Misrepresenting Social Context As A Stratum Of Language

Martin & Rose (2007: 3-4):

SFL has been described as an ‘extravagant’ theory; its extravagance has evolved to manage the complexity of the phenomenon it describes. But despite the complexity of language in social contexts, the basic principles developed in SFL for managing it are relatively simple. To begin with we will briefly introduce two general perspectives for looking at the phenomena of discourse. These two perspectives are:

• [relevant] levels of language: as grammar, as discourse, and as social context (known as the strata of language)
• three general functions of language in social contexts: to enact our relationships, to represent our experience, and to organise discourse as meaningful text (known as metafunctions).

Blogger Comment:

[1] In SFL, as elsewhere, social context is not a stratum of language.  In the first instance, the strata of language are semantics (meaning), lexicogrammar (wording) and phonology (sounding). Context is distinct from language, and constitutes the culture modelled as a semiotic system whose expression plane includes language.  Language realises context.

Significantly, this inclusion of context within language is also inconsistent with the theoretical source of this workbook, English Text (Martin 1992), which nominally distinguishes context and language, despite re-interpreting context as diatypic varieties of language (register and genre); see explanatory critiques here.

[2] In SFL, the term 'discourse' does not refer to a stratum of language.  (For a thorough critique of Martin's model of 'discourse semantics' as a stratum, see here.)  For Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 512), 'discourse' refers to:

… the patterned forms of wording that constitute meaningful semiotic contexts.

And Halliday (2008: 78) further clarifies the distinction between 'discourse' and 'text':

I do make a distinction between these two; but it is a difference in point of view, between different angles of vision on the phenomena, not in the phenomena themselves. So we can use either to define the other: “discourse” is text that is being viewed in its sociocultural context, while “text” is discourse that is being viewed as a process of language.