Friday 19 July 2013

David Rose On Register And Genre

In a Sysfling/SysFunc list discussion entitled 'Political discourse schematic structure' on 19/7/13, David Rose wrote in response to posts by Bill Greaves then Brad Smith:
This is a great point, that register is not a type, so as Bill says there is no such thing as 'a register'. It's far more useful to think of field, tenor and mode as register variables.
On the other hand, a genre is a type (which is what 'genre' means). A genre is defined in Sydney School research as a configuration of register variables, that 'persist as recognisable types within the culture'.

Blogger Comments:

[1] On the SFL model, the term 'register' refers to a point of variation on the cline of instantiation, as viewed from the system pole; viewed from the instance pole, that same point is termed 'text type'.  Registerial variation is modelled as different probabilities of feature selections on linguistic strata.  Such probabilities are established and altered, in the long term, by the actual frequencies of such feature selections in the instantiation of (actual) texts.

[2] It is not 'far more useful to think of field, tenor and mode as register variables' because doing so confuses context (field, tenor, mode), which is more abstract than language, with register, which is functional variation of language itself (not of the semiotic context that language realises).  That is, it confuses stratification with instantiation.  Registerial variation is a feature of all linguistic strata.

[3] It is precisely because 'genre is a type' (inter alia) that it is anomalous to model it as a stratum — as Martin does — in SFL.  The other strata are not types: semantics is not 'a type', lexicogrammar is not 'a type', phonology is not 'a type'.  Functional variation of strata is modelled by (points on) the cline of instantiation.

[4] On the 'Sydney School' model, a genre is not defined as a configuration of register variables.  As Martin's stratification construes it, genre is realised by register;  that is, the model construes genre and register as different levels of symbolic abstraction.

David Rose On The Relation Of Field To Genre

In a Sysfling list discussion entitled 'Political discourse schematic structure' on 19/7/13, David Rose wrote in response to a post by John Knox:
This is good advice, as the ideal method for discovering patterns is by comparison, where one dimension is constant and another varies. In this case the constant is the field of 'political discourse', and the variations are the genres through which it is realised.



Blogger Comment:

In the stratified model that Rose uses (eg Martin 1992), genre is realised by field (as well as tenor and mode). Here Rose misrepresents that model by reversing the relation as field is realised by genre.  To be consistent with the model he uses, he should have written "the constant is the field of 'political discourse' and the variations are the genres it realises", but this would have made the incoherence of the model more explicit.  For reasoned arguments as to why Martin's stratified model is problematic see, for example, here, here or here.