Problems With The Experiential Discourse Semantic System Of Ideation

Martin & Rose (2007: 17):

Ideation focuses on the content of a discourse — what kinds of activities are undertaken, and how participants undertaking these activities are described and classified. These are ideational kinds of meaning, that realise the field of a text.

Blogger Comments:

[1] The system of ideation, 'the company words keep', despite the name and subtitle, is Martin's (1992) experiential system on his stratum of discourse semantics; cf the ideational semantics of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999).  As demonstrated at considerable length here, Martin (1992) misconstrues experiential semantics as a mixture of lexical cohesion (textual grammar) — confused with lexis as most delicate grammar (delicacy) — and as misapplied expansion relations between clause elements (logical grammar), and further misconstrues some experiential semantics as field (context).  See especially The Avoidance Of Experiential Meaning In Discourse Semantics.

[2] To be clear, in SFL theory, the term 'content' refers to the content plane of language, both semantics and lexicogrammar, and to all metafunctions, not just the experiential.

[3] To be clear, in SFL theory, experiential meaning covers all process types, not just those of doing–&–happening ("activities").  These others include processes of being–&–having, sensing and saying.

[4]  To be clear, in SFL theory, the field of a text is the ideational dimension of a context of situation, whereas for Martin (1992) and Martin & Rose (2007), field is misconstrued as the ideational dimension of register as a stratal system.