Martin & Rose (2007: 256):
In theoretical terms what we are saying is that register, genre and ideology all matter. …
From the angle of field, we want to analyse texts whose subject matter interests us, or at least is relevant to the topic we are studying or researching; from tenor, we are interested in how speakers in oral interactions negotiate their relationships, and in how written texts engage their readers, or position us to accept their authors’ point of view; and from mode we are interested in the interplay between spoken and written ways of meaning, and in their relation to other modalities of communication (e.g. image, sound, activity).
The concept of genre then gives us the kind of handle on discourse that the clause gives us for grammar — a genre is a recurrent configuration of meaning that matters in the culture, just as a clause is the recurrent configuration of meaning that matters for discourse.
And from an ideological perspective there’s no point in analysing something that isn’t compelling, because analysis is a considerable investment in time and mental labour, so it has to be worth our while.
It’s for these reasons that we have based this book on a field that fascinates us and is surely one of the key topics of our time, the overthrow of the world’s last regime of constitutional racism.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, register, genre and ideology are interpreted by Martin (1992) as three strata of cultural context, despite the fact that registers and genres are two perspectives on functional varieties of language: language as subpotential variation vs language as instance type variation. Martin has since jettisoned his stratum ideology from his model of context. For clarifying critiques of Martin's model, see:
- the 82 posts here on register,
- the 67 posts here on genre,
- the 15 posts here on ideology, and
- the 172 posts here on context.
[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, field, tenor and mode are the metafunctional dimensions of context, not language. Martin (1992) misunderstands these as metafunctional dimensions of register, a functional variety of language, which he misunderstands as a stratal system of context. Moreover, Martin routinely confuses contextual field with ideational semantics; see, for example:
[3] To be clear, this is a false analogy, since a genre is a type of discourse (text), whereas a clause is not a type of grammar, but a constituent of grammar: a rank scale unit that serves as an entry condition to grammatical systems.
[4] To be clear, in SFL Theory, a text type (genre) is a pattern of instantiation that is shared across texts. The extent to which a genre (text type) "matters" in a culture might be gauged by the frequency of its instantiation.
[5] Trivially, the use of the word 'compelling' here might be seen as a Freudian slip, given that 'compel' means to force or oblige someone to do something, and that the language that realises ideology is the language of obligation and inclination — i.e. of desired proposals.
[6] To be clear, the effect of 'basing this book' on such texts is to have the reader associate the authors with the people who are actually involved in the struggle for social justice. This, in turn, has the effect of positioning a critic of their theorising as an enemy of social justice.
[7] This will come as a surprise to all the ethnic communities who are still systematically discriminated against by their national governments.
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