Confusing Ideational Context (Field) With Ideational Content (Language) [2]

 Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 294):

As we have illustrated above, analysing clause complexes (grammar) in tandem with conjunctive relations (discourse semantics) is a good way of exploring activity sequences. To analyse each step in these sequences more closely we need to look at transitivity (from both transitive and ergative perspectives). And to understand participant relations we need to look at nominal group structure (Epithet, Classifier, Thing in particular), relational clauses (identifying and attributive), and relationships of hyponymy (class/subclass) and meronymy (part/whole) between nominal groups. We looked at FitzSimons' field in all these ways, in order to bring more fully to consciousness the senses in which he was concerned with the leisure activity of going to the beach in relation to the semi-professional activities of the Australian surf lifesaving movement.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, 'conjunctive relations' are lexicogrammatical, one of the systems of textual cohesion, first theorised by Halliday & Hasan (1976), and included in all editions of IFG. Martin's discourse system, on the other hand, is a confusion of their cohesive conjunction (textual metafunction) and Halliday's clause complexing (logical metafunction) which is misunderstood and relocated from lexicogrammar. Evidence here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

[2] This is misleading. To be clear, analysing clause complexes and conjunctive relations is analysing the content of a text, whereas exploring activity sequences, here, is exploring the context of the text, its field, not the content of the text itself. In Martin & Rose (2007), on the other hand, activity sequences are interpreted as experiential semantics. See, for example:

• Activity Sequences: A Cornucopia Of Theoretical Inconsistencies

[3] This further demonstrates the authors' confusion of contextual field with the ideational content of the text.

[4] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the field of a text is 'what is going on' and 'what it is about'. The 'culturally recognised practice and its concerns' in this instance is the writing of a newspaper column about the 'Black Sunday' incident of Sunday, 6 February, 1938.

[5] This is misleading. Surf life saving in Australia has always been a volunteer movement, since its beginnings in 1907. The life savers at Bondi Beach in 1938 were volunteers, not "semi-professional".