Affirming The Metastability Of Evolving Dynamic Open Systems

Martin (1992: 585):

Martin 1986 introduces the term contratextuality for texts which directly oppose each other from different positions and this idea has been extended in delicacy by Lemke (1988: 48).  Contratextuality is critically related to semogenesis in ways that are only beginning to be investigated (for a revealing study of the semiotic subversion of genre fiction by feminist writers see Cranny-Francis 1990) and it is probable that work in this area will be among the first to shed light on the vexing question of how text renovates system as dynamic open systems evolve, thereby affirming their metastability.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the semogenesis to which contratextuality is related involves three related processes:

• logogenesis, the instantiation of the system in the text;
• ontogenesis, the development of the system in the individual; and
• phylogenesis, the evolution of the system in the species.

[2]  To be clear, on the SFL model, the relation between text and system is instantiation.  In this view, language is a probabilistic system and it is differences in probabilities that define register variation (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 552-6).  Probabilities in the system are manifested as frequencies in the text, and the frequencies in each text minutely nudge the probabilities in the system up or down.