Misconstruing Register As Context [New]

 Martin (1992: 28):

Beyond this, as Halliday and Hasan note, the concept of cohesion is not in itself sufficient to define a text. Context is also critical and it is for this reason that Chapter 7 has been included in this volume to contextualise the work on discourse semantics developed in Chapters 2 through 6. Needless to say only a brief sketch of a model of the contexts in which English is used is provided at that stage. Since they have so often been misunderstood in this regard, we will close this introductory chapter with the following quotation from Halliday and Hasan (for further discussion of this point see Chapters 6 and 7 below).

The concept of COHESION can therefore be usefully supplemented by that of REGISTER, since the two together effectively define a TEXT. A text is a passage of discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is coherent with respect to the context of situation, and therefore consistent in register; and it is coherent with respect to itself, and therefore cohesive. Neither of these two conditions is sufficient without the other, nor does the one by necessity entail the other. (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 23)

Blogger Comments:

Amusingly, here Martin accuses others of misunderstanding Halliday & Hasan's notion of context, while introducing a clarifying quote from them on the subject which he himself misunderstands.

To be clear, Martin mistakenly equates context and register, presumably on the basis of:

it is coherent with respect to the context of situation, and therefore consistent in register

despite the fact that on the previous page, Halliday & Hasan (1976: 22) make a clear distinction between context (situational features) and register (linguistic features):

The linguistic features which are typically associated with a configuration of situational features — with particular values of field, mode and tenor — constitute a register.

This simple misunderstanding invalidates Marin's model of context. For Martin, varieties of language — registers and genres — are context, not language. This is equivalent to claiming that varieties of climate — tropical, temperate etc. — are not climates, or that varieties of dog — cattle dog, sheep dog etc. — are not dogs.