Ideation

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 12-3):

IDEATION comprises resources for construing experience as goings-on and relationships. The basic framework for analysing ideation adopted here is based on Halliday and Matthiessen (1999), Hao (2015, 2020a) and Doran and Martin (2021).

As flagged in Figure 1.5, it deals with sequences consisting of one or more figures and figures consisting of one or more elements; and the main types of element are occurrences, entities and qualities – which in various combinations constitute figures. In simple terms, occurrences realise activity, entities realise items participating in activity and qualities realise associated properties. Figures including an occurrence are referred to as occurrence figures (e.g. she headed to Target); figures not including an occurrence are referred to as state figures (e.g. her hair dye wasn’t there).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the authors have abandoned Martin's discourse semantic system of IDEATION in favour of the ideational semantics of Halliday & Matthiessen, which is not concerned with 'meaning beyond the clause'. That is, they have rebranded a semantic model as discourse semantic, with discourse semantics being Martin's model, not Halliday's.

[2] To be clear, the 'consist of' relation is not the same in each case. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 48):

While figures are said to consist of elements and sequences are said to consist of figures, the 'consist-of' relation is not the same: elements are constituent parts of figures, functioning in different roles; but figures form sequences through interdependency relations.

[3] To be clear, in Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 59), the main types of element are process, participant, circumstance and relator:

and quality (op cit: 60) is a type of participant:

The model to be used by the authors rebrands (a subset of) process as occurrence, omits circumstance and relator, and replaces participant with two subtypes of participant: quality and thing, the latter rebranded as entity. On this model, figures don't consist of circumstances and cannot be related to other figures by a relator. However, in any case, as will be seen (e.g. p95), the authors actually misapply this semantic system of the content plane to the expression plane (!).

[4] To be clear, the use of the term 'realise' puts the terms 'activity', 'item' and 'associated properties' at a higher level of symbolic abstraction than the semantic stratum.

[5] To be clear, in Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 53), the main types of figure are doing, sensing, saying and being:

The authors reclassify these as occurrence vs state figures, which basically corresponds to the distinction of doing vs being (and sensing and saying). However, in any case, as will be seen (e.g. p101), the authors actually misapply this semantic system of the content plane to the expression plane as well (!). This fundamental misunderstanding alone invalidates the content of this prize-winning work. But there are many others, as will be seen.