Misrepresenting Abstraction

Martin (1992: 520):

Keeping this in mind, the logical independence of action/reflection and activity/thing is outlined in Table 7.7.

Table 7.7. Degrees of abstraction for activities and things
	activity	thing
monitoring	commentary	evaluation
	We are doing.	That’s pretty.
reconstructing	recount	description
	I/we did.	It was pretty.
generalising	procedure	report
(timeless)	It does.	They’re attractive.

Blogger Comments:

[1] The term "logical independence" misrepresents cross-classification. This cross-classification table shows the interrelation between two variables.

[2] The claim here is that:

'action/reflection' = 'degrees of abstraction' = 'monitoring/reconstructing/generalising'.

Halliday's mode feature distinction of 'language in action' vs 'language in reflection' does not correspond to degrees of abstraction (Token-Value relations).  That is, one does realise the other.

As previously explained, the proposed mode features of monitoring, reconstructing and generalising are not degrees of abstraction (Token-Value relations) — whether or not they are distinguished by tense.

[3] The distinction between "activities and things", as presented here, is actually the experiential distinction between material processes and attributive relational processes and the interpersonal distinction between the absence and presence of evaluation (variously labelled evaluation, description and report).

∞

The fundamental confusion here is that the discussion is presented as theorising mode, the systems of the textual metafunction at the level of context.  Here, instead, the discussion is concerned with the ideational dimension of semantics (activities and things) of registers.  The confusion is thus simultaneously along three theoretical dimensions: stratification, metafunction and instantiation.