Misunderstanding Grammatical Intricacy

Martin (1992: 93):

Consider then [3:1], written by a 7 year old in Sydney, Australia, after a class trip to the city zoo:

[3:1] at the zoo

One day I went to the zoo and I saw Rhinocerous I moved to a Hippopotamus I touched him and he is hand and he is big and so I went on and I saw the tiger and this man was feeding him it was eating it up Mum tod me mv on and next came then a gorilla. I had a baby gorilla.  My mum tod me to move on.  I saw a watch.  It was 5 ock. …

As far as CONJUNCTION is concerned the text makes use of "spoken" rather than "written" sentences; e.g. the "run-on" sentence I touched him and he is hand and he is big and so I went on and I saw the tiger and this man was feeding him (see Halliday 1985 on grammatical intricacy and spoken language).

Blogger Comments:

[1] Trivially, Martin misunderstands the situational context of the text.  This is a family outing, not a class trip, as shown by the presence of a parent and by the time of day.

[2] This is misleading.  As a characteristic of spoken MODE, Halliday's grammatical intricacy is concerned with structurally related clauses in clause complexes (logical metafunction: expansion and projection).  It is quite distinct from Halliday's conjunction, which is concerned with cohesively related messages (textual metafunction: expansion only).

As will be seen in the critiques of Chapter 4, Martin's conjunction is a misunderstanding of Halliday's cohesive conjunction, confused with misunderstandings of Halliday's logical relations between clauses, relocated from the textual and logical grammar to Martin's logical discourse semantics.