David Rose On Martin's Context-Bound/Free And Individuation As Allocation/Affiliation

David Rose replied to Ed McDonald on Sysfling on 12/9/23 at 16:55:

For recentish work on "context-bound" vs "context-free" see

Revisiting mode: Context in/dependency in Ancient History classroom discourse

JR Martin, E Matruglio

Studies in functional linguistics and discourse analysis 5, 72-95

Revisiting field: Specialized knowledge in secondary school science and humanities discourse

JR Martin

Onomázein, 111-148

SF work on coding orientation is now being reframed as individuation: allocation/affiliation

Discourse and Diversionary Justice: an analysis of youth justice conferencing

M Zappavigna, JR Martin

Palgrave Macmillan

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin mistakes language varieties, register and genre, for context. If register and genre are misunderstood as the context of language, then the claim is that language is either independent or dependent of the context it construes. In this case, the realisation relation between context and language is misunderstood as dependency.

But even if register and genre are understood as language varieties, the claim is that texts are either independent or dependent of the varieties of which are instances. In this case, the instantiation relation between register/genre and text is misunderstood as dependency.

 [2] To be clear, Halliday (2008: 114) explains Bernstein's coding orientation as follows:

… Bernstein’s concept of “code”, which he defined as sociolinguistic coding orientation […] with its opposition of “elaborated/restricted”, was the basic mechanism of cultural transmission: it was the different semiotic practices, or “meaning styles”, of different social classes that was responsible for transmitting social class distinctions across the generations.

See Misunderstanding Bernstein at Working With Discourse: Meaning Beyond The Clause (Martin & Rose, 2007).

[3] To be clear, Martin has presented two models of a 'cline of individuation': one derived from the work of Bernstein and the other from the work of his PhD student, Knight. The Bernstein-derived model is a cline from 'reservoir' to 'repertoire', where 'reservoir' refers to the potential of the community and 'repertoire' refers to the potential of the individual. Bernstein (2000: 157):

I shall use the term repertoire to refer to the set of strategies and their analogic potential possessed by any one individual and the term reservoir to refer to the total of sets and its potential of the community as a whole.

Applied to language, this is a model of the meaning potential of meaners (language users). The organising principle of the cline is elaboration and ascription (intensive attribution), since 'repertoire' is both a subtype of 'reservoir' (elaboration), and a member of the class 'reservoir' (ascription); cf. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 145).

However, it is the Knight-derived model that is relevant here. Martin et al (2013):

A second, complementary perspective on individuation looks at how personæ mobilise social semiotic resources to affiliate with one another — how users attitude and ideation couplings, in Knight's (2010) terms, to form bonds, and how these bonds then cluster as belongings of different orders (including relatively "local" familial, collegial, professional, and leisure/recreational affiliations and more "general" fellowships reflecting "master identities" including social class, gender, generation, ethnicity, and dis/ability).

Like the Bernstein-derived model, the organising principle is again elaborating ascription, since each point on the cline is a subtype and member of the points above as types, but unlike the Bernstein-derived model, the individuation here is not of the meaning potential of meaners but of the meaners themselves. This inconsistency leads to a more serious inconsistency: the conflation of two different types of hierarchy.

Affiliation differs from individuation in that its organising principle is extension, not elaboration, since it is concerned with composition and association (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 146). That is, where individuation is a hyponymic taxonomy (an elaboration of types), affiliation is a meronymic taxonomy (a composition of parts).

Because of this difference, affiliation can not be mapped onto the cline of individuation. For example, the bonding of meaners through shared evaluations does not affiliate them as a master identity such as gender or ethnicity. Gender and ethnicity are not created by people making the same interpersonal assessments, and the meaners (personæ) of the same gender or ethnicity can differ markedly in their interpersonal assessments.