Rebranding Halliday & Hasan's Lexical Cohesion As Their Own Taxonomic Relations

Martin & Rose (2007: 75):

We can identify three sets of lexical relations. The first is the chains of relations between elements as a text unfolds, from one clause to the next. These include relations such as repetition, synonymy and contrast, that build up a picture of people and things as the text progresses. For example, early in her story Helena begins to construct a picture of herself as a teenage girl: late teenage years - farm girl - eighteen-year-old. As they progressively construct taxonomies of people, things, places and their qualities, these are known as taxonomic relations.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misconstrues lexicogrammar as discourse semantics.  To be clear, lexical relations are relations between lexical items, and lexical items are the synthetic realisations of feature combinations at the level of lexicogrammar (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 199).  The theoretical inconsistency is in terms of stratification.

[2] This is misleading.  These relations are those of lexical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan 1976).  In not acknowledging the source of this work, Martin & Rose falsely present it as their own.

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.

[3] This misrepresents a lexicogrammatical system of the textual metafunction (lexical cohesion) as  a discourse semantic system of the experiential metafunction.  It is the logogenetic patterns of instantiation of systems of the ideational metafunction, such as clause transitivity, that "build up a picture of people and things as the text progresses".  The theoretical inconsistencies are thus twofold: stratal and metafunctional.

[4] Here Martin & Rose rebrand Halliday & Hasan's lexical cohesion (textual lexicogrammar) as their own taxonomic relations (experiential discourse semantics).