Confusing The Context Plane With The Content Plane

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 295-6):

As far as abstraction is concerned, the text shifts back and forth from more abstract to more concrete, partly in relation to periodicity. The higher level Themes and New reviewed above draw on nominalisation and text reference to preview and consolidate events (a strength, the slightest clue, utter chaos; this, it, that, this):

[macro-Theme] Big waves and Bondi Beach have always gone together, writes Peter FitzSimons, but no one had ever seen the ocean rise up with a strength such as this …

[hyper-Theme] At three o'clock there was still not the slightest clue [[that this afternoon would forever be known as 'Black Sunday' in the annals of Sydney]]. Then it happened.

[hyper-New] In no more than 20 seconds, that peaceful scene had been tragically transformed into utter chaos.

[hyper-Theme] In their long and glorious history, this still stands as the finest hour of the Australian surf lifesaving movement.

And the marked Themes flagging the waves' attack and the rescue involve key nominalisations (roar, peril).

With a roar like [[a Bondi tram running amok]]

<<ignoring their own possible peril>>

Once the incursion and rescue get underway, however, events unfold chronologically with text time matching field time (and thus temporal connections realised between clauses); and figures by and large are realised congruently (with events as verbs, qualities as adjectives, entities as nouns).

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here the authors confuse mode, the role played by language and other semiotic systems in the situation (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 33-4), with the ideational abstraction in the text that realises the situation. That is, the authors again confuse the cultural context with the content plane of language.

[2] Here the authors confuse mode with what they take to be discourse semantics (periodicity). Again, the authors confuse the cultural context with the content plane of language.

[3] Here the authors confuse mode with lexicogrammar (nominalisation, reference and Theme). Again, the authors confuse the cultural context with the content plane of language.

[4] As previously explained, macro-Theme, hyper-Theme and hyper-New are Martin's rebrandings of terms from writing pedagogy: introductory paragraph, topic sentence and paragraph summary, respectively. Importantly, writing pedagogy is not linguistic theory; writing pedagogy involves proposals for effective writing, whereas a functional linguistic theory involves propositions about how language functions.

[5] Here the authors confuse mode with what they take to be discourse semantics (conjunction), or with what SFL takes to be lexicogrammar (cohesive conjunction and clause complexing). Again, the authors confuse the cultural context with the content plane of language.

[6] Here the authors confuse mode with the natural relation between ideational semantics (events, qualities, entities) and lexicogrammar (verbs, adjectives, nouns). Again, the authors confuse the cultural context with the content plane of language.