Sunday 19 August 2018

Taking Halliday's Notions Of 'Figure' And 'Nuclearity' And Passing Them Off As Their Own

Martin & Rose (2007: 74, 75):
From a grammatical perspective, the clause is a structure of words and word groups, but from a discourse semantic perspective the clause construes an activity involving people and things. The core elements of such a figure are the process and the people and things that are directly involved in it, while other elements such as places and qualities may be more peripheral. This nuclear model of experience is diagrammed in Figure 3.1. The ‘doer-doing’ nucleus is represented as a revolving yin/yang complementarity, with ‘place’ and ‘quality’ in peripheral orbits.
 


Blogger Comments:

[1] This misunderstands and misrepresents the clause by reducing it to the syntagmatic axis (structure) and by confusing structure with constituency (the rankscale).  Systemically, the clause is a level on the rankscale that serves as the entry condition to the systems of THEME, MOOD and TRANSITIVITY. Structurally, as a construal of experience, the clause is a configuration of functions (process, participant, circumstance).

[2] This misunderstands and misrepresents a semantic counterpart of the clause (the figure) by reducing all process types to "activities" and reducing all participants to "people and things".  The latter also confuses orders of phenomena (figure with element); see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 56ff).

[3] Here Martin & Rose present the Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) notion of a 'figure' without acknowledging its source, thereby falsely presenting it as their own work.
plagiarism (noun)
the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. 
synonyms: copying, infringement of copyright, piracy, theft, stealing, poaching, appropriation;

See also Jim Martin "Honouring" The Late Ruqaiya Hasan where Martin falsely accused the late Ruqaiya Hasan of plagiarism at a symposium organised to honour her.

[4] Strictly speaking, not all participants are directly involved in the process; those mediated by a minor Process are only indirectly involved.

[5] Here Martin & Rose present the Halliday (1985) notion of 'nuclearity' without acknowledging its source, thereby falsely presenting it as their own work.  In the second edition of IFG, Halliday (1994: 164) writes:
[6] Cf Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 174):


[6] This mistakes the 'doer-doing' relation in doing-&-happening figures with the 'medium-process' relation on which the notion of nuclearity is founded.  In grammatical terms, it confuses ergativity with transitivity, reducing a general ergative relation to one type of transitive relation.

[7] To be clear, consistent with their lack of meticulous scholarship, Martin & Rose have not even bothered to present the yin-yang representation the right way around — and the term 'revolving' serves no explanatory function here.

The "taichi symbol" (taijitu)





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