David Rose Denying The Existence Of Linguistic Theory

David Rose wrote to sys-func and sysfling list on 10 February 2017 at 14:28:

*Actually* there’s no such thing as genres, or registers, or grammar. There's just text. What we like to call genres, or cultural practices, or semiotic acts, or grammatical features… are just recurring instances of similar patterns in ongoing text, that we recognise as types and might give names to. 

Features at any stratum are nothing but records of past recurrences (usuality) that may predict future recurrences (probability) 

One social application of linguistics is to (try to) control future recurrences (obligation) 

How many recurrences does it take before we call it a feature?

Blogger Comments:

[1] Rose claims that text exists but that genres, registers and grammar* do not.

Actually	there	’s	no such thing as genres, or registers, or grammar
		Process: existential	Existent
comment Adjunct: factual	Subject	Finite	Complement

There	’s	just	text
	Process: existential		Existent
Subject	Finite	mood Adjunct: counterexpectancy: limiting	Complement

The assumption here is that only instances of perceptual phenomena can be ascribed to the set of existents.  Halliday (2008: 13):

Observed from close up, language appears in the guise of text, instances of spoken or written discourse that can be perceived by the senses — that can be heard or seen. Observed from a distance, language appears as a potential, an open ended network of possibilities with certain statistical properties and having certain kinds of interrelationship with its eco-social environment.

The validity of the proposition can be assessed by considering a couple of its implications:

• Language–as–instance (text) exists, but language–as–potential does not.  (Cf weather exists, but climate does not.)  That is, only the instance pole of the cline of instantiation "exists"; a speaker's potential to instantiate texts in logogenesis does not "exist"; the potential that is established in individuals in ontogenesis does not "exist"; the potential that evolves in the species does not "exist".
• Texts about genres, registers and grammar exist, but their subject matter does not.  A text such as Genre Relations is concerned with things that don't exist.

[2] This is the view of registers/genres — as a midpoint on the cline of instantiation — from the instance pole only; see Halliday (2008: 81-2) here.  Rose, however, follows Martin in misconstruing genre and register as systems of context.

[3] Feature frequencies in instances reflect feature probabilities in the system of potential. From the system pole perspective, differences in feature probabilities characterise different registers; from the instance pole perspective, differences in feature frequencies characterise different text types (genres).

[4] "Nothing but" is the language of reductionism (a.k.a. "nothing buttery").

[5] This is prescriptivist pedagogy.  See the is–ought problem, also known as Hume's law, or Hume's guillotine.

[6] To be clear, the question is: 'how far up the cline of instantiation does a feature extend?  Is it only a feature of one text?  Is it also a feature of its text type?  Is it also a feature of the general system of potential?

∞

* Note that, in order to avoid ambiguity, Halliday sometimes distinguishes between 'grammar' (data: the phenomenon modelled) and 'grammatics' (theory: the model of the phenomenon).