Misunderstanding Field As A Lexical Hyponomy That Realises It

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 184, 185):

Alternatively, items can be related in terms of type and sub-type into a classification taxonomy. Mukherjee (2022: 67–69) draws on this when he lays out the diversity of cells that occur on Earth:

Every cell on Earth – which is to say every unit of every living being – belongs to one of three entirely distinctive domains, or branches of living organism. The first branch comprises bacteria: single-celled organisms that are surrounded by a cell membrane, lack particular cellular structures found in animal and plant cells, and possess other structures that are unique to them […] We think of them as pathogens – batonella, pneuomococcus, salmonella – because a few of them cause disease […]. We – you and me – inhabit a second branch, or domain, called eukaryotes. The word eukaryote is a technicality: it refers to the idea that our cells, and the cells of animals, fungi, and plants, contain a special structure called a nucleus (karyon, or “kernel” in Greek). This nucleus, as we will soon learn, is a storage site for chromosomes. Bacteria lack nuclei and are called prokaryotes – that is, “before nucleii” […] And now the third branch: archaea. It may be the single most startling fact in the history of taxonomy that this full branch of living beings remained undiscovered until about fifty years ago […] they lack the defining features of the other two domains. (Mukherjee 2022: 67–69)

This stretch of text is organised around three subtypes of organism (in bold above), for which he also gives some examples. We can visualise this classification taxonomy as in Figure 3.

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, the field of this text, 'what is happening' in cultural terms, is cell biology. The hyponymic taxonomy of the set of lexical items is the language that realises the field in this instance.