Sunday 5 June 2016

Confusing Different Strata, Metafunctions & Orders Of Experience

Martin (1992: 521):
Reconstructions may be based on shared or unshared experience, which affects how much of the social process has to be explicitly replayed.


Blogger Comments:

[1] The claim here is that the ± shared experience of the speaker and listener is a distinction of mode.  This is inconsistent with the notion of mode as the part played by language in cultural contexts.

[2] This confuses mode — the textual metafunction at the level of context — with the construal of experience as meaning — the ideational metafunction at the level of semantics.  The confusion is thus along two theoretical dimensions simultaneously: stratification (context vs semantics) and metafunction (textual vs ideational).

[3] This misrepresents the verbal reconstrual of a past experience as the replaying of a social process.  That is, it confuses the (verbally projected) semiotic order of experience (metaphenomena) with the material order of experience (phenomena).