Tuesday 5 February 2013

David Rose On Field

David Rose wrote on sysfling on 5/2/13:
Kumar's [sic] question whether 'Classifier and Qualifier are agnates semantically' needs answering on two levels - grammatical and discourse semantic - or really three levels as classification is a field level relation between entities.





Blogger Comment:

In SFL, 'field' refers to the ideational dimension of context, not of the language that realises context. That is, field is the dimension of the culture — conceived as a semiotic system — that is construed and realised by the ideational dimension of language; 'field' does not refer to phenomena within the language system itself.

Rose's notion of field is based on Martin's misunderstanding of Halliday's context as cotext, and his misunderstanding of Halliday's stratification as based on the size of linguistic units rather than levels of symbolic abstraction.  When you mistakenly think all strata are levels of meaning, you just keep doing semantics under different labels.

Related Posts: 
The Claim: "All Strata Make Meaning"