The "Lack Of Consensus" On Context And Its Relation To Language

 Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 177):

In spite of decades of research developing a model of language and context, there is little consensus in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) about how context should be modelled and how language and context are related. …

For realisation it bears critically on the issue of whether or not to adopt a stratified model of context (as register and genre) and the relationship between extrinsic functionality (field, tenor, and mode) and intrinsic functionality (ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions).

Reviewer Comments:

[1] To be clear, Halliday originally modelled context as the culture as a semiotic system. He used Hjelmslev's notion of a connotative semiotic to model language as the expression plane of context.

Any lack of consensus on how to model context only arises from the fact that Martin (1992) misunderstood Halliday's model, and that two generations of Martin's students accept Martin's misunderstanding without question.

Martin's misunderstandings of context are examined in great detail in the review of Martin (1992), here, but the confusions can be summarised briefly as follows.

Martin (1992) rebrands context of situation (instance) as register and context of culture (potential) as genre. That is, he misconstrues the relation of instantiation on the plane of context as a relation of realisation between strata on the plane of context.

In rebranding (context of) situation as 'register', Martin misconstrues instances of context as subpotentials of language, registers, that realise situation types. That is, he confuses instances of the stratum that is more abstract than language, context, with a point of variation on the cline of instantiation of language, register.

In rebranding (context of) culture as 'genre', Martin confuses rhetorical mode (context) with text type (language), which is register viewed from the instance pole of the cline of instantiation. The structures proposed for different genres are semantic structures that vary for different text types (language) that realise different rhetorical modes (context).

As this deconstruction demonstrates, Martin's misunderstandings are multidimensional, and are so convoluted that students have little option but to accept them on trust.

[2] As will be seen in the course of this review, the authors devote the second half of this paper to addressing their own misunderstanding of how the contextual parameters of field, tenor and mode are related to the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language — what Hasan (2014: 8) terms the hypothesis of 'context-metafunction resonance' (CMR).

To be clear, Halliday (1978: 117) explains his original claim as follows:

In other words, the type of symbolic activity (field) tends to determine the range of meaning as content, language in the observer function (ideational); the role relationships (tenor) tend to determine the range of meaning as participation, language in the intruder function (interpersonal); and the rhetorical channel (mode) tends to determine the range of meaning as texture, language in its relevance to the environment (textual).

That is:

• field (e.g. biology) decides the range of ideational content,
• tenor (e.g. teacher-student) decides the range of interpersonal content, and 
• mode (e.g. spoken dialogue) decides the range of textual content.

This relation can be made more formal by turning the theory back on itself. Taking a decoding perspective on the identity of language and context, language is the Medium of the realisation and context is the Range of the realisation:

On the other hand, taking an encoding perspective on the identity of language and context, language is the Agent of the realisation and context is the Medium of the realisation:

It is this latter perspective that underlies the interpretation that language construes context.