Monday 5 September 2016

Why Martin Prefers His Own Model To Halliday's

Martin (1992: 571):
Before turning to the plane of ideology, the question of distinguishing register and genre as semiotic planes will be taken up once again with reference to the work of Halliday, Hasan and Longacre, none of whom "stratify" context along these lines.  Their models can each be shown however to involve additional complexity that the genre and register model here avoids.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is the beginning of Martin's argument as to why his model of register and genre as contextual planes is preferable to (his misunderstanding of) Halliday's original model in which genre and register are construed, instead, as complementary perspectives on varieties of language.

[2] It will be demonstrated in the following posts that this is the opposite of what is true.  That is, it will be demonstrated that Martin's model is more complex, as well as being inconsistent with several dimensions of the architecture of SFL theory.  It will also be demonstrated that Martin misrepresents the work of Halliday and Hasan in the course of his argument.