Some Fundamental Problems With The Experiential System Termed 'Ideation'

Martin & Rose (2007: 73):

IDEATION: construing experience 

Ideation is concerned with how our experience is construed in discourse. It focuses on sequences of activities, the people and things involved in them, and their associated places and qualities, and on how these elements are built up and related to each other as a text unfolds.

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The critiques of this chapter will attempt to identify its inconsistencies with the informing work, Martin (1992), as well as the inconsistencies both with SFL theory and with itself.  Problems with the theorising in Martin (1992) are identified in great detail here.

[1] To be clear, the characterisation of IDEATION as 'construing experience' is inconsistent with the characterisation of IDEATION in Martin (1992: 271) as 'the company words keep'.  The original characterisation derives from the fact that Martin's experiential discourse system is largely a rebranding of lexical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan 1976, Halliday 1985), a grammatical system of the textual metafunction.  The revised characterisation here derives from the title of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999), Construing Experience Through Meaning, which presents a model of ideational semantics, experiential and logical, that is consistent with the principles and architecture of SFL theory.

[2] To be clear, the inclusion of activity sequences in the experiential system of IDEATION is inconsistent with the informing work, Martin (1992), where activity sequences are modelled as field, the ideational dimension of context, itself misconstrued by Martin as register.  The notion of sequence as a semantic unit derives from the ideational semantics of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999).

Moreover, the inclusion of activity sequences in the experiential system of IDEATION is inconsistent in terms of metafunction to the extent that activity sequences involve logical relations between the semantic counterpart of clauses.

Adding to the confusion, logical relations between the semantic counterpart of clauses are also modelled, here and in the informing work, by the logical discourse system of CONJUNCTION, itself a rebranding of misunderstandings of the textual grammatical system of cohesive conjunction, confused with misunderstandings of the logical systems of clause complexing.

[3] It will be seen in the critiques that follow that these nuclear relations between elements constitute misunderstandings of clause nuclearity and logical relations, rebranded as an experiential discourse semantic system.

[4] It will be seen in the critiques that follow that the relations between elements constitute a rebranding of lexical cohesion, textual lexicogrammar, misconstrued as experiential discourse semantics.