Why Martin's Notion That ‘Reading’ Is On The Cline Of Instantiation Is Mistaken

Even leaving aside ascription as the organising principle of the cline of instantiation, the relation between a reading and a text is not the same as the relation between a text and system.

A ‘reading’ is metaphorical for Senser sensing Phenomenon.

So, unpacked, a ‘reading’ includes a reader, the reading process and the text that is being read.

So, variant ‘readings’ of one text include variant readers and/or variant reading processes.

The cline of instantiation, on the other hand, is merely a relation between (variant) texts and the system of which each is an instance. It does not include readers or the reading process.

Variation in readers and the reading process are distinct dimensions from the cline of instantiation, and, since they involve actual texts, these dimensions of variation intersect the cline of instantiation at the instance pole.

Two Reasons Why Halliday's And Martin's Models Of Stratification Cannot Be Integrated

1) They do not mean the same thing by ‘register’.

For Halliday, ‘register’ means a functional variety of language (with roots back to the Prague School and Firth).

Martin, on the other hand, equates ‘register’ with Halliday’s ‘context’, which removes the notion of register as a functional variety of language from the model. This is because a higher stratum is not a functional variety of a lower stratum; eg lexicogrammar is not a functional variety of phonology.

2) They do not mean the same thing by ‘context’.

For Halliday, ‘context’ is what people do with language (H&M 1999: ix), the ‘semiotic environment’ of language (and other socio-semiotic systems such as image systems (p375), the “culture”, considered as a semiotic potential (p606). Halliday’s ‘context’ is a level of abstraction that is realised by language.

For Martin (1992: 496), ‘context’ (register and genre) are levels associated with ever larger ‘units’: just as the level of discourse-semantics tends to focus on an exchange or “paragraph”, the level of register tends to focus on a stage in a transaction, and the level of genre tends to focus on whole texts. To this extent, Martin’s ‘context’ refers to levels of abstraction of texts.