Sunday 16 April 2017

Misconstruing Rhetorical Mode As Social Purpose

Martin & Rose (2007: 12):
An exposition consists of the basic stages Thesis and supporting Arguments. Its social purpose is to persuade an audience to the writer’s point of view, the ‘thesis’. Expositions contrast with the argument genre known as ‘discussion’, in which two or more points of view are presented and one argued for over the others.

Blogger Comments:

In SFL theory, the function of language in a situation (type) is termed (rhetorical) mode, the theoretical projection of the textual metafunction onto the stratum of context (the culture modelled as a semiotic system).

The discussion here misconstrues semiotic function as social purpose and blurs the stratal distinction between context (mode) and semantics (text structure) — of a text type (genre).  Text types are located on the cline of instantiation between system and instance, not at the system pole, and they are varieties of language, not context.

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