from above means treating proposals and propositions as the expression of field, tenor and mode, the systems of the stratum above the semantic stratum. The authors' however, skip this stratum and treat proposals and propositions as the expression of genre. In their model, it is field, tenor and mode, not proposals and propositions, that are the expression of genre.
In Halliday's original stratification, however, what the authors model as a genre stratum is modelled as rhetorical mode, the textual dimension of context. Viewed this way, looking at proposals and propositions from above means looking at them, coherently, as the expressions of mode.
Cf. Halliday (1994: 363):
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