ideational

Ideational is an adjective meaning relating to ideas, cognition, or the realm of thought. It is used to describe content, concepts, or processes that involve mental representation rather than action, emotion, or sensation. The term appears in various disciplines to distinguish cognitive or conceptual aspects from other dimensions of study.

In linguistics, particularly Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), ideational refers to one of the three metafunctions of language. The ideational metafunction expresses content about the world, including experiences, events, and states. It is realized in clause structure through transitivity and the selection of process types (material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, and existential) and participants. Analyzing the ideational function helps explain how discourse encodes real-world meaning and how speakers represent experience.

In psychology and neurology, ideational relates to the ability to conceive, plan, and represent actions or sequences of steps. Ideational apraxia is a cognitive disorder in which a person has difficulty conceptualizing and organizing multi-step actions, despite preserved motor function. This condition is contrasted with ideomotor apraxia, where planning is relatively intact but execution is impaired.

Beyond clinical and linguistic contexts, ideational can describe content-focused aspects of thought or discourse, such as ideational content in a narrative or ideational frameworks underlying a theory. Etymologically, the word derives from idea plus the suffix -al, with the sense of pertaining to ideas.