Misunderstanding The Realisation Relation Between Context And Language

 Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 179):

In this model, register is the name of the stratum comprising the contextual variables field, tenor, and mode. This contrasts with Halliday’s use of the term register to refer the skew of probabilities in semantic systems inside language by field, tenor, and mode (e.g. Halliday 1991a, 1991b). 

As far as the realisation relationship between the contextual variables field, tenor, and mode and language is concerned (i.e. probabilistic realisation), this difference is purely terminological. Language realises field, tenor, and mode in both models, and field, tenor, and mode choices skew language choices in both models. 

The substantive difference in the models revolves around whether or not context is stratified into field/tenor/mode and genre, or only includes field/tenor/mode.¹

 ¹ As this terminological distinction has often led to confusion, it would perhaps be useful in the model assumed here to use Gregory’s (1967) suggestion of ‘diatype’ for the skewing of probabilities in the systems of language by choices in field, tenor and mode (i.e. Halliday’s register), leaving register as the cover term for field, tenor, and mode.

Reviewer Comments:

[1] This is potentially misleading. For Halliday, and SFL Theory, register is a point of variation on the cline of instantiation of the content plane of language, midway between potential (system) and instance (text). Registers differ from each other in terms of the probabilities of feature instantiation.

[2] This is misleading because it misrepresents the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction, context and language, as causal (enhancing). Importantly, the relation between any two levels of symbolic abstraction is intensive identity (elaborating).

[3] This confuses realisation with instantiation. It is instantiation, the selection of features in logogenesis, that is probabilistic. Realisation is simply the identity relation between any two levels of symbolic abstraction.

[4] This is very misleading indeed, because the difference is considerably more than merely terminological. To take one example, in Halliday's model of context, the cline of instantiation extends from culture (potential) to situation (instance), but neither culture nor situation has a terminological counterpart in Martin's model.

[5] This is not misleading because it is true. But it hints that the second half of this paper is motivated by the authors' intention to refute the criticism of Martin's model of stratified context in The Conception Of Context In Text (Hasan 1995).