Sunday 19 June 2016

Confusing Context Potential With The Semantics Of Registers

Martin (1992: 526):
In many registers, for reasons of status, contact and genre, affect is not linguistically manifested (because participants scarcely know each other for example) — this is not to say that it is not immanent and cannot be realised in other ways; where language is emotionally charged, then the basic contrast is between positive and negative.

Blogger Comment:

This confuses affect, a system of the interpersonal dimension of context, tenor, with the interpersonal semantics of registers.  The confusion is thus along two theoretical dimensions simultaneously: stratification (context vs semantics) and instantiation (potential vs register).