Bateman (1998: 18):
Martin then turns to the motivation and elaboration of these discourse semantic aspects of lexical relations, and again needs to address the question of units within IDEATION at the discourse semantic stratum. Here it is quickly made clear that collocation is not a sufficient motivation for defining units, since there is a gradient between idioms and non-idioms and Sinclair has gone so far as to maintain that mutual expectancy can be extended up to include entire texts. So, to counter this, Martin takes the constructs of field from register (discussed in more detail in Chapter 7: p497) as the basis of the units that are subject to lexical semantic relations [p297].
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, Martin is concerned with determining the unit of IDEATION, a structural system of experiential discourse semantics, which is his rebranding of his misunderstanding of lexical cohesion, a non-structural system of textual lexicogrammar.
Because the original system is non-structural, he is unable to identify a structural unit — i.e. a unit with internal function structure, such as all the units of lexicogrammar and phonology. Moreover, because the original system is concerned with relating lexical items to each other, Martin's unit is essentially a rebranding of his misunderstanding of a lexical item, which he terms a 'message part'.
Adding further to the above confusions and theoretical inconsistencies, this unit of lexical relations is grammatical, not lexical, as demonstrated (pp292-3) by the types of message part: actions, people, places, things and qualities.
[2] To be clear, in order to identify his discourse semantic unit, Martin looks to field, the ideational dimension of cultural context, which he misunderstands as register. This is further complicated by Martin confusing contextual field with the ideational semantics that realises it.
The number of theoretical confusions, and the confused relations between them, in this section of Martin's chapter, are difficult to untangle, but an attempt has been to do so in the following clarifying critiques:
- Inconsistencies Of Structure And Metafunction
- Misconstruing The Difference Between Lexical Item And Grammatical Word
- Confusing Register (Language) With Context (Culture)
- Confusing Context With Semantics
- Misconstruing First Order Field As Its Semantic Description [1]
- Misconstruing First Order Field As Its Semantic Description [2]
- Misconstruing Experiential As A Constituent Of Logical
- Misconstruing Stratification: Semantics Realising Semantics
- Misrepresenting Congruent Vs Incongruent
- Confusing Context, Semantics And Lexicogrammar
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