Confusing Contextual Field With Field-Specific Ideational Semantics

Martin & Rose (2007: 80):

Relations between classes and members, and between parts and wholes, make up two types of taxonomies by which we construe fields of experience. People, things and places belong to more general classes of entities, and at the same time they are parts of larger wholes, and are composed of smaller parts. These are known as classifying and compositional taxonomies respectively. Both hierarchies may have many layers, particularly in technical fields, for example (classifying) kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, sub-species and (composing) ecosystem, food-chain, organism, organ system, organ, tissue, cell, organelle, metabolism…  Processes can also be viewed as instances of more general types, or as parts of larger activities, but their taxonomies are not as multi-layered as for people, things and places.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, on the SFL model, we construe experience as ideational meaning.  Field, on the other hand, is the ideational dimension of context: the culture as a semiotic system.  Field does not refer to the ideational dimension of language.  Following Martin (1992), Martin & Rose confuse contextual field with the semantic counterpart of a field: a domain; see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 322-3).  The theoretical inconsistency is one of stratification (levels of symbolic abstraction).

[2] This confuses a type of circumstance ('places') with types of participant ('people, things').  Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 54):

Participants are inherent in the process; they bring about its occurrence or mediate it. There are a number of specific ways in which a participant may take part in a process; it may act out the process, it may sense it, it may receive it, it may be affected by it, it may say it, and so on. The different configurations of participants are the bases for a typology of process types. The distinction between participants and circumstances is a cline rather than a sharp division, but it is semantically quite significant. 

Circumstances are typically less closely associated with the process and are usually not inherent in it. They specify the spatial or temporal location of the process, its extent in space or time (distance or duration), its cause, the manner of its occurrence, and so on.

[3] Trivially, metabolism is not a part of a organelle (e.g. mitochondrion).  'Metabolism' refers to the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life. 

[4] This confuses two distinct types of class membership: delicacy ('general') and instantiation ('instance'); see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 145).