Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
215. "social semiotics...is crucially concerned with explicit accounts of language as text, of context, and of linguistic analysis within a socially based theory of language," with is not transparent.
216. w/halliday along, this becomes "a socio-semantic functional theory of material textual production"; acc. to halliday "language is...a meaning potential which has evolved to enable certain social functions"; "we need certain theoretical categories to describe...the interface between the socio-cultural world and textual form"; "we need to see lexico-grammatical patterns as multi-functional--realizing referential, ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings" & to "understand that these patterns realise these meanings because there is constant interaction between processes and agencies of textual production, the material nature of texts, and processes...by which texts are reproduced by receiving subjects," all "located in particular socio-historical structures"
216. definition: "genres are...the socially ratified text-types in a community, which make meaning possible by contextualising in a megagrammatical way (a way that tells us something about the grammar) the actual linguistic or semantic patterns that constitute the lexico-grammar of texts."
216. "it is through/in genres that...the things that carry ideologies of individuals and communities...are actually transmitted, maintained and potentially changed. it is genres that locate institutionally, valorise and shape the intertextual resources...that are the stuff of reality construction and change."
217. "the complex relations which compel us to construct a verbal text in relation to a supporting context...or to construct a sociohistorical context in relation to texts which support and require its construction...are in fact also always of the same order. the construction of texts as contexts, or of contexts as texts" happens by virtue of the same processes; "the relations between a situation-type and a text-type, and a text-type and its intertexts, are of the same kind...both situation-types and intertexts... are semiotic constructs"
219. from bahktin & derrida: "genre [is] a category that is potentially both reality-maintaining and reality-changing: both conservative in maintaining the status quo, and subversive in always presenting the possibility of challenging it."
238. "text as genre is therefore both the codification of a certain social state of affairs (the inertial element) and the domain of contestation and conflict (the processual/dynamic element)"; "the degree of power at issue in a particular interaction has a direct effect on the degree of fluidity possible in the interaction, and therefore in the genre. where power is strong, genres will be strictly policed and relatively rigid. where power is less, generic form is liable to greater flux"
240-1. Q & A (1): "where does this genre come from?" "a (new) genre is produced by making reference to and use of (fragments of) other genres, their social situations, social relations, and so on. this is possible precisely because the producer is located socially and linguistically in a particular place, is not 'just an individual' producing text out of nowhere, but is a social/linguistic subject with a particular experience of genres" (2) "is it central or marginal to the social inventory of generic types in this culture"? "every text carries the traces of many genres. what we call a genre therefore is usually and normally a particular configuration of such generic traces, a configuration which has, due to the social/cultural factors discussed above, a greater or lesser degree of structural and temporal stability and persistance....where there is high stability, multi-genericness over time and with use ceases to be focal or noticeable, becomes overlooked, redefined. the genre then seems coherent. where there is no such stability, the texts continue to exhibit their multi-generic character more obviously. such texts are marginal"
241. the big picture: "genre is one crucial category in the transmission of culture, ideology, the structurings of power, the formation of individual subjects, and the construction and transmission of hegemonic structures"

top 3: derrida, bahktin, halliday...