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.