Sunday, 2 April 2017

Misconstruing Semantic Structure As Social Purpose

Martin & Rose (2007: 9):
Her tale then unfolds as a story genre known as an ‘exemplum’, a kind of moral tale related to fables, parables and gossip. Its social purpose is to present a problematic incident and then interpret it for the audience, commenting on the behaviour of the people involved. This story type contrasts with the ‘narrative’ story type that typically presents a problem which is then resolved by the lead characters. An exemplum consists of the basic stages Orientation, Incident and Interpretation.

Blogger Comments:

This misconstrues a semantic structure of a text type — what Hasan (1985) termed a Generic Structure Potential — as a "social purpose".  This misunderstanding follows from misconstruing text types (genres) as social context instead of language.

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