Confusing The Context Plane With The Content And Expression Planes

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 295):

Mode deals with the role language is playing in relation to other modalities of communication and the concreteness of its rendering of the field. As we have seen, the text is an inter-modal one, with explicit exophoric connections between verbiage and image early on. In addition, there are many experiential connections between the beachside lexis of the verbiage and the image of people on the beach. Blue colour cohesion also ties the graphology explicitly to the ambience of the image.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, mode is the textual metafunction applied to the cultural context of language and its instantiations as situations. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 33-4) specify the dimensions of mode:

mode – what role is being played by language and other semiotic systems in the situation: 

(i) the division of labour between semiotic activities and social ones (ranging from semiotic activities as constitutive of the situation to semiotic activities as facilitating); 
(ii) the division of labour between linguistic activities and other semiotic activities; 
(iii) rhetorical mode: the orientation of the text towards field (e.g. informative, didactic, explanatory, explicatory) or tenor (e.g. persuasive, exhortatory, hortatory, polemic); 
(iv) turn: dialogic or monologic; 
(v) medium: written or spoken; 
(vi) channel: phonic or graphic.

Here the authors are following Martin (1992) in misunderstanding mode (along with tenor and field) as a system of a stratum of register, a functional (diatypic) variety of language. It will also be seen that the authors follow Martin (1992) in misunderstanding rhetorical mode as a system ('social purpose') of a stratum of genre.

[2] To be clear, this confuses context with lexicogrammar: the systems of reference ('exophoric') and lexical cohesion ('experiential connections between the lexis and the image '). 

[3] To be clear, on the one hand, this confuses the context plane (mode) with the expression plane (blue ink). On the other hand, it repeats the earlier (p293) the bare assertion, again unsupported by evidence, that blue ink coheres the representation of author to the representation of the sky: 

Blue colour cohesion resonates across the landscape sky and the portrait (loud saturated blue in the landscape, more muted in the portrait). Inter-modally, the blue of the portrait is picked up typographically by Peter FitzSimons' name in the Kicker