Martin & Rose (2007: 299, 332n):
Taking this a step further, the key resource which unties texts from situations is grammatical metaphor because of its power to reconstrue activities as things and thus break the iconic connections between linguistic and material activity.¹ This transforms social action into another realm of discourse in which abstractions enter into relations of various kinds with one another.
¹ By iconic we mean matching relations between the world as we perceive it and ideation, i.e. between people and things as nouns, actions as verbs and so on.
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Reminder: This is purportedly a discussion of mode, the textual dimension of context — 'culture' in SFL Theory, but misunderstood as 'register' by Martin ± Rose. In SFL Theory, 'situation' is the term for an instance of culture, but since Martin & Rose have replaced culture (field, tenor, mode) with register, and regard 'text' as an instance of their context, the term 'situation' can not mean an instance of context. In the preceding posts, Martin & Rose have used 'situation' to mean, on the one hand, the material environment of the speech/writing event, and on the other hand, the ideational meaning of the text, which they usually confuse with field instead. It is against this background of complicated theoretical misunderstandings — along the dimensions of stratification, instantiation and orders of experience — that the untangling of the confusions in the excerpt above is attempted below.
[1] To be clear, from the perspective of SFL Theory, the notion that a text can be "untied" from a situation is nonsensical, because it is the text that construes the situation.
[2] To be clear, this seriously misunderstands grammatical metaphor. Grammatical metaphor is not a "non-iconic" relation between "linguistic and material activity", but an incongruent relation — within language — between semantics and grammar. Moreover, this characterisation reduces grammatical metaphor to ideational metaphor, and reduces ideational metaphor to elemental metaphor (processes incongruently realised as things). Importantly, grammatical metaphor is semantically junctional. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 243):
When this happens, it is a signal that a phenomenon of this other kind — quality, or process — is being treated as if it was a thing. The grammar has constructed an imaginary or fictitious object, called shakiness, by transcategorising the quality shaky; similarly by transcategorising the process develop it has created a pseudo-thing called development. What is the status of such fictitious objects or pseudo-things? Unlike the other elements, which lose their original status in being transcategorised (for example, shaker is no longer a process, even though it derives from shake), these elements do not; shakiness is still a quality, development is still a process — only they have been construed into things. They are thus a fusion, or 'junction', of two semantic elemental categories: shakiness is a 'quality thing', development is a 'process thing'. All such junctional elements involve grammatical metaphor.
[3] To be clear, as explained above, this is a nonsensical claim. Elemental ideational grammatical metaphor does not "transform social action" into anything. Instead, it reconstrues the congruent model of experience into a metaphorical model which is further removed from everyday experience. Cf Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 646):
As we have seen, grammatical metaphor of the ideational kind is primarily a strategy enabling us to transform our experience of the world: the model of experience construed in the congruent mode is reconstrued in the metaphorical mode, creating a model that is further removed from our everyday experience – but which has made modern science possible.
[4] To be clear, in SFL Theory, "the world as we perceive it" is the construal of experience as ideational meaning. In these terms, the authors' nonsensical claim becomes:
- By iconic we mean matching relations between ideational meaning and ideation
where 'ideation' is Martin's discourse semantic system, which, as demonstrated here, is his misunderstanding of Halliday & Hasan's (1976) lexical cohesion (textual lexicogrammar) rebranded as his experiential semantics.
[5] To be clear, the relation here is the stratal relation within language between meaning (people, things, actions) and grammatical form (nouns, verbs). As such, it does not exemplify a relation between "the world as we perceive it" and Martin's experiential discourse semantic system of ideation.
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