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

Text

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 43):

The basic unit of semantics is the text — language functioning in context, an instance of the semantic system.

Blogger Comment:

Note that this new addition to IFG by Halliday's reviser, Matthiessen, blurs the distinction between 'text' as a unit of the semantic stratum and 'text' as an instance of a linguistic system.  Most importantly:

• the theoretical notion of 'text as semantic unit' is not restricted to the instance pole of the cline of instantiation, and 
• the theoretical notion of 'text as instance' is not restricted to the semantic stratum.

It will be seen that this blurring compromises the discussion that follows.

Content: Semantics & Lexicogrammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 43):

As the upper of the two content strata within language, semantics is the interface between context and lexicogrammar. Semantics transforms experience and interpersonal relationships into linguistic meaning, and lexicogrammar transforms this meaning into words, as we put it above, adopting the speaker’s perspective.

Blogger Comment:

Note that this new addition to IFG by Halliday's reviser, Matthiessen, construes each of semantics and lexicogrammar as both the Assigner and Value of these identifying relations — as both the Agent and Range of the Process.

semantics	transforms	experience and interpersonal relationships	into	linguistic meaning
Assigner	Process: relational	Identified Token		Identifier Value

and	lexicogrammar	transforms	this meaning	into	words
	Assigner	Process: relational	Identified Token		Identifier Value

Semantics As Interface

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 42-3):

Semantics is the highest stratum within language; it serves as an ‘interface’ between language and the environment outside language. This means that semantics interfaces with context, but not only with context — it also interfaces with other systems that operate within context, viz. with the content systems of other semiotic systems and with bio-semiotic systems such as our systems of perception and our system of bodily action (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999).

Mixed Channels And The Blurring Of Sharing Vs Exploring

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 42):

Technological advances have continued to enhance the potential of both phonic and graphic channels, and to enable mixed channels (cf. Halliday, 2008: 140–141). Importantly, mobile and web-based technologies (for hardware and software) have changed the possibilities of ‘sharing’ in rather dramatic ways, with a whole host of new options like e-mail messages, text messages, blogs, tweets and other formats associated with social media, as investigated and discussed by Macnamara (2010). As a result, the distinction between the private sphere of ‘sharing’ values and opinions and the ‘public’ sphere of exploring them has become blurred.

Mode: Channel

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 42):

Channel determines the ‘bandwidth’ of the flow of meanings in a situation. For most of human history, the channel was only phonic, but typically with visual contact (thus also allowing for accompanying gestures, facial expressions and other forms of visual ‘paralanguage’); but with the gradual emergence of writing, initially in certain city-based civilisations around five thousand years ago, graphic channels were added, and archival uses of language became possible.

Orientation Of Text Towards Both Field And Tenor: 'Enabling' Situations

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 42):

The goals of ‘enabling’ situations can also be said to relate to both field and tenor, but in a different way. They concern the addressee’s activities in some field, but tenor comes into the picture as well because these activities are ‘modulated’: the addressee is either capacitated to undertake them (instruction) or required to do so (regulation). In terms of their organisation, instructional texts tend to be more field-like, being organised as the sequence of steps that make up a procedure. In contrast, regulatory texts have a less clearly field-based organisation; and like ‘promoting’ texts, they may include motivations – although typically threats of forms of punishment rather than the irresistible features of a product or service!

Orientation Of Text Towards Both Field And Tenor: 'Recreating' Situations

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 41-2):

Orientation towards both field and tenor means that the goals of the situation, or intended outcomes, are concerned with field and/or tenor. Thus the goals of ‘recreating’ situations may be concerned with the construal of some imaginary world, ranging from a slight variant of our own world to a world of pure fantasy; but the goals may at the same time involve moral principles embodied in tenor. In this way, utopias and dystopias are concerned with both field and tenor. The orientation towards both field and tenor is reflected in the structure of traditional folk tales or nursery tales: field is reflected in the sequence of events (initiating, sequent and final), and tenor is reflected in evaluations, which may be strung out prosodically through the narrative and/or encapsulated in a separate ‘moral’ at the end of the tale (cf. Hasan, 1984).

