Confusing Ideational Grammar With Textual Cohesion And Rebranding The Misunderstanding Experiential Discourse Semantics (Taxonomic Relations)

Martin & Rose (2007: 83):

Now let’s turn to find how Tutu construes the field of Truth and Reconciliation through taxonomic relations. Institutional fields such as the law, government, education and so on consist largely of abstract things like amnesty, justice, truth, reconciliation. These abstractions often denote a large set of activities, which the reader is expected to recognise. Sometimes, however, the subordinate activities may be specified, particularly for pedagogic or legal purposes. For example, Tutu quotes the Act’s definition of one type of offence as a set of more specific activities:

The Act required that where the offence is a gross violation of human rights — defined as an abduction, killing, torture or severe ill-treatment

This sentence explicitly instantiates a classifying taxonomy, as in Figure 3.8.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This confuses the ideational metafunction (cultural field) with the textual metafunction (lexical cohesion rebranded as 'taxonomic relations'); see further below.

[2] To be clear, in SFL theory, the term 'institution' refers to a sub-potential of cultural context; that is, it is situation type viewed from the system pole of the cline of instantiation.  'Institutional field' thus refers to the ideational dimension of a cultural sub-potential.  Accordingly, institutional fields do not consist of abstract things, because abstract things are linguistic construals of experience.  That is, the relation between culture and language is not one of constituency, since culture and language are different levels of symbolic abstraction.  The relation between them is thus one of realisation.

[3] To be clear, this denotation is a relation between meaning (semantics) and wording (lexicogrammar) on the content plane of language.

[4] To be clear, this specification in the definition is construed in the grammar as an encoding identifying clause, wherein a superordinate Value a gross violation of human rights is encoded by reference to a more delicate Token as an abduction, killing, torture or severe ill-treatment, realised as a prepositional phrase whose Range is realised by a nominal group complex of extension: alternation.

(a gross violation of human rights)	(is) defined	as an abduction, killing, torture or severe ill-treatment
Identified Value	Process: relational	Identifier Token

as	an abduction, killing, torture or severe ill-treatment
minor Process	Range

an abduction	killing	torture	or severe ill-treatment
1	+ 2	+ 3	+ 4

That is, here Martin & Rose confuse hyponymic lexical cohesion (textual lexicogrammar) with clause transitivity (experiential grammar) and nominal group complexing (logical grammar), and rebrand the confusion as taxonomic relations (experiential discourse semantics).