Confusing Register (Language) With Context (Culture)

Martin (1992: 291):

As an alternative to approaching the problem simply from the perspective of grammar and lexis, one can turn to the level of context, and ask questions about appropriate units based on the structure of the register variable field.

Blogger Comments:

[1] The problem (of the syntagmatic extension of the lexical item) is a problem that only arises from misunderstanding the notion of 'lexical item'.  See previous post.

[2] In SFL theory, field is the ideational system, not structure, of context, not register.  Registers, on the other hand, are functional varieties of language use — text types — that differ in terms of the probabilities of systemic features being selected.