Thursday 17 September 2015

Misconstruing First Order Field As Its Semantic Description [2]

Martin (1992: 292-3):
As a first approximation, these activity sequences can be broken down as follows:
i. taxonomies of actions, people, places, things and qualities
ii. configurations of actions with people, places, things and qualities and of people places and things with qualities.
iii. activity sequences of these configurations
This can be illustrated from the field of tennis as follows:
i. TAXONOMY — part/whole relations among game-set-match
ii. CONFIGURATION — Agent Process Medium structure player-serve-ball
iii. ACTIVITY SEQUENCEplayer serve-opponent return-player volley

Blogger Comment:

This provides an ideational semantic model for analysing construals of social activities — while purporting to be a model of field.

In terms of SFL theory, the three components of this 'field' model correspond to the three orders of phenomena in ideational semantics: element, figure and sequence (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999).