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".

Confusing Ideational Context (Field) With Ideational Content (Language) [1]

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 294):

Field focuses our attention on the institutional context of a text – including domestic, work and leisure activities. A field can be defined as a set of activity sequences defining participation in a specific walk of life – for example doing the rounds, writing stories, attending staff meetings, reading newspapers, viewing current affairs programs on TV etc. as a print media journalist. Each step in each of these activity sequences consists of configurations of participants, processes and circumstances. And each participating entity, human or non-human, abstract or concrete, is organised within each field into distinctive taxonomies – of both subclassification ('is a kind of ') and composition ('is a part of').

Blogger Comments:

[1] This metaphor is potentially misleading. Field does not "focus our attention". Field is the ideational dimension of culture that is both realised and intellectually constructed (construed) by language and parallel semiotic systems.

[2] To be clear, for Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 320), 'field' means 

the field of activity and subject matter with which the text is concerned ('what's going on, and what is it about?' … The field is thus the culturally recognised repertoires of social practices and concerns …

expressed by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 33) as:

what’s going on in the situation: (i) the nature of the social and semiotic activity; and (ii) the domain of experience this activity relates to (the ‘subject matter’ or ‘topic’)

[3] As previously mentioned, Martin has variously located 'activity sequences' at the level of context in field (Martin 1992) and at the level of discourse semantics in his experiential system of IDEATION (Martin & Rose 2007). This reflects Martin's inability to distinguish cultural context from language and its varieties (register, text type), which follows from his inability to understand stratification as levels of symbolic abstraction, rather than as interacting modules (Martin 1992: 390, 488). 

The chief source of his confusion seems to be between field in the sense of what the text is about, in terms of social concerns, and the ideational content of the text itself. As Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 407) diplomatically put it:

[Martin's] "field" corresponds to what has been discussed here in terms of ideational semantic networks in the ideation base.

[4] To be clear, this nicely demonstrates Martin's confusion between field (e.g. the social practice that the newspaper columnist Peter FitzSimons is engaged in) and the ideational content of a text (participants, processes and circumstances in the newspaper article).

Problems With Key Resources For Text Analysis (By Strata And Metafunction)

 Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 293, 295):

In this chapter we've tried to build some bridges from the grammar analyses developed in Chapters 2-6 towards the analysis of discourse. An outline of these and related resources is presented in Table 7.9 below, which aligns columns by metafunction and rows by levels of abstraction (stratification).

 Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, it is the grammar that is the resource for discourse analysis. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 57):

The description of English grammar presented here is not designed as a reference grammar. However, unlike the recent reference grammars — or all previous ones for that matter, this description has been designed as one that can be used in text analysis — a task that imposes quite stringent demands on the description.

The grammar includes the systems of COHESION which the authors have ignored to make way for Martin's discourse semantics. 

[2] To be clear, there are many theoretical inconsistencies in Table 7.9.

a. Martin's stratum of genre confuses text type, rhetorical mode ('purpose') and semantic structure ('stages'), and contrary to the implication made by including structure types in the table, does not include the metafunctions in the model. See the evidence here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

b. Martin's stratum of register confuses diatypic variation in language with the cultural context that language realises. See the evidence here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

Here 'activity sequences' are located in field, contradicting their location in experiential discourse semantics in Martin & Rose (2007). For evidence of such contradictions, see here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

c. Martin's stratum of discourse semantics confuses, misunderstands, and renames lexicogrammatical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan 1976) and Halliday's semantic system of speech function. See the evidence here (Martin 1992) and here (Martin & Rose 2007).

Here external conjunction is classified as ideational and internal conjunction as textual despite both being classified as logical in both Martin (1992) and Martin & Rose (2007). This reflects Martin's confusion of the external vs internal distinction with the structural (logical) vs cohesive (textual) distinction in the grammatical realisation of the semantic system of enhancement. See the evidence here Martin (1992) and here Martin & Rose (2007).

The Difference Between Martin's 'Activity Sequence' And Halliday's 'Sequence'

  Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 283-4):

Both effective and middle clauses interact with the temporal relations discussed above to construct the activity sequences comprising a disaster and rescue operation of this kind. A transitive perspective on what happened is presented in Table 7.3 below. The experiential grammar builds the figures (participant, process and circumstance configurations) which constitute the predictable sequences the story recounts. Once the waves roll in, there are no surprises, which accounts for the absence of external concessive relations in FitzSimon's article. For more on ideational semantics in relation to field, see Working with Discourse Chapter 3.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, clauses don't "interact" with temporal relations; temporal is one type of enhancing relation, structural or cohesive, between clauses.

[2] To be clear, Martin's 'activity sequence' is theoretically distinct from Halliday's 'sequence'. In Halliday's semantics (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 49), a sequence (of figures) is the ideational phenomenon that is congruently realised grammatically by a clause complex (logical metafunction). 

In Martin's model, an activity sequence is variously construed as a unit of field, misconstrued as register, misconstrued as context (Martin 1992), evidence here, or as an experiential unit of discourse semantics (Martin & Rose 2007), distinct from the logical system of conjunction; evidence here.

[3] To be clear, 'figure' is not a discourse semantic unit (Martin 1992; Martin & Rose 2007), but a phenomenon in Halliday's ideational semantics that is congruently realised grammatically as a clause (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 49).

[4] This confuses supposed reader reactions (surprise) to events in the text with the author's (FitzSimons') use of logical relations (concessive). On the one hand, what happened after the waves rolled in was surprising to this reader. On the other hand, the author simply chose not to use any concessive logical relations, such as although everyone was surprised by the sudden horror of the unfolding events, the rescue operation began almost immediately. 

[5] For a close examination of the experiential discourse semantics in Working with Discourse Chapter 3, see the clarifying critiques here.