Martin & Rose (2007: 312):
What this all means is that we have to be very clear how we position ourselves on the instantiation cline when collecting data and analysing it.
In contrast to some views on analysing discourse, we do believe it is important to analyse instances in individual texts.
What is unique about a specific text may be just what matters; we don’t want to lose what’s special by only valuing generalisations across a text corpus.
Beyond this, as discourse analysts generalise, the tendency at this stage of our work is to lose sight of how texture is construed as a text unfolds, through its particular logogenetic contingencies.
We can tend to lose sight in other words of the very kinds of analysis we’ve been promoting in this book.
So the text and reading end of the instantiation cline is an important one, however reluctant journal editors may be about publishing analyses of a single text, as if they believe climate is all that matters and weather doesn’t count.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, it is language (and other semiotic systems) that is on the cline of instantiation, and data is at the instance pole of the cline.
[2] To be clear, analysing discourse — individual texts — is analysing instances.
[3] This is an instance of the logical fallacy known as attacking a straw man, the 'straw man' here being the unattributed claim that only generalisations across a text corpus are valued. To be clear, a specific text (the instance pole) and "generalisations across a a text corpus" (above the instance pole) are not in competition but are complementary perspectives on language.
But here, also, Martin & Rose are confusing two different perspectives on the instance, text vs discourse, which Halliday (2008: 78) explains as follows:
I do make a distinction between these two; but it is a difference in point of view, between different angles of vision on the phenomena, not in the phenomena themselves. So we can use either to define the other: “discourse” is text that is being viewed in its sociocultural context, while “text” is discourse that is being viewed as a process of language.
That is, Martin & Rose are interested in text in its socio-cultural context (discourse), and the view they are arguing against is simply the complementary perspective of discourse as a process of language (text).
Moreover, since the authors' model of genre is itself an example of generalising across a text corpus, in this instance they are actually arguing against the approach they themselves have taken.
[4] Again, this misconstrues complementary perspectives as competing alternatives; see [3]. Amusingly, the authors' claim can applied to their own model through the following paraphrase:
as we generalise texts into genres, the tendency at this stage of our work is to lose sight of how texture is construed as a text unfolds, through its particular logogenetic contingencies.
[5] To be clear, this confuses the totality of metafunctional systems on Martin's discourse semantic stratum with texture, which is created through the textual systems on the lexicogrammatical stratum, namely: those of theme, information and cohesion.
[6] As previously demonstrated, the authors' notion of reading as a pole of the cline of instantiation is invalidated by their misunderstanding of both instantiation and reading, the latter being confused with attitudinal stances towards texts, and with textual responses to texts.
[7] To be clear, relating a specific text to the systems it instantiates is viewing language as both weather (instance) and climate (system). But, in any case, Halliday cautions against restricting our angle of vision to one pole on the cline of instantiation. Halliday (2008: 85, 126, 192):
… whichever of these rôles [grammarian or discourse analyst] we are adopting, we need to observe from both ends. The grammarian, however system-oriented he may be, has to monitor instances of discourse; the discourse analyst, however text-oriented, has to keep an eye on the overall potential. The complementarity means that, unless you shift your angle, you will distort the picture: you cannot know all that is going on if you keep to just one observational perspective. …
To revisit my earlier analogy of climate and weather: the power of weather to influence our daily lives, through storms and floods and droughts and all the rest, derives from the fact that it is the instantiation of something we call “climate” — because it is climate that has shaped our evolution and so determines the effect on us, and indeed on all of nature, of all the fluctuating processes and forces that we call “weather”. In the same way the power of the text resides in the system, because it is the system that determines the meaning and the significance of the ongoing choices made by writers and speakers. It is a mistake to restrict our angle of vision to just one perspective or the other, or to treat the discourse analyst and grammarian as if they inhabited two different realms of intellectual being. …
The system and the text are not two different phenomena: what we call the “system” of a language is equivalent to its “text potential”. Analysing discourse means, first and foremost, relating the text to the potential that lies behind it. There are perhaps three areas of discourse analysis that have figured prominently in systemic-functional research: literary-æsthetic, technical-scientific, and sociopolitical. In the first of these, the text carries value in its own right; when you analyse texts of this kind, you are aiming to explain not only why and how the text means what it does but also why it carries the value that it does. […] In analysing scientific and technical texts, the linguist is likely to be foregrounding the special properties that distinguish these texts from other varieties of written and spoken language, such that they are able to play a central part in the creation and transmission of knowledge. Scientific theories evolve from the conjunction of material and semiotic processes, and the advancement of science is powered by linguistic as well as technical resources. […] On the socio-political side, the researcher is investigating how discourse creates, maintains and transmits the social order (and hence may also be used to subvert it).
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