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The Misunderstandings Behind 'Iconicity'

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 209):

From an ideational perspective, we are concerned with iconicity – the degree to which a text matches what it is talking about.

Reviewer Comments:

To be clear, for the authors, 'iconicity' is textual meaning viewed from an ideational perspective. That is, 'iconicity' is said to be 'creating information flow' viewed from the perspective of 'construing experience'.

However, the authors' notion of iconicity derives from a proposed relation of ideational congruence in language to field in context. Martin & Matruglio (2020: 102-3):

…an activity sequence as a whole can be realised not as a discourse semantic sequence of events, but named as a figure… . And semantic configurations such as these may be themselves construed grammatically as nominal groups … rather than clauses. So from an ideational perspective we can use the degree of iconicity between what is going on in a field and its construal in discourse as a further measure of contextual dependency, with more iconic realisations more context dependent than less iconic ones. The main linguistic resource used to rework ideational iconicity in discourse is grammatical metaphor…

Importantly, this misunderstands a congruent relation between ideational lexicogrammar and ideational semantics as an iconic relation between the ideational content of language (text) and the ideational dimension of context ("what it is talking about").

This misunderstanding largely derives from the misconstrual of 'activity sequences' as field instead of semantics in Martin (1992); evidence here. However, in later work, Martin & Rose (2007), 'activity sequences' were relocated to discourse semantics, though as experiential rather than logical systems; evidence here. The more recent re-relocation of 'activity sequences' back to field in Martin & Matruglio (2020) is thus both inconsistent with Martin & Rose (2007) and a misconstrual of language as context.

A second source of this misunderstanding derives from Legitimation Code Theory in sociology, whose 'social realist' epistemological stance contradicts the 'immanent' stance of SFL Theory, and in which meaning is, instead, modelled as knowledge. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 442):

If a different standpoint is adopted, the frame of reference may be an extra-semantic one: either because the approach to meaning is transcendent rather than immanent or because the object of modelling is taken to be knowledge rather than meaning.

The Metafunctional And Stratal Misunderstandings Behind 'Presence'

Doran, Martin & Herrington (2024: 208-9):

… we have revisited work on context dependency in SFL to include ideational and interpersonal perspectives alongside the more traditional textual ones. As noted above, taken together, the contributions from the different metafunctions are referred to as presence …. This problematises concerns in SFL for the cline between action and reflection …, and monologue versus dialogue, acknowledging that they do not simply impinge upon textual meanings, but meanings across all metafunctions.

Reviewer Comments:

The authors' argument here is as follows: 

Premiss 1: The mode of a context is realised by ideational and interpersonal language as well as textual language.

Premiss 2: This is a problem for context-metafunction resonance.

Conclusion: The solution is to propose that there are ideational, interpersonal and textual components of textual language, and to locate the resultant ensemble, 'presence', in mode at the level of context.

The problem with Premiss 2 is that it is false, because it misunderstands context-metafunction resonance as requiring that mode only have implications for textual meaning. The problem with the conclusion is that it misunderstands both stratification and metafunction. As previously explained for the authors' frameworks of 'mass', and 'association,' the authors' framework of 'presence' confuses the level of context (mode) with the level of language (textual meaning), and misunderstands one metafunction, the textual, to include all three metafunctions.