Misrepresenting Halliday (1994) Through Selective Omission

Martin & Rose (2007: 74):

The model of human experience at the heart of ideational meaning, in all languages, is of processes involving people, things, places and qualities. Halliday (1994: 106) proposes that this construal of experience lies behind the grammar of the clause:

The clause ... embodies a general principle for modelling experience - namely the principle that reality is made up of PROCESSES. Our most powerful impression of experience is that it consists of goings on - happening, doing, sensing, meaning, being and becoming. All these goings-on are sorted out in the grammar of the clause.

The grammar of the clause organises such ‘goings on’ as configurations of elements, such as a process, a person and a place:

In this interpretation of what is going on, there is doing, a doer, and a location where the doing takes place. This tripartite interpretation ... is what lies behind the grammatical distinction of word classes into verbs, nouns and the rest, a pattern that in some form or other is probably universal among human languages, (ibid.: 108)

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misrepresents Halliday (1994) through selective omission.  As Halliday (1994: 107) makes clear, the frame of reference for construing experience consists of process, participants and circumstances:

and this is the tripartite interpretation said to be behind group and word classes (op. cit.: 109):

This is not a minor quibble, since Martin & Rose here confuse strata (lexicogrammar and semantics) and, from a semantic perspective, orders of phenomena (figure and element); see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 49).  Moreover, such (motivated) misrepresentations are indicative of the lack of meticulous scholarship (and intellectual integrity) that permeates Martin & Rose's work, as the posts on this blog demonstrate.

[2] This misleads through selective omission.  As a way of supporting the (abovementioned) misrepresentation, it presents Halliday's discussion of one instance as the general model, as a fuller quote demonstrates.  Halliday (1994: 108):