Rebranding Halliday's Clause Nuclearity As Their Own Nuclear Relations

Martin & Rose (2007: 75-6):

We can identify three sets of lexical relations. …
The second is the configurations of elements within each clause. These include relations between people and things and the process they are involved in, and the places and qualities associated with the process, for example the configuration of two people and a process when Helena’s romance starts: Helena - meet - young man. As they are more or less central to the unfolding of the process, as in Figure 3.1, these are known as nuclear relations.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misrepresents 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] To be clear, 'the configuration of elements within each clause' involves grammatical relations, not lexical relations, which obtain at the level of lexicogrammar, not discourse semantics.  The theoretical inconsistencies are thus twofold: in terms of delicacy and stratification.

[3] This is misleading.  These relations are those of clause nuclearity (Halliday 1985, 1994).  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.