Martin (1992: 499):
Instead, taking Halliday's (1978) model [of context] as a baseline, the problem of purpose will be explored, since it bears critically on the relationship between genre and register to be further developed below.
Blogger Comments:
[1] In SFL theory, the "purpose" of a functional variety of language is modelled in terms of the rhetorical mode of the situation type that the language realises. Mode is concerned with the rôle that language plays.
[2] In SFL theory, register and genre — in the sense of text type — are the same phenomenon viewed from different poles of the cline of instantiation. Register is the view of functional varieties of language from the system pole; text type is the view from the instance pole. Importantly, these are identified by the contextual features — field, tenor and mode — that they realise. That is, situation type (context) and register/text type (language) are different levels of symbolic abstraction.
