Misconstruing Field As Mode

Martin (1992: 521):

And fictional constructions can be broken down into realistic (e.g. romance or detective fiction) and fantastic (e.g. science fiction); in fantastic texts, more has to be constructed as less can be assumed.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As the meaning of 'realistic' and 'fantastic' suggests, these are ideational distinctions, not textual; that is, field features, not mode features.  The confusion is thus metafunctional.

[2] The use of the word 'texts' here betrays the ongoing confusion between text types (registers) and context (mode).  The confusion is thus along two theoretical dimensions simultaneously: stratification (context vs language) and instantiation (system vs instance type).