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 SEQUENCE — player 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).