Orientation Of Text To Tenor vs Field In Relation To Internal vs External Conjunction

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 41):

The orientation towards tenor is thus likely to be reflected in the semantic organisation of texts operating in ‘recommending’ and ‘exploring’ contexts in the use of fairly global internal relations – called internal conjunctive relations (see Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Martin, 1992) or internal rhetorical relations (see Mann & Matthiessen, 1991). 

Both evidence and motivation can be interpreted as internal versions of cause –

• evidence: ‘I claim/you should believe that ... because ... ’; 
• motivation: ‘I want you/you are obliged to ... because ...’. 

In general, orientation towards tenor is characteristic of ‘sharing’, ‘recommending’ and ‘exploring’ contexts, and also in principle of ‘enabling’ contexts of the ‘regulatory’ subtype (but see immediately below). In contrast, texts operating in contexts with an orientation towards field are much less likely to involve internal relations; instead, they are organised both globally and locally in terms of external relations.

Blogger Comment:

Note that this new addition to IFG by Halliday's reviser, Matthiessen, fails to alert the reader to the fact that Martin (1992) misunderstands the distinction between internal and external conjunctive relations.  See, for example:

• Misinterpreting Internal And External Conjunctive Relations
• Misconstruing Internal And External Relations
• Misrepresenting Internal Vs External Relations
• Misconstruing Structural Vs Cohesive As External Vs Internal

Orientation Of Text Towards Tenor

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 41):

Orientation towards tenor means that the goals of the situation, or intended outcomes, are concerned with tenor, more specifically with the relationship between speaker and addressee – with maintaining or changing this relationship, as when speakers try to bring their addressees closer to their own positions.  When texts operate in such situations, they tend to be organised in terms of tenor, with a central proposition or proposal supported by text segments that provide evidence for the proposition, increasing the likelihood that the addressee will agree, or motivation for the proposal, increasing the likelihood that the addressee will comply (if the proposal is some form of command) or accept (if the proposal is some form of offer).

Orientation Of Text Towards Field

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 41):

Orientation towards field means that the goals of the situation, or intended outcomes, are concerned with field, more specifically with the development of field, as in an ‘expounding’ context where the speaker’s goal might be to construe a taxonomy for the addressee, a classification of some classes of phenomena. When texts operate in such situations, they tend to be organised in terms of field — in terms of the structure of the field, as when a text is organised according to the classes of a taxonomy. Orientation towards field is characteristic of ‘expounding’, ‘reporting’ and ‘doing’ contexts, and also in principle of ‘enabling’ contexts of the ‘instructing’ subtype.

Relating Mode To Orientations Of Language To Field And Tenor

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 38):

However, we can relate these particular categories [of rhetorical mode] to the orientation of the text (i) towards the field of the situation, (ii) towards the tenor or (iii) towards some mixture of both.

Blogger Comment:

Note that this new addition to IFG by Halliday's reviser, Matthiessen, misrepresents the stratificational relation between context and language.

The relation between an instance of language (text) and an instance of context (situation) is realisation, which is a subtype (symbolic identity) of an intensive identifying (Token-Value) relation. 

an instance of language	realises	the field, tenor and mode of its situation
Token	Process: intensive	Value

'Orientation', on the other hand, means the alignment or positioning of something relative to other specified positions.  An alignment relation between a Token and a Value is circumstantial (spatio-temporal), not intensive.

an instance of language	faces	the field and tenor of its situation
Token	Process: circumstantial: spatio-temporal	Value

Consequently, the spatio-temporal relation of 'orientation' — like other circumstantial relations, such as cause — is inconsistent with the theoretical meaning of stratification.

Rhetorical Mode

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 38):

Rhetorical mode encompasses a number of rhetorical categories concerned with the contribution of the text to the situation it operates in: informative, didactic, persuasive, exhortatory, pragmatic, and so on.

