3.1 Construing experience 74
3.2 Taxonomic relations 76
3.3 More on taxonomic relations 86
3.4 Nuclear relations 90
3.5 Activity sequences 100
3.6 More on grammatical metaphor 109
3.7 Seeing participants from the field: kinds of entities 113
ideation is concerned with how our experience is construed in discourse, it focuses on sequences of activities, the people and things involved in them, and their associated places and qualities, and on how these elements are built up and related to each other as a text unfolds.
Following an introduction, this chapter has three main sections. Section 3.2 describes chains of relations between lexical elements in a text, such as repetition, synonymy and contrast. As they build up a picture of people and things as a text unfolds, these are known as taxonomic relations. Section 3.4 describes lexical relations between processes, people, things, places and qualities within each clause. As they are more or less central in the clause, these are known as nuclear relations. Section 3.5 describes relations between activities as a text unfolds. As they construe experience as unfolding in series of activities, these relations are known as activity sequences.
In section 3.2 a method is introduced for analysing taxonomic relations in a text, that allows us to see relations between lexical elements as a text unfolds, as well as the overall pictures of people and things that a text construes. Section 3.4 includes methods for analysing nuclear relations in a text, that display how people and things participate in activities, and how lexical elements are related
across different parts of grammar. Section 3.5 concludes with a method for analysing activity sequences in a text that displays its phases of activities as well as its patterns of participation by people and things.
The final section 3.6 discusses what happens when lexical meanings are expressed by atypical wordings, such as realizing a process as a noun instead of a verb ('nominalization'). This is known as grammatical metaphor, and a method is described for unpacking grammatical metaphors to help analyse activity sequences.
The model of human experience at the heart of ideational meaning, in all languages, is of processes involving people, things, places and qualities. Halliday (1994: 106) proposes that this construal of experience lies behind the grammar of the clause:
The clause ... embodies a genera! principie for modelling experience - namely the principle that reality is made up of processes. Our most powerful impression of experience is that it consists of goings on - happening, doing, sensing, meaning, being and becoming. All these goings-on are sorted out in the grammar of the clause.
The grammar of the clause organizes such ‘goings on’ as configurations of elements, such as a process, a person and a place:
In this interpretation of what is going on, there is doing, a doer, and a location where the doing takes place. This tripartite interpretation ... is what lies behind the grammatical distinction of word classes into verbs, nouns and the rest, a pattern that in some form or other is probably universal among human languages, (ibid.: 108)
From a grammatical perspective, the clause is a structure of words and word groups, but from a discourse semantic perspective the clause construes an activity involving people and things. The core elements of such a figure are the process and the people and things that are directly involved in it, while other elements such as places and qualities may be more peripheral. This nuclear model of experience is diagrammed in Figure 3.1. The ‘doer-doing’ nucleus is represented as a revolving yin/yang complementarity, with ‘place’ and ‘quality’ in peripheral orbits.
Grammatical descriptions such as those in Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), and Caffarel et al. (2004), have richly elaborated this construal of experience within the clause, in various dimensions. They describe grammatical patterns that:
• distinguish types of processes - doing, happening, thinking, saying, being, having
» ex p a n d processes - in dimensions such as time, manner, cause
• differentiate roles of people and things participating in a process - for example as the Medium, Range or Agent of the process
« modify these participants - classifying, describing and counting them, their parts, possessions, facets and so on
« distinguish types of circumstances associated with activities - such as places, times and qualities.
f quality P^ n° n/ process , place |
Figure 3.1 Nuclear model of experience as activity
As rich as these grammatical resources are for specifying aspects of experience, they still comprise only a part of the strategies that language provides us for construing experience. Two complementary sets of ideational patterns are equally necessary. One is the conjunctive relations that logically relate one clause to the next, so construing experience as unfolding series of activities. We outline these resources in Chapter 4 on conjunction. The other is lexical relations, that is semantic relations between the particular people, things, processes, places and qualities that build the field of a text. These relations between lexical elements comprise the system of ideation.
