Indeed, if Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen had formed a clear view of the way in which the choices described in their Construing Experience Through Meaning determine the choices in the major system networks of the lexicogrammar, they would surely have said so in that book. I have looked hard for a section that makes this connection, but I have yet to find it. This suggests that the model proposed there is simply one possible, half-complete hypothesis that needs to be subject to the normal process in science of development, testing, evaluation, revision (or rejection), retesting, re-evaluation, and so on.
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[1] Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 98-9) sets out the congruent lexicogrammatical realisations of semantic figures and elements:
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 98):
Within the ideational metafunction, each [of the four types of figure] is realised congruently by one particular transitivity type: doing & happening ( material, sensing ( mental, saying ( verbal, and being & having ( relational.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 99):
Within the ideational component, [the three types of element] are realised by different classes of units:
process ( verbal group,
participant ( nominal group,
circumstance ( adverbial group; prepositional phrase.
[2] Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 94):
Such selections have been referred to as “pre-selections”, but in order to avoid any connotations of temporal sequence, we prefer the term “selection” for such relations in the ideation base.
[3] For an appraisal analysis of Fawcett's negative attitude towards Halliday and Matthiessen, click here.
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