Misrepresenting Martin (1992) On Activity Sequences

Martin & Rose (2007: 18-9):

Ideation (the content of a discourse) 

Here we’re concerned with people and things, and the activities they’re involved in.  Since Helena's telling her story, there’s lots of activity involved and it unfolds in sequences. …
As well as sequences of activities, ideation is concerned with describing and classifying people and things. Helena’s second love for example is classified (policeman, man, murderer, vulture), partitioned (face, hands, eyes, throat, head, brains; personality, soul, conscience) and variously described (bubbly, charming, bewildered, dull like the dead, wasted etc.).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL theory, 'ideation' refers to the metafunction that includes both the experiential and logical metafunctions, across strata.  Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) use the term 'ideation base' to refer to the ideational dimension of the stratum of semantics.  In contrast, Martin's (1992) 'ideation' refers only to the experiential dimension of his stratum of discourse semantics.

[2] To be clear, in SFL theory, 'content' refers to the plane (level of symbolic abstraction) that includes both semantics (meaning) and lexicogrammar (wording) across all metafunctions — experiential, logical, interpersonal and textual — at all points on the cline of instantiation.  In contrast, here 'content' is reduced to one stratum (discourse semantics), one metafunction (experiential) and one point on the cline of instantiation: the instance pole (discourse).

[3] This is inconsistent with the theory of discourse semantics, Martin (1992), on which this publication is based.  Here, activity sequences are construed as experiential in terms of metafunction and discourse semantic in terms of stratum.  In contrast, in Martin (1992), activity sequences are construed as field: the ideational dimension of context — which Martin misconstrues as register, a diatypic variety of language.  Adding another dimension to this confusion, Martin (1992) uses 'activity sequence' to refer to both events that go on in the environment of a text (first-order experience) and events that are represented in a text (second-order experience), thus blurring the distinction between the material and semiotic order.  Evidence here.

In SFL theory, 'sequence' refers to the highest order of complexity, of the most general categories of experiential phenomena, on the stratum of semantics (Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 48ff).  The congruent realisation of a sequence is a clause complex: logically related experiential configurations of wording.  Including the logical relations in sequences in the model of experiential discourse semantics adds yet another confusion to the inconsistencies identified above.

[4] In SFL theory, 'describing and classifying people and things' occurs on both strata of the content plane: lexicogrammar and semantics.  In ideational semantics, 'people and things' are classified as participants, one of the categories of the simplest order of phenomena, elements, which are congruently realised in the grammar as nominal groups.  'Describing and classifying' means expanding the element in terms of elaboration, extension or enhancement.  In the grammar, this can be achieved at clause rank, through relational processes, and at group rank, through the Modifiers of the Head of a nominal group.