Problems With The Authors' Notion Of Shunting Back And Forth Between ‘Texts’ And ‘Readings’

Martin & Rose (2007: 312):

Introducing readings as a final step in the instantiation cline of course begs the question of how we determine what those readings are.  

And there is no doubt in our mind that we need to explore compliant, resistant and tactical responses on the basis of how those readings are materialised in texts, whatever the modalities involved. 

And this means looking at the readings the texts themselves afford, shunting back and forth between ‘texts’ and ‘readings’, until we feel we’ve said enough about the negotiation of meanings among them, as diverse social subjectivities engage.  

This produces in effect a kind of recursive loop at the end of the instantiation cline; but that is just what we want here: readings feeding back into texts, texts feeding back into text types, text types into registers and so on.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, 'to beg the question' is a technical term for a type of circular reasoning (logical fallacy) in which the conclusion of an argument is smuggled into its premisses.

[2] Amusingly, the two authors admit to having only one mind between them.

[3] To be clear, here Martin & Rose again confuse readings of texts (mental projections) with responses to texts (verbal projections). Importantly, a verbal response to a text is another text — another instance — not something further down the cline of instantiation than a text.

[4] To be clear, this is simply "shunting" between different texts at the instance pole of the cline of instantiation. There is no "recursive loop" between two different points on the cline of instantiation.

[5] To be clear, a genuine example of a reading "feeding back" into a text is the process of an editor reading and editing a written text.

[6] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the sense in which texts "feed back" into text types is that selection frequencies in each text potentially alter the selection frequencies of the text type of which they are instances.

[7] To be clear, in SFL Theory, text type and register are the same phenomenon viewed from opposite poles of the cline of instantiation: text type is register viewed from the instance pole, whereas register is text type viewed from the system pole.

Importantly, inconsistent both with SFL Theory and with the authors' own cline of instantiation, Martin & Rose model text type (genre) and register as systems of contextual strata, outside language.