Sunday 11 November 2018

Misconstruing Ideational Semantics As Contextual Field

Martin & Rose (2007: 81):
Each lexical item in a text expects further lexical items to follow that are related to it in one of these five general ways. A lexical item initiates or expands on the field of a textand this field expects a predictable range of related lexical items to follow.
Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, lexical items, as the name suggests, are located on the stratum of lexicogrammar.  Here, as throughout this chapter, lexical items are misunderstood as being located on Martin's stratum of discourse semantics, a higher level of symbolic abstraction.

[2] To be clear, in SFL theory, 'field' is the ideational dimension of context, the culture modelled as a semiotic system.  Here, and throughout, Martin & Rose unwittingly use 'field' to refer to the semantic correlate of a field — what Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 323) term a 'domain'.  The misunderstanding is further complicated by the fact that Martin & Rose mistake 'field' for a dimension of register, misunderstood as context.

[3] In terms of SFL theory, this confuses the tendency of lexical items to co-occur — in lexical cohesion: the syntagmatic relation of collocation — with paradigmatic relations in lexical sets (repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy and meronymy); see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 644).  To be clear, collocation is the one type of lexical cohesion that has not been rebranded by Martin & Rose as feature of their discourse system of taxonomic relations.

[4] This misunderstands the relation between lexical item and field.  A Lexical item does not "initiate" or "expand" the "field of a text".  In SFL theory, a lexical item is the synthetic realisation of a bundle of the most delicate lexicogrammatical features, which realise semantic features, including those of ideational semantics, which realise contextual features, including those of field.  But see [2] above for what Martin & Rose misunderstand as field.

[5] To be clear, in SFL theory, the relative probabilities of lexical item instantiation in a text are a property of the lexicogrammatical systems of a register that realises a specific field.  Those probabilities rise and fall on the basis of ongoing instantiations during logogenesis.

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