The Notion That Text Phases Are Sensitive To Genre And Field

Martin & Rose (2007: 262):

As we introduced in Chapter 1, text phases are sensitive to both genre and field: while the stages of a genre unfold in a highly predictable sequence, the phases within each stage are partly predictable from the genre, and partly from its construal of a particular field of activities and entities. Stories, for example, unfold through phases such as settings, problems, people’s reactions, descriptions, solutions to problems, author’s comments and participants’ reflections on the significance of the events. Orators and authors use such phases in highly variable combinations, as the basic building blocks of stories, as we saw for Helena’s story. The phases of recounts are often a series of episodes, and in biographical recounts these episodes correspond to the person’s life stages. In argument genres, phases may include grounds and conclusions, as we saw for Tutu’s exposition, as well as evidence, examples and so on. In the Act we found phases such as purposes, motivations, provisions and definitions. In reports, each phase will tend to describe an element or aspect of the phenomenon under focus. These may include phases such as appearance, behaviour, location, types, parts and so on, depending on the particular type of report and its particular field. We have not attempted an exhaustive study of phase types in this book, as genres are not our primary focus (but see Martin and Rose 20076, and Rose 20076 for discussion of phases in various genres). It is an area of considerable variation that is wide open to further research; the tools we present here will help the analyst to develop this research.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as previously demonstrated, from the perspective of SFL Theory, the authors' 'genre' — misunderstood as a stratum of context — refers to text types that vary in their ideational semantic structures (stages), while the authors' 'field' is ideational semantics, misunderstood as context, misunderstood as register. Phases, on this model, are ideational subcomponents of stages; see [2].

In claiming that text phases vary according to genre and field, what Martin & Rose are actually saying is that the ideational subcomponents of stages vary according to the ideational stages and the ideational meaning of the text type.

[2] As can be seen from this inventory of text phases, all are ideationally defined units, which locates them theoretically within ideational semantics.

[3] To be clear, as demonstrated above and previously, developing this research is not developing research that is consistent with SFL Theory, the theory in which it is purported to be located.