Field refers to the subject matter or topic. Field answers the question: "What is happening?" "What is the activity?" We examine language project to find out its content and aims. The description of the content should be clear and detailed enough to give readers a sense that they have explored the site themselves. At this juncture we can begin to suggest how the content affects the vocabulary used. The field of a text tells you which domain of experience the text is about: family life, religious observance, law enforcement, medicine, etc. Field is an element of the experiential metafunction of a text.When analyzing a text for its field, you will want to examine:
• The lexical items.
The field of a text can easily be determined by examining the lexical words in the text, or even just the nouns. You will want to find and answer to these two questions:
Semantic domains: Which discipline do the lexical words refer to? Certain words are more common in one discipline than in another. You could prove this by corpus research, otherwise use your own intuition, specialized dictionaries, etc.
Because semantic domains are inherently hierarchical and overlapping, we may make a very general pronouncement (“this text is about science”) or a very specific one (“this text is about particle physics”). A text may also refer to more than one semantic domain.
Specialization: How well known are the lexical words to a general audience and to a specialized audience?
• The process and circumstance types. For example, in a news text ‘about’ a terrorist attack, a large proportion of the participants will refer to terrorists and a large proportion of the processes will refer to acts of terrorism.
