The Self-Contradiction In Martin's Model Of Genre

Martin & Rose (2007: 296):

Throughout this book the main theoretical construct we have used to get a handle on context is genre. And for the most part we spent time on just five of these – exemplum, exposition, act, recount and report. That’s a very small window on culture, even if as linguists we try to model culture as a system of genres. But it’s a start, and one that suits functional linguistics and has served it well in its negotiations with social theory over the past twenty years.

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To be clear, in SFL Theory, 'genre' (Hasan) is synonymous with 'text type' (Halliday), and 'text type' is the view of 'register' from the perspective of the instance pole of the cline of instantiation, in contradistinction to 'culture', which refers to the context that language realises, at the system pole of the cline of instantiation:

That is, in locating genre at the level of context, Martin's model is inconsistent with SFL Theory in terms of two dimensions: stratification and instantiation. Moreover, in modelling a variety of language (genre) as context— instead of language — Martin's model is self-contradictory even in its own terms.

Cf Martin & Rose (2007: 8):

We use the term genre in this book to refer to different types of texts that enact various types of social contexts.