Endorsing Martin's Model Of Context By Means Of A Logical Fallacy

Bateman (1998: 21):

The stratified model of context argued for by Martin in this chapter has now been extensively applied in a range of social contexts, ranging across the original areas of application in education to various institutionalised discourse situations. Some of the more recent work building on the approach is given in Christie and Martin (1997). This work shows that, although the formulation of accounts of genre may have now moved on in various directions, and the original model may have been subject to criticism from several perspectives, this does little to detract from the scope and perspective found in Chapter 7. It is only with the kind of explicit modelling and interrelationships posited in the chapter—no matter how the phenomena addressed come eventually to be modelled—that any attempt to understand the social functions of language can really be made.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As an argument for the validity of Martin's misunderstanding of context as varieties of language (register/genre) and coding orientations ("ideology"), Bateman here deploys the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum, which concludes that a proposition must be true because many or most people believe it.

[2] To be clear, these "social contexts" in which Martin's model has been used are, on Martin's model, those of ideology, genre and register.

[3] To be clear, criticisms from perspectives such as theoretical consistency and internal consistency do much "to detract from the scope and perspective found in Chapter 7".

[4] To be clear, in terms of explicitness, Martin provides no system networks for either genre or ideology, and none of his networks include realisation statements that specify structure at their own level, or preselected features at the stratum below.

In terms of interrelatedness, Martin misunderstands the principle of stratification (evidence here), and misunderstands the realisational relation between strata (evidence here).