Text As Semantic Unit

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 43):

A text is organised internally as patterns of logical, experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning. At the same time, it is organised externally as a unit operating in context: the structure of the context of situation that a text operates in is, as it were, projected onto the text.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This new addition to IFG by Halliday's reviser, Matthiessen, blurs the distinction between semantics and instantiation, as a result of blurring the distinction between 'text' as a unit of the semantic stratum and 'text' as an instance of a linguistic system.  (The topic under discussion is 'semantics'.)

On the SFL model of stratification, a text realises a context of situation.  The relation between them one of symbolic abstraction, a sub-type of intensive identity.  The relation between text and situation, therefore, is not spatio-temporal (text "in" situation).

The notion of a text as 'a unit operating in context of situation' construes 'text' as Actor of a material Process and 'context of situation' as its spatio-temporal Location:

text	operating	in context of situation
Actor/Medium	Process: material	Location

This is a (metaphorical) construal of text as a Medium of the instantiation process during logogenesis, not a construal of text as a unit of the semantic stratum.

[2] On the SFL model, context and language are construed together (as different levels of symbolic abstraction).  The metaphor that 'the structure of the context of situation is projected onto the text' construes 'the structure of the context of situation' as Goal/Medium of a material Process and 'the text' as its spatio-temporal Location:

the structure of the context of situation	is projected	onto the text
Goal/Medium	Process: material	Location