Textual Meaning And Higher Levels Of Contextualisation

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 294, 295):

The only generalised advice we feel confident to give has to do with remembering to look right to textual meaning and look up to higher levels of contextualisation, whatever analysis we are working on. Looking up means moving beyond discourse semantics into a model of social context – the register and genre rows in Table 7.9.

Blogger Context:

[1] To be clear, it is the textual metafunction that is the resource for creating text, through both structural and non-structural grammatical realisations. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 30-1, 650):

But the grammar also shows up a third component, another mode of meaning that relates to the construction of text. In a sense this can be regarded as an enabling or facilitating function, since both the others – construing experience and enacting interpersonal relations – depend on being able to build up sequences of discourse, organising the discursive flow, and creating cohesion and continuity as it moves along. This, too, appears as a clearly delineated motif within the grammar. We call it the textual metafunction. …

We have identified the following features as those which combine to make up the textual resources of the lexicogrammar of English:

(A) structural

1 thematic structure: Theme and Rheme

2 information structure and focus: Given and New

(B) cohesive

1 conjunction

2 reference

3 ellipsis (that is, ellipsis and substitution)

4 lexical cohesion

Looked at ‘from below’, these textual resources fall into two categories – those that engender grammatical structure (theme and information) and those that do not (conjunction, reference, ellipsis, lexical cohesion).

[2] Again, this model confuses the social context (field, tenor, mode) realised in language with functional varieties of language (registers/text types), with the term 'genre' confusing text type with textual context ('purpose') and non-metafunctional semantic structure ('stages').