The play of genres and their recontextualisations around issues draws attention to the crucial role of change in ideological analysis. For the distribution of power in a culture is never more than metastable; in order for power relations to remain stable over time, they must continually adapt to change: there has to be both inertia and change for life to carry on. Halliday and Matthiessen (Halliday 1992, 1993; Halliday and Matthiessen 1999) have developed a comprehensive outline of social semiotic change which is highly relevant here. For relatively short time frames such as that involved in the unfolding of a text, they suggest the term ‘logogenesis’ (the perspective we've been foregrounding in this book); for the longer time frame of the development of language in the individual, they use the term ‘ontogenesis' (Painter 1984, 1998); and for maximum time depth, ‘phylogenesis’ (as in Halliday’s reading of the history of scientific English in Halliday and Martin (1993)). A good example is Mandela’s Meaning of Freedom recount, which unfolds in a spiral texture that maps out his development as a political leader (ontogenesis) in the context of major cultural shifts in post-colonial history (phylogenesis). This trinocular framework is summarised as follows.
⁶ The term ‘instantiation’ refers to texts as instances of the semiotic system of a culture, i.e. the language system is instantiated in texts.
[1] To be clear, on the authors' model, genres cannot be recontextualised, because genre is the highest level of context. That is, genre is a context without a context.
[2] To be clear, here the authors continue their previous confusion of power with ideology — the latter being neither defined nor exemplified.
These are the three major processes of semohistory, by which meanings at continually created, transmitted, recreated, extended and changed. Each one provides the environment within which the 'next' takes place, in the order in which we have presented them; and, conversely, each one provides the material out of which the previous one is constructed: see Figure 1-6.
[5] To be clear, this seriously misunderstands the three semogenic processes, confusing them with the ideational content of a text. In this particular case, logogenesis describes the unfolding of Mandela's text; ontogenesis would describe the development of the languages, Xhosa and English, in Mandela himself; and phylogenesis would describe the evolution of Mandela's languages, Xhosa and English, in the human species.
[6] To be clear, this is potentially misleading. Ontogenesis is the development of a semiotic system in the individual, and phylogenesis is the evolution of a semiotic system in the species.
[7] To be clear, this misunderstands instantiation and stratification. Texts are instances of language, not culture. In SFL Theory, culture is modelled as a semiotic system that is realised by language. That is, culture and language are different levels of symbolic abstraction. An instance of the culture is a situation; that is, culture is instantiated as situations, not texts. The confusion of culture with language pervades Martin's model, as demonstrated by his modelling varieties of language, register/genre, as culture instead of language.
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