Ed McDonald:
3. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by individuation, but would you recognise a greater degree of “individuation” from phonology through lexiocgrammar and semantics to the “material and social worlds of human communities”
No, in a word. Individuation varies at each stratum, from culture to persona… figs [4 and 5] from Martin, J. R., Zappavigna, M., Dwyer, P. & Cléirigh, C. (2013). Users in uses of language: embodied identity in Youth Justice Conferencing. Text & Talk 33(4/5), 467-96
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, the process of individuation is the differential ontogenesis of potential — from culture to phonology — across individuals, and the cline of individuation is the relation between the different potentials of different individuals and the collective potential of all meaners.
[2] To be clear, Martin's Figure 4 confuses points on the cline of instantiation of context (culture and sub-culture) with categories of language users (master identity and persona). Moreover, it proposes that context (culture) is individuated as a language user (persona).
Strictly speaking, the individuation of culture is the differential ontogenesis of the context potential across individuals, and if 'persona' is interpreted as individuated potential, then it is the individuation of both context and language as potential.
[3] To be clear, there are several theoretical inconsistencies in Martin's Figure 5.
Firstly, it presents instantiation and individuation as if they were internal dimensions of meaning potential like stratification. However, the clines of instantiation and individuation model different perspectives on meaning potential as a whole, rather than scales within meaning potential.
Secondly, it misrepresents text as an instance of context (culture) as well as language. In SFL Theory, it is situation that is an instance of context. This relates to Martin's misunderstanding of context as varieties of language, genre and register (which accounts for the superfluous stratum in the figure).
Thirdly, by its vertical dimension, it (unintentionally?) misrepresents the cline of individuation as applying to text as well as potential. This makes the nonsensical claim that every text is common to all language users, varying according to user.
[4] To be clear, the Martin et al paper was written by Zappavigna, under the control of Martin, who is responsible for Figures 4 and 5. The blogger's name was included as author because he, as part-time Research Assistant, devised the model of gestural and postural semiosis that forms the intellectual backbone of the paper. This model has since been misunderstood and rebranded as Martin's model of paralanguage, as documented here.