Taxonomising Text According To Field

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 35-6):

In principle, such a taxonomy would be based on all three contextual variables – on field, tenor and mode. However, here we will present a contextual taxonomy of text that is based on field in the first instance, more specifically on the variable of socio-semiotic activity (see Matthiessen, 2006c; Matthiessen, Teruya & Lam, 2010; Teruya, 2007). … So let’s consider the nature of the socio-semiotic activity that constitutes a situation. In a sense, the activity that constitutes a situation is either one of behaviour or one of meaning; this is the traditional distinction between action and reflection. So we will make a basic distinction between activities of ‘doing’ and of ‘meaning’, and then further distinctions within ‘meaning’:

⦁ ‘doing’: the situation is constituted in some form of social behaviour, involving one or more persons. Language or other semiotic systems such as gesture, gaze and facial expression may be engaged to facilitate the performance of the activity, as when language is used to coordinate a team

⦁ ‘meaning’: the situation is constituted in some process of meaning. There are seven primary types:

○ ‘expounding’: expounding knowledge about the world – about general classes of phenomena, categorising them or explaining them 

○‘reporting’: reporting particular phenomena, chronicling the flow of events, surveying places or inventorying entities 

○‘recreating’: recreating any aspect of prototypically human life imaginatively by dramatising or narrating events 

○‘sharing’: sharing personal experiences and values, prototypically in private 

○‘enabling’: enabling some course of activity, either enabling the activity by instructing people in how to undertake it or regulating the activity by controlling people’s actions 

○‘recommending’: recommending some course of activity, either for the sake of the speaker through promotion of some commodity or for the sake of addressee through advice 

○‘exploring’: exploring societal values and positions, prototypically in the public arena.

Blogger Comment:

Note that this new addition to IFG by Halliday's reviser, Matthiessen, blurs the distinction between field ('what's going' and 'what it's about') and symbolic mode ('the rôle of language').

Field, Tenor And Mode: Taxonomising Situations And The Texts That Realise Them

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 35):

Field, tenor and mode variables are the basis for any attempt to develop a taxonomy of situations. At the same time, since text is language functioning in context, the field, tenor and mode variables are also the basis of any attempt to develop a taxonomy of texts operating in situations. It is certainly true that in developing a taxonomy of texts, we can adopt – we need to adopt – a trinocular perspective, matching up contextual, semantic and lexicogrammatical considerations to support the taxonomy. However, to be meaningful, a taxonomy of texts must be grounded in contextual considerations. If the taxonomy is ‘on the right track’, semantic and lexicogrammatical considerations will align themselves with the contextual ones.

Context And Lexicogrammar

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 35):

Still, while field, tenor and mode resonate with semantic systems in the first instance, they do penetrate into lexicogrammar: field values put ideational wordings at risk, tenor values put interpersonal wordings at risk, and mode values put textual wordings at risk. … Indeed, the tenor variables of power and contact may be grammaticalised as part of the core interpersonal system of mood in a language, as in Japanese and Korean.

Correlating Tenor With Speech Function And Mood

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 34):

Thus combinations of tenor values relating to (a) status and (b) contact correlate with different semantic strategies open to speakers for demanding goods-&-services of their listeners – for commanding their listeners. If (a) the status is unequal, with the speaker being subordinate to the listener and (b) the contact is minimal, the speaker’s semantic options are very limited: it is very hard to command a stranger who is of superior status to do something; but there will be certain semantic strategies. Lexicogrammatically, these strategies will be far removed from the congruent realisation of a command, a clause of the imperative mood – perhaps something like I wonder if you would be so kind as to ... and they will be ‘dispersed’ in the grammar of mood, involving not only ‘imperative’ clauses but also ‘declarative’ and ‘interrogative’ ones and in fact not only clauses but also combinations of clauses; but semantically, they are still within range of options associated with commands. … Tenor is, as it were, refracted through semantics so that the lexicogrammatical resonances with tenor values are more indirect than the semantic ones.