Mistaking Textual Meaning For Ideational Meaning

Martin & Rose (2007: 323-4):

In ideational terms developed in Chapter 3 above, the primary focus of a visual image is either on entities or on activities. Entity-focused images either classify them or compose their parts; activity-focused images construe either a single activity (simple) or an activity sequence (complex). As we discussed for genres in Chapter 8, images may also have secondary foci realised by their elements.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Martin & Rose mistake textual meaning for ideational meaning. To be clear, it is the textual metafunction, not the ideational metafunction, that is concerned with the focus of information, the highlighting of ideational (or interpersonal) meaning.

[2] To be clear, these are all bare assertions, unsupported by argument, and their validity will be assessed in the text analyses that follow. For the moment it can be noted that the authors make no acknowledgement of the distinction between content and expression, nor of how the textual focus on one type of ideational meaning, rather than another, is expressed.

[3] To be clear, in terms of SFL Theory, this misconstrues the relation between textual meaning ('foci') and ideational meaning ('elements') as realisation, despite the fact that both are of the same level of symbolic abstraction (meaning). (Realisation is the relation between different levels of symbolic abstraction.)