Misrepresenting A Text In Rewording Grammatical Metaphors

Martin & Rose (2007: 107-9):

These unpacking strategies are used in the following analysis, Table 3.6. …

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Original Text:

My story begins in my late teenage years as a farm girl in the Bethlehem district of Eastern Free State. As an eighteen-year-old, I met a young man in his twenties. He was working in a top security structure. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. We even spoke about marriage. A bubbly, vivacious man who beamed out wild energy. Sharply intelligent. Even if he was an Englishman, he was popular with all the 'Boer' Afrikaners. And all my girlfriends envied me. Then one day he said he was going on a 'trip'. 'We won't see each other again...maybe never ever again.’ I was torn to pieces. So was he. An extremely short marriage to someone else failed all because I married to forget. More than a year ago, I met my first love again through a good friend. I was to learn for the first time that he had been operating overseas and that he was going to ask for amnesty. I can’t explain the pain and bitterness in me when I saw what was left of that beautiful, big, strong person. He had only one desire - that the truth must come out. Amnesty didn't matter. It was only a means to the truth.

To be clear, the authors' "unpacking of metaphor" is merely the following rewordings:

Original Text	Rewordings By Martin & Rose
It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship	Helena and young man began relating beautifully
An extremely short marriage to someone else failed	Helena married someone else extremely briefly
he was going to ask for amnesty	the young man was going to ask not to be punished for his crimes
He had only one desire	the young man wanted only one thing
the truth must come out	the young man wanted to tell the truth
Amnesty didn't matter	the young man didn't care not to be punished
It was only a means to the truth	the young man only wanted to tell the truth

It can be seen that the final three rewordings misunderstand the original text, and include the unpacking of a technical term, amnesty, which is no longer metaphorical.  Moreover, in replacing the original wordings, Martin & Rose have misrepresented the text by ignoring the junctional quality of grammatical metaphor. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 283):

However, we have shown that the metaphorical version is not simply a meaningless (i.e. synonymous) variant of some more congruent form; it is 'junctional' — that is, it embodies semantic features deriving from its own lexicogrammatical properties.