Misunderstanding Stratification And Context

Martin (1992: 498):

Register is defined as "the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture associates with a situation type.  It is the meaning potential that is accessible in a given social context" (Halliday 1978: 111). 

Defining register in these terms pushes considerations of context such as those addressed by Malinowski and Firth one level up, to what Halliday refers to as context of situation — presumably what is referred to as situation (non-linguistic phenomena) in Fig. 7.4.  Context of situation is then organised metafunctionally into field, tenor and mode as described above.

Blogger Comment:

This is a very strange misunderstanding indeed.  Halliday's definition of register — as the meaning that realises a situation type — has no bearing whatsoever on the organisation of strata.  Register and situation type are midway points on the cline of instantiation — for the strata of semantics and context, respectively.

Halliday's notion of context derives from Malinowski and Firth, and is structured semiotically in terms of field, tenor and mode, as Martin has already explained (p494) with a quote from Halliday (1978).

Misrepresenting Firth On Context

Martin (1992: 497):

Systemic approaches to context derive from the work of Malinowski (1923, 1935) who argued that texts have to be understood in relation to their context of situation and context of culture.  Malinowski developed these ideas with respect to the problem of translating specific texts in particular contexts, leaving it to Firth (1950, 1957b, 1957c) to develop context more abstractly as a level of language.  For Firth, context was one of a number of levels of analysis (alongside grammar, morphology, lexis, phonology and phonetics) required for linguistics to make statements of meaning about text (Firth 1935/1957a: 33).

Blogger Comment:

This is misleading.  Firth did regard the text as part of his formulation of context, and he did regard context as integral to the study of language, but the following quote from Firth's A Synopsis Of Linguistic Theory, 1930-1955 makes clear that he distinguished language and context.  Firth (1962: 6):

Each function will be defined as the use of some language form or element in relation to some context.

This distinction is borne out by Firth's (op. cit.: 9) description of the constituents of the context of situation:

A. The participants: persons, personalities and relevant features of these.

(i) The verbal action of the participants.
(ii) The non-verbal action of the participants.

B. The relevant objects and non-verbal and non-personal events.
C. The effect of the verbal action.

Note that 'participants' refers to the interlocutors and any others relevant to the speech event, not to participants in processes in the clauses of the spoken texts that the interlocutors produce.

Confusing Material Setting And Context Of Situation [updated]

Martin (1992: 121):

These orientations [situation vs community] can be systematised as follows.  Adapting Malinowski's terms, a distinction can be drawn between context of culture and context of situation.  Context of situation refers here to relevant information that can be perceived (seen, heard, felt, tasted, smelled), including text; context of culture embraces relevant information which cannot be perceived, but which can be assumed because of shared knowledge among interlocutors deriving from their membership in some definable community.

Blogger Comment:

[1] The relation between 'situation' and 'community' — even on Martin's understanding of these terms — is not the same relation as that between 'context of situation' and 'context of culture', as will be demonstrated below.

[2] Here Martin fails to inform the reader that Malinowski's terms had already been introduced into SFL theory by Halliday; see, for example, Halliday & Hasan (1985/9: 5-7).  In doing so, Martin thus falsely presents the work of others as his own.

In SFL theory, 'context' is the culture modelled as a semiotic system, whose expression plane includes language — a connotative semiotic in Hjelmslev's (1961) terms.  Language realises context; context is a higher level of symbolic abstraction than language.

The relation between 'context of culture' and 'context of situation' is instantiation, with the former constituting the 'system pole' of the cline of instantiation, and the latter constituting the 'instance pole'.  In other words, a 'situation' is a instance of 'culture' as potential, where both are conceived of as semiotic, not material.

[3] The material phenomena that can be perceived by interlocutors are features of the material setting.  Any such phenomena only feature in the semiotic context of situation if they figure as an instance of the culture that is realised by the (instance of) language of the interlocutors.

[4] This blurs an important distinction.  To be clear, the 'surrounding' text is the co-text, and so is language that realises context, not context itself.  On the other hand, instances of culture realised in any ancillary texts, as in a teaching situation, can feature in the semiotic context of situation.

[5] To be clear, the 'context of culture' is the cultural potential that can be realised in the meaning potential that is language.

__________

Importantly, 374 pages later in this work, these inconsistencies are further compounded when Martin (p495) reinterprets context of situation as register and context of culture as genre.  The absurdity of substituting two perspectives on functional varieties of language (register and genre) for opposite poles of the instantiation cline for context (situation and culture) can be made clear by substituting the later terms for the terms introduced above, yielding:

Register refers here to relevant information that can be perceived (seen, heard, felt, tasted, smelled), including text; genre embraces relevant information which cannot be perceived, but which can be assumed because of shared knowledge among interlocutors deriving from their membership in some definable community.