Halliday & Matthiessen On Fawcett's Relational Processes

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 504): 

Fawcett incorporates into the “relational: possessive” category, processes of giving and acquiring; reduces the circumstantial to locational processes only; and includes within these, processes of going and sending. As is to be expected, this alternative analysis embodies certain generalisations that are not made in our account of figures, and ignores certain others which are.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 505):

Fawcett’s alternative model for relational processes, with its particular features such as treating ‘giving’ and ‘placing’ as agentive possessives and locatives (‘make…have’, ‘make…be at’) rather than as material dispositives, has to be understood in its total explanatory context: 

(i) in relation to its repercussions within the transitivity system, both the trinocular perspective on transitivity itself (from above, as generalisations about meaning; from roundabout, its consequences for agnateness, delicacy and the move towards lexis; from below, as regularities in the realisation) and the overall topology of content — transitivity in relation to the semantic construal of causality, agency, disposal, and so on; 

(ii) in relation to Fawcett’s architectural design, which differs from ours in having a single system–structure cycle for the two strata of semantics and lexicogrammar (his “syntax”) and then adding a further level of description that is expressed in cognitive terms.

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The model of Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 212) has the explanatory advantage of revealing the following consistent systemic proportionalities:

Thus static location in space [enhancement] is construed relationally …

but dynamic motion is construed materially … 

static possession [extension] is construed relationally …

but dynamic transfer of possession is construed materially …

and static quality [elaboration] is construed relationally … 

but dynamic change in quality is construed materially …

which reflects the more general contrast in the ideational semantics (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 131):

The domain outside this conscious-semiotic [sensing, saying] centre of the ideational universe is then quintessentially either active (doing) or inert (being) …