RSSComparing Models Of Stratification
Aug 16
realisation stratification No Comments
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 (following 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.
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