Two Contradictory Claims About Genre

Martin & Rose (2007: 10):

The stages of a genre are relatively stable components of its organisation, that we can recognise in some form in instance after instance of the genre, such as the Orientation, Incident and Interpretation stages of an exemplum. These stages are some of the basic resources of the culture for organising discourse at the level of the text; we use initial capitals to label them.

Blogger Comments:

[1] On Martin's model of genre as context, an instance of a genre is an instance of context, not language.  On the previously given gloss of genre as text type, an instance of a genre is a text, that is: language, not context.  This self-contradiction is sufficient to invalidate the modelling of genre as a stratum of context.

[2] The use of the word 'level' here identifies 'text' as the highest unit of the semantic stratum (as opposed to 'text' as an instance of system potential).  That is, the stages of a genre are here located on the semantic stratum (consistent with SFL theory), thereby contradicting the authors' claim throughout that these are located on a stratum of context (inconsistent with SFL theory).