Why The Argument For A Stratum Of Ideology Is Invalid

Martin (1992: 495-6):

Any configuration of this kind then needs to be qualified with respect to cultural diversity (cf. dialogism and heteroglossia in Bakhtin 1981).  Clearly, meaning potential is not evenly distributed across a culture (any more than material resources are).  Access to genre, register and language as semiotic resources is mediated through discourses of ethnicity, class, gender and generation, which discourses are in a continual process of negotiation with each other.  Not only is this process of negotiation manifest in all text, but it functions as well as the source of semogenesis, both contextual and linguistic.  It is for this reason that a fourth communicative plane, ideology, will be articulated here, with genre, and hence register and language as its expression form.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, genres/registers are types of language, not distinct semiotic modes.

[2] This is manifestly untrue.  The negotiation between "discourses of ethnicity, class, gender and generation" that "mediates access" to semiotic resources is a feature of only some registers of language.  Consider, for example, texts like the following:

There once was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.

[3] The claim here is that the negotiation between "discourses of ethnicity, class, gender and generation" that "mediates access" to semiotic resources is a source of semogenesis.  This misunderstands semogenesis.  In SFL theory, the logogenesis of all texts 'provides material for' ontogenesis, which 'provides material for' phylogenesis (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 18).

[4] The claim here is that, because the negotiation between "discourses of ethnicity, class, gender and generation" that "mediates access" to semiotic resources is a source of semogenesis, it motivates a more abstract level of context, above genre, termed ideology.  That is:

• because logogenesis 'provides material for' ontogenesis (and ontogenesis for phylogenesis),
• ideology can be modelled as a level of symbolic abstraction within context.

In logic, this is known as a non sequitur.  Semogenetic relations are distinct from — and so do not motivate — higher levels of symbolic abstraction.  This continues the confusion of semogenesis with stratification and the misconstrual of strata as modules.

In SFL theory, the ideologies of a culture are simply modelled within context, whereas the language that realises ideologies is, in the first instance, the concern of semantics.