Tuesday 2 August 2016

Confusing Field And Language

Martin (1992: 545):
As far as [field] taxonomies are concerned, domestic taxonomies deal with the 'natural' order of things — the common sense construction of experience.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL theory, a field taxonomy is a classification of the types of fields in a culture that are realised by language and its attendant semiotic systems.

[2] To be clear, no field taxonomy deals with the 'natural' order of things.  On the one hand, a field taxonomy models the ideational dimension of culture as a semiotic system.  On the other, it is the ideational dimension of the language that construes experience. This confusion is thus stratificational.

[3] It is very misleading to equate the commonsense construal experience — i.e. those that don't employ ideational metaphor — with the 'natural' order of things (scare quotes notwithstanding).  On the other hand, the language that realises the field of quantum physics depends heavily on ideational metaphor, is very uncommonsense, and yet construes the physical order of Nature.