The Global Purpose Of A Genre

Martin & Rose (2007: 261, 345):

Crucially all texts have more than one purpose, and for this reason they will include elements that we would expect to find in other genres. But all texts also have a global defining purpose, and it is this global purpose that predicts the stages the text will go through to achieve this goal, i.e. its genre. Its additional purposes are realised below the level of generic stages, in the variable phases of meaning within each stage, and within the messages that make up each phase. Identifying the genre of a text sometimes involves some shunting up and down, from identifying its global purpose, to analysing its stages and phases, and back up again to its purpose. As with other features of language, a first glance is often not sufficient to identify a genre. A useful guide is the table of genres, their purposes and stages, presented as an Appendix to this book.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, text types (genres) differ by their patterns of instantiation; that is by different frequencies of feature selection in semantic and grammatical systems. Systemic Functional Linguistics gives priority to system over structure.

[2] This is the opposite of what is true. As Martin & Rose have just demonstrated — see the previous post — they use their stages of a text to identify ("predict") the genre of a text, and thus its global purpose. As Appendix A (above) demonstrates, the 'purpose' of a text is just a gloss of its genre classification. In SFL Theory, the purpose of a text is modelled as a dimension of mode. Halliday (2002 [1981]: 225):

Halliday has suggested (1975) that the “textual” properties of a text – the cohesive patterns and those of ‘functional sentence perspective’ – tend to be determined by the “mode”, the function ascribed to the text in the given context of situation, the purpose it is intended to achieve.

[3] To be clear, here Martin & Rose propose a 'generic' compositional scale of

• stage
• phase, and
• message.

Now, although these are clearly semantic units of language defined ideationally, Martin & Rose incongruously locate them two levels of symbolic abstraction above semantics, on their stratum of genre, which they define as context, not language.

On terminology, in Martin (1992: 325), 'message' is proposed as the unit for his logical discourse semantics, whereas in SFL Theory, 'message' refers to the textual semantic counterpart of the clause (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 88, 212).

[4] To be clear, there is no shunting between levels here. On the authors' own description, in order to identify the global purpose of a text (a gloss of its genre classification), it is necessary to analyse its stages; see [2] above.