Unpacking Grammatical Metaphor: "Conjunction" As Circumstance

Martin & Rose (2007: 150):

Another common motif in abstract or technical writing is to present a logical relation as a circumstance:

Is      amnesty       being given     at the cost of justice being done?
         Medium      Process           Circumstance (accompaniment)

The logical meaning of at the cost of is concessive purpose (‘without’), giving the following sequence:

Is amnesty being given
without justice being done?

Again this strategy enables a sequence of two activities to be packaged as a single figure, with amnesty as one chunk of information and justice being done as another.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is not a circumstance of Accompaniment, since it does not construe amnesty and the cost of justice being done as joint participants in the process is being given; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 324). Instead, at the cost of justice being done — like without justice being done — is a dependent non-finite clause:

is	amnesty	being given	at the cost of	justice	being done
			without
α			× β
Pro-	Medium	-cess		Medium	Process

[2] To be clear, interpreting at the cost of as marking purpose (enhancement) flatly contradicts the previous interpretation of it as marking accompaniment (extension). In SFL Theory, the relation between the two clauses is concessive condition: if P ('amnesty is being given') then contrary to expectation Q ('justice is not being done').

[3] To be clear, since this is a clause complex realising a sequence of two figures, it is not a metaphorical rendering of a sequence of two figures as a single figure.