Confusing Lexical Cohesion (Collocation) With Clause Ergativity ("Nuclear Relations")

Martin & Rose (2007: 83):

At the same time there are other lexical relations between each of these simple strings. These include relations between human rights violations and amnesty, and between victims and reparation. However these lexical relations are less taxonomic than nuclear — human rights violators are to be granted amnesty, and victims are to be granted reparations. The simplicity of the taxonomic strings here enables the complexity of nuclear relations between their elements to be developed comprehensibly.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, human rights violations, like violations of human rights, is not a lexical item and so does not participate in lexical relations.  Moreover, lexical items and lexical relations are lexicogrammatical, not discourse semantic.

[2] To be clear, in SFL theory, these lexical relations are those of collocation, a tendency to co-occur, one type of lexical cohesion, a non-structural resource of the textual metafunction at the level of lexicogrammar.  Collocation differs from the other types of lexical cohesion (Martin & Rose's "taxonomic relations") in that the nature of the relation is syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004: 572). 

It will be seen in later posts that Martin & Rose confuse the semantic basis of lexical collocation with grammar, specifically: the ergative model of transitivity ("nuclear relations"), and present their misunderstanding of lexicogrammar as discourse semantics.  As Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 577) explain:

In general, the semantic basis of many instances of collocation is the relation of enhancement, as with dine + restaurant, table; fry + pan; bake + oven. These are circumstantial relationships, but as the example with smoke + pipe  illustrates, participant + process relationships also form the basis of collocation — the most important ones involving either Process +  Range (e.g. play +  musical instrument: piano, violin,  etc; grow + old ) and Process +  Medium (e.g. shell + peas, twinkle + star, polish + shoes). While we can typically find a semantic basis to collocation in this way, the relationship is at the same time a direct association between the words;

[3] This is a bare assertion, unsupported by theoretical argument or textual evidence, and based on misunderstandings of lexical items, lexical cohesion ("taxonomic relations") and clause ergativity ("nuclear relations").