Purpose, Genre And Register

Martin (1992: 499):

Instead, taking Halliday's (1978) model [of context] as a baseline, the problem of purpose will be explored, since it bears critically on the relationship between genre and register to be further developed below.

Blogger Comments:

[1] In SFL theory, the "purpose" of a functional variety of language is modelled in terms of the rhetorical mode of the situation type that the language realises.  Mode is concerned with the rôle that language plays.

[2] In SFL theory, register and genre — in the sense of text type — are the same phenomenon viewed from different poles of the cline of instantiation.  Register is the view of functional varieties of language from the system pole; text type is the view from the instance pole.  Importantly, these are identified by the contextual features — field, tenor and mode — that they realise.  That is, situation type (context) and register/text type (language) are different levels of symbolic abstraction.