Why Genre Is Not A Social Process

 Martin & Rose (2007: 8):

For us a genre is a staged, goal-oriented social process. Social because we participate in genres with other people; goal-oriented because we use genres to get things done; staged because it usually takes us a few steps to reach our goals.

Blogger Comments:

The multi-dimensional theoretical confusions here can be made more explicit by replacing the word 'genre' with 'text type' — the authors' own gloss:

For us a text type is a staged, goal-oriented social process. Social because we participate in text types with other people; goal-oriented because we use text types to get things done; staged because it usually takes us a few steps to reach our goals.

[1] The claim here is that a type of text is a process.  To be internally consistent, the claim would have to be that: 

• a type of text is a type of process, and as such, that
• a text is a process.

In SFL theory, this process is logogenesis, the unfolding of text at the instance pole of the cline of instantiation.

That is, this definition of 'genre' confuses a point on the cline of instantiation (text type) with a semogenic process (logogenesis).

This confusion of text type with logogenesis is further confounded by its being modelled here as context, instead of language.

[2] The claim here is that types of text are social because we participate in them with other people. The main confusion here is the blurring of different orders of experience.

People and the content of texts are of different orders of experience.  People, as sayers or sensers, are first-order phenomena, whereas the wordings or meanings that they verbally or mentally project are second-order phenomena: metaphenomena.  The use of participate in blurs this distinction by placing phenomena and metaphenomena at the same order of experience.

The minor confusion here is the claim that text types are social.  Text types are socio-semiotic rather than social.  This is because they are varieties of language, and language is a social semiotic system; that is: a semiotic system of the subclass 'social'.

[3] The claim here is that types of text are goal-oriented because we use them to reach our goals. This is no more, or less, true of text types than it is of clauses or tone groups, and so, is not a distinguishing feature of text types.

[4] It will be seen that Martin's 'genre' model of text type is largely limited to identifying text structures that vary for text type.  However, inconsistent with SFL theory, the elements of text structure are not differentiated according to metafunction, and are further misconstrued as generic stages (context) rather than semantic structure (language); cf Hasan's (1985) Generic Structure Potential.

Self-Contradiction: Genre As Both Text Type And Context

 Martin & Rose (2007: 8):

We use the term genre in this book to refer to different types of texts that enact various types of social contexts.

Blogger Comments:

[1] The notion of genre as text type is consistent with SFL theory.  In the architecture of SFL theory, text type is a point of variation on the cline of instantiation; it is register viewed from the instance pole (text) of the cline of instantiation.



However, most importantly, this use of the term 'genre' is not consistent with the model of genre presented throughout this work, as (a level of) context.  Types of text are language, not context.  Types of context are context, not language.

[2] In SFL theory, text types (genres) do not "enact" situation types (context); text types realise situation types.  Text types (language) and situation types (context) are different levels of symbolic abstraction.  It is the use of the term 'enact' that blurs the distinction between these two levels of abstraction.

Misrepresenting Cohesive Conjunction As A Misunderstanding Of Stratal Relations

Martin & Rose (2007: 6):

As the meaning of the South African flag is more than the sum of its shapes and colours, so too is discourse more than the sum of its wordings, and culture more than the sum of its texts.  For example, here’s part of the story we’ll be working on later. The narrator, Helena, is talking about separating from her first love:

Then one day he said he was going on a 'trip'. 'We won't see each other again.., maybe never ever again.' I was torn to pieces.

The last clause here, I was torn to pieces, tells us how Helena felt; but because of the way meaning unfolds through the discourse phases of ‘meeting’, ‘description and ‘leaving’ it also tells us why she felt upset; there’s an explanation going on which transcends the meaning of the individual clauses. Taken one by one, each clause describes what happened; taken together they explain it.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misrepresents the relation between strata as the higher stratum being "more than the sum of" elements on the lower stratum.  That is, it misrepresents two different levels of symbolic abstraction as a single level of abstraction organised in terms of composition.  In terms of the fractal types of expansion and projection, this misrepresents elaboration (intensive identity) as extension.

Martin & Rose:

discourse (semantics)	is	more than the sum of its wordings
Carrier	Process: relational: attributive	Attribute

SFL:

meaning (semantics)	is realised	by wording (lexicogrammar)
Value	Process: relational: identifying	Token

[2] In the story text, there is an implicit conjunctive relation of cause: result between the clause complex 'We won't see each other again.., maybe never ever again' and the following clause I was torn to pieces.  This is a type of cohesion, a non-structural resource of the textual metafunction on the stratum of lexicogrammar.  Martin & Rose miss this implicit grammatical relation of cause, and instead attribute it to 'the way meaning unfolds' through 'discourse phases' — as a way of exemplifying their misinterpretation of stratal relations as "more than the sum of".

Misunderstanding Encoding

Martin & Rose (2007: 4-5):

Realisation is a kind of re-coding like the mapping of hardware through software to the images and words we see on the screen on our computers. Another way of thinking about this is symbolisation. An example is the flag of the new democratic South Africa…

So we have the colours of the flag symbolising ‘diverse elements within South African society’, and their convergence symbolising ‘the road ahead in unity’. Symbolising is an important aspect of realisation, since grammar both symbolises and encodes discourse, just as discourse both symbolises and encodes social activity. The concept of realisation embodies the meanings of 'symbolising’, ‘encoding’, ‘expressing’, ‘manifesting’ and so on.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Symbolisation is neither 'another way of thinking about' realisation, nor 'an important aspect of realisation'.  Realisation is the relation between two levels of symbolic abstraction.

[2] This misunderstands the relation between symbolising (realising) and encoding.  Symbolising (realising) is the relation between two levels of symbolic abstraction, lower Token and higher Value.  In such a relation, there are two directions of coding, encoding and decoding, not merely encoding.

When the direction of coding is construed as encoding, the identifying relation between the levels encodes the Value by reference to the Token.  In the case of lexicogrammar and semantics, the identity encodes semantic values by reference to lexicogrammatical tokens:

lexicogrammar (wording)	realises	semantics (meaning)
Identifier Token	Process: relational	Identified Value

On the other hand, when the direction of coding is construed as decoding, the identifying relation between the levels decodes the Token by reference to the Value. In the case of lexicogrammar and semantics, the identity decodes lexicogrammatical tokens by reference to semantic values:

lexicogrammar (wording)	realises	semantics (meaning)
Identified Token	Process: relational	Identifier Value

In short, interstratal relations involve decoding just as much as encoding.  Semantics (meaning) is decoded by reference to context (culture) just as much as context (culture) is encoded by reference to semantics (meaning).

[3] 'Manifesting' is not synonymous with 'realising', since it includes the notion of 'showing', and thus belongs to a different sub-type of identifying process, distinct from the 'symbol' subtype to which 'realising' belongs (Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 269).