Misrepresenting Halliday & Matthiessen's Semantics As Martin And Hao's Discourse Semantics

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 91, 92):

This chapter explores how ideational meaning is realised in paralanguage. Ideational meaning is concerned with how experience is represented: ‘what kinds of activities are undertaken, and how participants undertaking these activities are described and classified’ (Martin and Rose, [2003] 2007: 17). The linguistic systems of ideation and connexion, described in Martin (1992) and developed by Hao (2015), model ideational meaning at the level of discourse semantics as sequences of figures made up of elements of different kinds: entities (objects), occurrences (happenings/motion) and qualities (attributes/manner) (Table 4.1). As discussed in Chapter 1, we set aside connexion, since, as in filmic discourse, there is no way of making it explicit in paralanguage alone and linking relations among gestures have to be abduced (Bateman, 2007, 2014).

 

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[1] To be clear, by this, the authors do not mean 'how the ideational meaning of paralinguistic body language is realised by its expression systems', but 'how the ideational meaning of language is realised by paralinguistic body language expression systems. As previously explained, this is because the authors misunderstand paralanguage as an expression-only semiotic system.

[2] This is very misleading indeed. The terms 'sequence', 'figure' and 'element', and their congruent realisations in lexicogrammar, derive from the ideational semantics of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999), not from the discourse semantics of Martin (1992). Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 49):

In stark contrast, Martin (1992: 325) proposes only the 'message' and message part' for his ideational discourse semantic systems:

and relates his discourse semantic logical unit to clause functions (except circumstances) and his discourse semantic experiential unit to group and phrase rank functions and clause-rank circumstances (ibid.):

Hao was Martin's PhD student and she accordingly adopted his practice of rebranding the work of others as Martin's model. In Figure 4.1, based on Hao (2015), she cherry-picks from Halliday & Matthiessen's (1999) system of elements, rebranding their 'process' as her 'occurrence', and reinterpreting subtypes of participant, 'quality' and 'thing' as least delicate types, with the latter rebranded as her 'entity'. Cf. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 67):

Note also that Table 4.1 also confuses form (clause complex, clause) with function (participant, process, circumstance), these latter being the functions of groups and phrases.

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The enhancement relation of 'before', for example, can be realised by directed gestures that use a dimension of the gesturing space as the time dimension. 

[4] This is another misunderstanding that arises because the authors misunderstand paralanguage as an expression-only semiotic system. The logical relations do not obtain between gestures on the expression plane; they obtain on the content plane, and gestures are a means of realising them on the expression plane.