Confusing Language With Field In Analysing A Text

Martin & Rose (2007: 101):

So in oral personal recounts each clause commonly begins with ‘and’, illustrated in the following extract from testimony to the Australian National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families:

The circumstances of my being taken, as I recollect, were that
I went off to school in the morning
and I was sitting in the classroom
and there was only one room where all the children were assembled
and there was a knock at the door, which the schoolmaster answered.
After a conversation he had with somebody at the door,
he came to get me,
He took me by the hand
and took me to the door.
I was physically grabbed by a male person at the door,
I was taken to a motor bike
and held by the officer
and driven to the airstrip
and flown off the Island.

In this case the activity sequence is expected by the two fields of 'school in the morning’ and ‘abduction of Aboriginal children by the state’. Within each field the expectant activity sequence is constructed with simple addition, but the counter expectant shift from one field to the next is signalled by the marked time Theme After a conversation he had with somebody at the door... .

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a bare assertion, unsupported by evidence from corpora.  What is true is that grammatical intricacy is more probable in spoken mode than written mode, as Halliday has demonstrated.

[2] To be clear, fields don't expect anything, because they are not conscious.  The claim here is that somebody (the addressee, a reader, a linguist) expects this particular sequence of clauses because of its contextual field.  Such predictions can only be made in hindsight.

[3] To be clear, here again Martin & Rose confuse language ('school in the morning') with cultural context ('abduction of Aboriginal children by the state').

On the SFL model, the first-order field of the text — 'what is going on' — is someone testifying at the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families.

The second-order field of the text — 'what it's about' — is the abduction of the speaker, as a child, by officers of the State.

[4] To be clear, here the activity sequence has shifted from being expected to doing the expecting ('expectant').  Incidentally, the unmarked meaning of 'expectant' is

having or showing an excited feeling that something is about to happen, especially something good.

[5] To be clear, the claim here is that it is the shift from one field to the next that is doing the expecting ('counter expectant') — and this on top of the fact that there is no shift in field, since the first of the authors' "fields" is language, not field, as explained above.