Resources for orienting are fundamental for realising a range of genres. As we’ve seen throughout this and previous chapters, this is particularly the case for persuasive genres that aim to organise different positions into arguments where they regularly work in conjunction with choices in both tendering and rendering.
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This move exemplifies a persistent mis-stratification in Martin’s model of context and language. The claim is that ORIENTING resources are “fundamental for realising a range of genres,” with persuasive genres given as the key example. But the formulation quietly smuggles semantic systems into the contextual stratum. In canonical SFL, genre is a contextual category — rhetorical MODE — realised through semantic choices.
Three major problems follow:
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Level confusion: ORIENTING (together with tendering and rendering) is a semantic resource. To treat it as realising genre is to confuse strata—elevating semantic choice to the level of context. In Halliday’s canonical model, this is not permissible: genre (MODE) is realised through the entire semantic system, not through a cherry-picked subsystem.
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Double misplacement: Tendering and rendering are also semantic resources, yet here they are grouped with ORIENTING as if they were contextual resources. This results in a strange hybrid: context (genre) supposedly realised by semantics (orienting, positioning), but presented as if the latter were contextual systems. The stratification has collapsed.
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Systemic incoherence: No account is given of how ORIENTING and POSITIONING interrelate as systems. If both are resources of a stratum, how do they constrain or complement one another in actual choice? The absence of such specification makes the claim functionally rhetorical: genres “draw on” orienting and positioning, but the system networks that would demonstrate this relation are absent.
The overall effect is a conflation of context and semantics, in which familiar rhetorical tendencies of persuasive genres are redescribed as if they were systemic resources. The result is neither a clear account of contextual realisation, nor a principled mapping of semantic options—only a terminological inflation that obscures rather than clarifies the stratified architecture of SFL.
In short…
This formulation repeats a recurring mis-stratification: genre (a contextual category) is said to be realised by ORIENTING, tendering, and rendering, even though these are, in essence, semantic systems. The result is a collapse of strata in which semantic resources are rebranded as contextual ones. Moreover, the relationship between ORIENTING and POSITIONING is left unspecified—no systemic account of how these resources interrelate is offered. What remains is rhetorical description: persuasive genres “draw on” these resources, but without theoretical precision. The move exemplifies terminological inflation at the cost of stratificational clarity.
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