Misconstruing Language Sub-Potentials (Genres) As Context Potential (Culture)

Martin (1992: 560):

Linguists' concern with constituency at the level of genre has meant that questions of field, in Pike's sense of the term, have not been actively pursued.  Hasan's notion of generic structure potential does generalise across a range of text structures, determining their generic identity:

The property of structure is what allows us to distinguish between complete and incomplete texts on the one hand, and between different generic forms on the other.  With some oversimplification, the assumptions here can be stated as follows: associated with each genre of text — i.e. type of discourse — is a generalised structural formula, which permits an array of actual structures.  Each complete text must be a realisation of a structure from such an array.  The generic membership of the text is determined by reference to the structural formula to which the actual structure can be shown to belong.  (Hasan 1977: 229)

But Hasan has not attempted to develop these structure potentials in the direction of system/structure theory; and as noted above, the question of systemic relations among structure potentials does not really arise.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This invites the misinterpretation that such linguists also:

• misconstrue genre (language sub-potential) as a stratum of context (cultural potential), and
• misconstrue semantics (text structure) as genre (text type).

[2] To be clear, this is field, in Martin's misconstrual of Pike's sense of the term (as system rather than structure type).

[3] To be clear, as the quote makes plain, Hasan's generic structure potentials provide a generalised formula for a range of semantic structures of a given text type (genre).

[4] Hasan did not make systems of generic structural potentials because to do so would have been inconsistent with the rest of the architecture of SFL theory, since it would have confused the system pole of the cline of instantiation (semantic stratum potential) with the middle of the cline (genre/text type/register).

Misinterpreting Pike

Martin (1992: 548-9):

Halliday (1978, 1979) associates different types of structural realisation with different metafunctions. … In addition Halliday points out the correlation between these different metafunctional perspectives on realisation and Pike's work on particle, wave and field. … Halliday correlates constituency realisation with the particulate perspective, culminative realisation with wave theory and prosodic realisation with field.  The last of these correlations seems to be stretching a point since for Pike field theory is not so much concerned with non-discrete realisations as with "intersecting properties of experience" that "cluster into bundles of simultaneous characteristics which together make up the patterns" of experience (Pike 1982: 13); Pike sums up his perspectives when introducing field as follows:

We have discussed the way in which elements can be viewed by themselves as particles, or as waves smearing into some kind of continuum whose prominent parts make up nuclei.  Now we turn to sets of relationships which occur when units are linked to one another by their presence in some larger system.  A total set of relationships and of units in these relationships we call a field.  (1982: 30)

The component of systemic theory which would appear to correspond most closely to this articulation of field is system, not prosody.  For this reason the discussion will be pursued here at the level of genre under the headings of particle, prosody and wave.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Significantly, Martin's model of discourse structure is inconsistent with the SFL association of metafunction and structure type.  On the one hand:

• the structure of the logical system, conjunction, is modelled as messages (particles) related by types of expansion, and
• the structure of the experiential system, ideation, is modelled as lexical strings of message parts (particles),

but on the other:

• the structure of the interpersonal system, negotiation, is modelled as constituency (particles) — exchange and move — rather than as prosody, and
• the structure of the textual system, identification, is modelled as reference chains of participants (particles), rather than as wave.

[2] While it is true that Pike's notion of field does not correlate with the notion of prosody, it is not true that it correlates with the notion of system in SFL theory.  Martin has simply misinterpreted Pike's notion of 'system' as Halliday's notion of 'system'.  Pike is concerned with complementary perspectives on a sequence of items; that is, in SFL terms: syntagmatic, not paradigmatic relations.  Pike (1993):

The observer can choose to look at a sequence of items as if they were separate, in order to talk about phonemes, words, etc., but he also needs to be able to talk about them in terms of fusion, and he doesn't understand them ultimately unless he sees them in relation to a patterned system. Hence particle, wave, and field.

[3] Halliday (1977, 1978: 188) uses the term 'prosodic' rather than 'field' in relating types of grammatical structure to metafunctions.  Martin (1992) is merely following Halliday while implying otherwise.

The consideration of structure types with regard to genre suggests that text type is about to be confused with semantic structure.

[4] Having introduced Halliday's association of structure types with metafunctions, Martin will now consider the structure types in relation to genre, a stratal system that he does not differentiate in terms of metafunction.