Not Acknowledging Halliday As The Source Of "Their" Ideas

Martin & Rose (2007: 74-5):

Grammatical descriptions such as those in Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), and Caffarel et al. (2004), have richly elaborated this construal of experience within the clause, in various dimensions. They describe grammatical patterns that:

• distinguish types of processes - doing, happening, thinking, saying, being, having
• expand processes - in dimensions such as time, manner, cause
• differentiate roles of people and things participating in a process - for example as the Medium, Range or Agent of the process
• modify these participants - classifying, describing and counting them, their parts, possessions, facets and so on
• distinguish types of circumstances associated with activities - such as places, times and qualities.

As rich as these grammatical resources are for specifying aspects of experience, they still comprise only a part of the strategies that language provides us for construing experience. Two complementary sets of ideational patterns are equally necessary. One is the conjunctive relations that logically relate one clause to the next, so construing experience as unfolding series of activities. We outline these resources in Chapter 4 on CONJUNCTION. The other is lexical relations, that is semantic relations between the particular people, things, processes, places and qualities that build the field of a text. These relations between lexical elements comprise the system of IDEATION.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, these are two ways of saying the same thing, except that the second version substitutes 'associated with' for 'expand', and 'activities' for 'processes'.  But more importantly:

• expansion is not the only relation that obtains, since Matter and Angle involve projection, and
• the logico-semantic relation actually obtains between the circumstance and 'the configuration of process + participants' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 314).

[2] This is very misleading indeed. Here Martin & Rose strategically neglect to mention previous work on the logical component in the construal of experience, as discussed for lexicogrammar in Introduction to Functional Grammar (Halliday ± Matthiessen), and for semantics in Construing Experience through Meaning (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999).  The false implication here is that Martin & Rose are filling a gap in previous theorising.

[3] Here Martin & Rose confuse structural relations between clauses (logical metafunction) with non-structural conjunctive relations between messages (textual metafunction).  More importantly, in neglecting to acknowledge Halliday as the source of these ideas, they again give the false impression that this work is entirely their own.

[4] It will be seen that Martin & Rose model 'unfolding series of activities' as both experiential (this chapter) and logical (Chapter 4), with the latter confusing logical complexing with cohesive conjunction, both of which are lexicogrammatical, but relocated by them to their stratum of discourse semantics.

[5] It will be seen that these lexical relations are those of Halliday's (& Hasan's) lexical cohesion, a resource of the textual metafunction, misunderstood by Martin & Rose as experiential in metafunction, and relocated to their stratum of discourse semantics.

[6] Here Martin & Rose confuse the textual function of cohesive relations between lexical items with the ideational functions that lexical items serve in grammatical structures — the latter of which it is that construes the field of the situation realised by a text.

[7] It will be seen in the course of this chapter review, that Martin & Rose confuse lexis with grammar, and ignore the difference in symbolic abstraction between lexicogrammar and semantics.