Confusing Material And Semiotic Phenomena In Misunderstanding Context

Martin & Rose (2007: 321-2):

In our discussion of mode above we talked about the way in which the exophoric references in Vincent Lingiari’s speech made it ‘context dependent’ — dependent on our being there or on reading images of what was going on. Another way of putting this would be to say that more than one modality was involved, using the term modality here in the sense of a modality of communication such as language, music, image or action. To understand Lingiari, in other words, we need to process language in relation to image, or language in relation to action. There are two modalities co-articulating what is going on. In register terms what this suggests is that we need to expand our conception of mode to embrace multimodal discourse analysis (hereafter MDA). This entails moving beyond linguistics into social semiotics and taking into account as many modalities of communication as we can systematically describe.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin & Rose model context as register and genre (varieties of language), but here contradict their own model by using 'context' to mean both the first-order material setting ("being there") and the second-order co-text (images).

[2] To be clear, by 'action' here, Martin & Rose mean the material setting. That is, they misconstrue first-order material experience (phenomena) as second-order semiotic experience (metaphenomena). Meanings projected from the material setting are another matter.

[3] To be clear, despite conventional opinion, music itself — unlike musical theory, notation and lyrics — is not a semiotic system. If it were, it would have long been possible to construct system networks of the meaning contrasts realised by sound contrasts. Instead, as a perceptual phenomenon, music potentially induces mental processes of emotion, desire and cognition.

[4] To be clear, inconsistent with the opening sentence, here Martin & Rose return to their own model of context, which misconstrues culture as functional varieties of language (registers).

[5] Trivially, SFL Theory models language as a social semiotic system. That is, the linguistics deployed by Martin & Rose is already within social semiotics.