Posted by Essays on Sep 12, 2009 in
Study Guide |
Representation of the Essay’s Meaning
To probe the essays further, we turned our attention away from the textual devices used to organise and present the meanings. In our second analysis of the texts, we focused on the ideational metafunction (Halliday, 1985), in order to explore the meanings themselves. By ideational metafunction, we refer to meaning in the way that it is usually thought of: as content. Our concern is with what the essays are about, how the patterns of experience are represented, rather than how they are organised as texts. The hypothesis that emerged from this reading was that the hyper-themes of the successful essays were typically about the relationships between concepts belonging to the two semantic fields of ‘culture’ and ’society’, rather than about the concepts within each field independently.
An analysis was made (after Martin, 1992) of the content words, in order to understand how the writers had parcelled the meanings in the field. The analysis aimed to identify what kind of relationship existed between the content words. Some relationships concerned identifying the parts of or kinds of things, for example:
Culture comprises material and non-material culture, with the material culture consisting of artifacts created by humans such as wheels, spacecraft, books and totem poles, and the non-material being sub-divided into abstract human creations such as languages, ideas, beliefs, rules, and so on.
Here, the semantic field of culture is explored in order to identify the kinds of culture. We refer to these relationships as taxonomic because they function to explain the mutually exclusive parts that make up the whole.
In contrast, other relationships were about how the content words from one semantic field were related to those from another semantic field, for example:
The norms of a culture help maintain social order.
The relationship between the two semantic fields, culture and society, is depicted through the verbs “help maintain” which represent the process of how the norms of a culture are related to social order. These relationships, termed ‘processual’ relationships, serve to show how concepts that belong taxonomically to the field of culture are related to concepts that belong taxonomically to the field of society.
Although the successful essays were characterised by both types of lexical relationships, there were more processual relationships in the most successful essays, and very few in the least successful ones. Even the most elaborate and explicit of taxonomic schemes to explain culture or society separately, for example, classifications of different sociological theories of culture, would not in themselves reward the essay with a high mark. For example, Student 2’s essay was replete with taxonomies to organise the parts of, and kinds of, both culture and society, but had few processual relationships. However, it is interesting to note that this essay displayed more processual relationships than would have been predicted. This was because the analysis carried out was insufficiently delicate to distinguish between different types of processual relationships, treating equally quite precise relationships such as:
. . . society is the carrier of culture, the vessel by which humans are able to make sense of the physical and social world,
and very inconclusive relationships such as:
Culture and society are closely interrelated.
Indeed, the processual relationships in Student 2’s essay were almost exclusively represented with the verbs “relate” or “interrelate” to establish that there was a link between culture and society, so that, even by the end of the essay, no greater precision had been reached as to how the two concepts were actually related.
Representation of the Essay’s Meaning
To probe the essays further, we turned our attention away from the textual devices used to organise and present the meanings. In our second analysis of the texts, we focused on the ideational metafunction (Halliday, 1985), in order to explore the meanings themselves. By ideational metafunction, we refer to meaning in the way that it is usually thought of: as content. Our concern is with what the essays are about, how the patterns of experience are represented, rather than how they are organised as texts. The hypothesis that emerged from this reading was that the hyper-themes of the successful essays were typically about the relationships between concepts belonging to the two semantic fields of ‘culture’ and ’society’, rather than about the concepts within each field independently.
An analysis was made (after Martin, 1992) of the content words, in order to understand how the writers had parcelled the meanings in the field. The analysis aimed to identify what kind of relationship existed between the content words. Some relationships concerned identifying the parts of or kinds of things, for example:
Culture comprises material and non-material culture, with the material culture consisting of artifacts created by humans such as wheels, spacecraft, books and totem poles, and the non-material being sub-divided into abstract human creations such as languages, ideas, beliefs, rules, and so on.
Here, the semantic field of culture is explored in order to identify the kinds of culture. We refer to these relationships as taxonomic because they function to explain the mutually exclusive parts that make up the whole.
In contrast, other relationships were about how the content words from one semantic field were related to those from another semantic field, for example:
The norms of a culture help maintain social order.
The relationship between the two semantic fields, culture and society, is depicted through the verbs “help maintain” which represent the process of how the norms of a culture are related to social order. These relationships, termed ‘processual’ relationships, serve to show how concepts that belong taxonomically to the field of culture are related to concepts that belong taxonomically to the field of society.
Although the successful essays were characterised by both types of lexical relationships, there were more processual relationships in the most successful essays, and very few in the least successful ones. Even the most elaborate and explicit of taxonomic schemes to explain culture or society separately, for example, classifications of different sociological theories of culture, would not in themselves reward the essay with a high mark. For example, Student 2’s essay was replete with taxonomies to organise the parts of, and kinds of, both culture and society, but had few processual relationships. However, it is interesting to note that this essay displayed more processual relationships than would have been predicted. This was because the analysis carried out was insufficiently delicate to distinguish between different types of processual relationships, treating equally quite precise relationships such as:
. . . society is the carrier of culture, the vessel by which humans are able to make sense of the physical and social world,
and very inconclusive relationships such as:
Culture and society are closely interrelated.
Indeed, the processual relationships in Student 2’s essay were almost exclusively represented with the verbs “relate” or “interrelate” to establish that there was a link between culture and society, so that, even by the end of the essay, no greater precision had been reached as to how the two concepts were actually related.
Tags: Guide, Representation of the Essay's Meaning, Undergraduate Essay Writing
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