So fields of experience consist of sequences of activities involving people, things, places and qualities. These activities are realized by clauses and their elements. We are concerned in this chapter with lexical relations between these elements, within and beyond the clause. Our goal is to outline the patterns of lexical relations that can combine to construe a field.
We can identify three sets of lexical relations. The first is the chains of relations between elements as a text unfolds, from one clause to the next. These include relations such as repetition, synonymy and contrast, that build up a picture of people and things as the text progresses. For example, early in her story Helena begins to construct a picture of herself as a teenage girl: late teenage years - farm girl - eighteen-year-old. As they progressively construct taxonomies of people, things, places and their qualities, these are known as taxonomic relations.
The second is the configurations of elements within each clause. These include
relations between people and things and the process they are involved in, and the places and qualities associated with the process, for example the configuration of two people and a process when Helena’s romance starts: Helena - meet - young man. As they are more or less central to the unfolding of the process, as in Figure 3.1, these are known as nuclear relations.
The third is the sequence of activities construed by clauses as a text unfolds.
These are the relations from one process to the next that imply a series of steps, such as meeting - beginning relationship - marriage. As they construe the field of a text as unfolding in series of activities, these relations are known as activity sequences. These three systems of ideationare summarised in Figure 3.2.
iD EA T lO N
taxonomic relations between elements from clause to clause
{late teenage years - farm girl - eighteen-year-old) nuclear relations
activity sequences
configurations of elements within each clause (;Helena - meet - young man)
from process to process in series of clauses {meet - begin relationship - marry)
Figure 3.2 ideation systems
The first Incident of Helena’s story principally concerns herself and her first love, who are seen from various perspectives as the events unfold. For example, she classifies her young self as a farm girl, and her lover as a young man and an Englishman, and contrasts this identity with the ‘Boer' Afrikaners. Each mention of them is highlighted below in bold and bold italic.
My story begins in my late teenage years as a farm girl in the Bethlehem district of Eastern Free State.
As an eighteen-year-old, I met a young man in his twenties. He was working in a top security structure. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. We even spoke about marriage. A bubbly, vivacious man who beamed out wild energy. Sharply intelligent. Even if he was an Englishman, he was popular with all the ‘Boer’
Afrikaners. And aii my girlfriends envied me.
If we extract these instances we can see more clearly how Helena and her lover are classified:
Helena Her first love others
my late teenage years a young man in his twenties ail the 'Boer' Afrikaners a farm girl an Englishman
an eighteen-year-old
H elena describes herself in terms of her youth and her origins, a n d her lover in term s of his youth and English ethnicity, and she then contrasts this with another eth n ic group he was popular with. As he is the focus of the story, her description of him is far more developed, including many positive attributes, such as bubbly, vivacious, beamed o u t wild energy, sharply intelligent, popular. However, these in s c rib e d judgements are dealt with as appraisals in Chapter 2, and we will set them aside in the discussion here, limiting ourselves to purely ideational categories.
Helena constructs an unfolding picture of herself and her lover as members of more general classes, such as age and ethnicity, that are not stated but are assumed by their instances in the text. We will refer to the relation between one instance of a class and the next as a co-class relation. In Table 3.1 we analyse each of these relationships as strings of lexical relations as the events unfold.
Table 3.1 Lexical strings of Helena and her first love
Helena's youth her lover
late teenage years young man
co-class co-class
farm girl Englishman
co-class co-class
eighteen-year-old 'Boer' Afrikaners
Underlying these instances in the text are general social categories, including age, gender, ethnicity, capacity and class (see Chapter 9, section 9.3). Figure 3.3 shows some of their sub-categories, that are instantiated1 in this phase of the story.
Dotted lines show how people are cross-classified by multiple categories, such as a farm girl by her class, age and gender. (Triple dots represent unstated other sub-
categories.)
If we pull back the focus from Helena and her first love, to the broader classes of people running through the story as a whole, we can make explicit the social world that she constructs in the story in Figure 3.4.
social
category sub-category instance in text