Firstly, a recommendation for a different kind of "trinocular" analysis of "texts" of all kinds from my paper in the Semiotic Margins collection: (1) The need for triangulation: textual, social, theoretical. McDonald (2011):
[I]t seems to me that what is needed for a social-semiotic treatment of any particular modality is a kind of triangulation between the analysis of its texts, the theoretical frameworks that have been applied to it, and the social meanings it has for its communities of users. It is not enough to have just one or two of these:
the theoretical and social without the textual leaves the analysis ungrounded, with no way of understanding in detail how analysts have come up with their interpretations;the social and the textual without the theoretical traps analysts in the (unexamined) presuppositions of their commonsense (or ‘intuitive’) viewpoints;the textual and theoretical without the social makes analyses ultimately only personal ones – insightful, perhaps, but in the end only one individual interpretation.
To clear, this is a non-issue in SFL Theory. A text is an instance of meaning, and the meaning of a social semiotic system is social in the sense that it is interpersonally exchanged in a community of users. Clearly, how a text is analysed depends fundamentally on the theory used to do so. Importantly, in the immanent view of meaning that SFL Theory takes, there is no ultimate theory of phenomena that can be reached by cherry-picking from different theories. Instead, there are applications of each theory that are either valid or invalid in terms of that theory.
