The Difference Between Martin's 'Activity Sequence' And Halliday's 'Sequence'

  Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 283-4):

Both effective and middle clauses interact with the temporal relations discussed above to construct the activity sequences comprising a disaster and rescue operation of this kind. A transitive perspective on what happened is presented in Table 7.3 below. The experiential grammar builds the figures (participant, process and circumstance configurations) which constitute the predictable sequences the story recounts. Once the waves roll in, there are no surprises, which accounts for the absence of external concessive relations in FitzSimon's article. For more on ideational semantics in relation to field, see Working with Discourse Chapter 3.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, clauses don't "interact" with temporal relations; temporal is one type of enhancing relation, structural or cohesive, between clauses.

[2] To be clear, Martin's 'activity sequence' is theoretically distinct from Halliday's 'sequence'. In Halliday's semantics (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 49), a sequence (of figures) is the ideational phenomenon that is congruently realised grammatically by a clause complex (logical metafunction). 

In Martin's model, an activity sequence is variously construed as a unit of field, misconstrued as register, misconstrued as context (Martin 1992), evidence here, or as an experiential unit of discourse semantics (Martin & Rose 2007), distinct from the logical system of conjunction; evidence here.

[3] To be clear, 'figure' is not a discourse semantic unit (Martin 1992; Martin & Rose 2007), but a phenomenon in Halliday's ideational semantics that is congruently realised grammatically as a clause (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 49).

[4] This confuses supposed reader reactions (surprise) to events in the text with the author's (FitzSimons') use of logical relations (concessive). On the one hand, what happened after the waves rolled in was surprising to this reader. On the other hand, the author simply chose not to use any concessive logical relations, such as although everyone was surprised by the sudden horror of the unfolding events, the rescue operation began almost immediately. 

[5] For a close examination of the experiential discourse semantics in Working with Discourse Chapter 3, see the clarifying critiques here.