Saturday 4 June 2016

Confusing Theoretical Dimensions: Stratification, Instantiation & Metafunction

Martin (1992: 520-1):
Texts constituting a social process can be divided into those reconstructing a social process which has taken place and those constructing one which has not (TENSE, DEIXIS and PERSON all shift to distanced values — past, there/then, 3rd).


Blogger Comments:

[1] Again, 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).

[2] This confuses the language rôle feature 'constitutive' (Hasan 1985/9: 58) — the textual metafunction at the level of context — with the construal of experience as meaning — the ideational metafunction at the level of semantics.  The confusion is thus along two theoretical dimensions simultaneously: stratification (context vs semantics) and metafunction (textual vs ideational).