IDENTIFICATION is a textual system concerned with tracking participants in discourse. At issue here is the way in which people, places and things are introduced in text and potentially referred to again once introduced (e.g. a robot...the android below). This work is based on Gleason's analysis of discourse structure within a stratificational framework (Gleason 1968) and Halliday and Hasan's (1976) description of referential cohesion.
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[1] To be clear, Martin's IDENTIFICATION, which he characterises (p93) as 'reference as semantic choice' is Halliday & Hasan's cohesive reference, misunderstood, relocated from Halliday's lexicogrammar to Martin's discourse semantics, and rebranded as Martin's work.
The fundamental misunderstanding that invalidates the model is Martin's confusion of textual reference with 'reference' in the the sense of ideational denotation. It is this confusion that leads Martin to misconstrue an ideational unit, the participant, as his textual unit.
This also leads Martin to mistake nominal groups — that realise participants — for reference items, which then leads Martin to confuse reference with nominal group DEIXIS.
[2] Consistent with the metafunctional confusion noted above, Martin here provides an example of his experiential system, IDEATION, instead of his textual system, IDENTIFICATION.
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