David Rose On The Realisation Of Process Type

David Rose replied to Johanna Salomonsson on Sysfling on 4 Mar 2022, at 09:58:

Two points about SFL that could help your readers…  

1. It differs from traditional grammars that gloss each word and morpheme. In SFL, process type is a clause rank system realised by relations between lower rank units, such as verbs. The whole clause is material or relational. (This is sometimes confused by labelling verbal groups as process types.)

2. Analyses are multiperspectival. In Halliday’s model, process type is a transitive perspective on a clause, and the ergative perspective is complementary.

As you show, your second examples are caused attributive relations, in which Attributor is additional Agent from ergative perspective. The complementary perspectives help to show why clauses such as Tom’s ‘We painted the wall red’ look similar in agency, but differ in process type.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is nonsense. Systemically, PROCESS TYPE is a system of the clause, and a clause consists of groups, including the verbal group, each of which is the entry condition to its systems. Structurally, the Process of a clause is realised by a verbal group.

"Relations between verbs", on the other hand, refers to relations between lexical items, each item being specified by the most delicate lexicogrammatical features. Rose's misunderstanding, therefore, is that a grammatical system is realised by a lexical set.

[2] To be clear, what Rose refers to here is the widespread practice of classifying verbal groups in terms of  PROCESS TYPE, instead of considering the function of each group in a clause. 

But, on the other hand, 'Process' is the function label of a verbal group in a clause.

[3] To be clear, the "second examples" in the discussion were:

A happy baby makes a happy mother

Your happy Glaxo baby will make you a happy mother

but only the second of these is an attributive clause with an Attributor. The first is an identifying clause, with no agency:

That is, the clause identifies a happy baby with a happy mother; it does not construe a happy baby as a member of the class a happy mother, as would an attributive clause.

This is a fact that escaped all interlocutors in this Sysfling discussion, including Jim Martin.

Postscript:

Ten hours after this post was published, David Rose correctly reanalysed the clause in question as identifying. See the next post.