The Question Of Whether Systematising Generic Structure Potentials Leads Directly To A Two Plane Model Of Register And Genre

Martin (1992: 551):

To date, no empirical work has been done developing genre networks along these lines, and so the question of whether systematising generic structure potentials leads directly to the two plane model of register and genre being developed here or not has not been fully resolved.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As explained in the previous post, a genre network "along these lines" confuses genre, a midway point on the cline of instantiation (subpotential) with the system pole (network of potential).

[2] Even ignoring all the theoretical inconsistencies entailed, developing genre networks has no bearing whatsoever on the stratification of register and genre as contextual planes.  The principal reasons why it is theoretically inconsistent to model register and genre as levels of context are:

• context is more abstract than language, whereas
• register and genre are both language, and
• register and genre are not different levels of symbolic abstraction (strata), but instead
• the same phenomenon viewed from opposite poles of the cline of instantiation.