Misconstruing Language Rôle As Speaker Rôle

Martin (1992: 520):

Commentary texts can be divided into those where the speaker and listener are both observers (TV sports/parade/wedding commentary) and those in which only one party is observing (radio commentary).

Blogger Comments:

[1] Again, the use of the word 'texts' here betrays the ongoing confusion between text types (registers) and context (mode).  The confusion is thus along two theoretical dimensions simultaneously: stratification (context vs language) and instantiation (system vs instance type).

[2] The claim here is that the experiential rôles of the speaker and listener, as observers or not, is a distinction of mode.  This is inconsistent with the notion of mode — a system of the textual metafunction — as the part that language plays (not the speaker).  The confusion here is metafunctional.

Cf. the system of process sharing in Hasan (1985/9: 58):

The second factor to be considered under mode is that of PROCESS SHARING.  Is the addressee able to share the process of text creation as it unfolds, or does the addressee come to the text when it is a finished product?