Misunderstanding Field As The Language That Realises It

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 186-7):

Finally, both activities and taxonomies can be described in terms of potentially gradable properties. For example, when Mukherjee (2022: 68) describes bacteria, he does so by describing their characteristics (in bold) and the place they live (spatiotemporal properties underlined):

The abundance and resilience of bacteria stagger the mind. Some live in oceanic thermal vents where the water reaches near boiling temperature; they could easily thrive inside a steaming kettle. Some prosper within stomach acid. Yet others live, with seemingly equal ease, in the coldest places on earth, where the land freezes into packed, impenetrable tundra for ten months of the year. They are autonomous, mobile, communicative, and reproductive. (Mukherjee 2022: 68)

As this excerpt shows, these properties can be graded as being higher or lower (known as arrayed), such as the coldest place on earth and near boiling temperature. Although not specified here, arrayed properties are often gauged by being measured or quantified (e.g. 133.61 °F, 100 °C).

Taxonomy, activity and property make up the basic perspectives on field and offer complementary construals of phenomena. But as we have seen, they do not build their meaning in isolation. Their meanings regularly interrelate with each other, as we saw above where the classification taxonomy of types of organism was based upon their differing compositional taxonomies. 

In addition, each of these perspectives on phenomena can be reconstrued in terms of the other. For example, the teacher names the activity of a cell dividing into two identical daughter cells as mitosis.

By naming it in this way, the teacher reconstrues the activity of a single cell dividing into two identical daughter cells as an item – mitosis; or what we call an itemised activity. This allows mitosis to function as an item and be related to other items – for exemple by establishing a classification taxonomy of types of mitosis (e.g. orthomitosis, pleuromitosis, extranuclear mitosis, intranuclear mitosis, closed mitosis, open mitosis, etc.). At the same time, mitosis can function as an activity and be sequenced with other activities as, say, moments within the cell cycle, along with interphase, telophase, and cytokinesis. Properties can also be reconstrued – for example when Mukherjee (2022) described bacteria as in terms of their abundance and resilience (thereby reconstruing the properties abundant and resilient as itemised properties).

Reconstruals and interrelations such as these allow for increasingly expansive and integrated construals of phenomena. They provide rich resources to build knowledge of the world around us and to map and explain highly complex fields (Doran and Martin 2021; see also Carr 2023; Chen 2024). Together with the basic relations of field – activity, property, and taxonomy – they also link closely with ideational meanings within language (see Hao 2020),which for SFL theory, allows us to maintain ideational register/metafunction resonance between language and context.

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, this all misunderstands field — what's happening in terms of the culture — as the ideational language that realises field.