While Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 608-9) acknowledge a ‘broadly
materialist’ position underpinning their construal of linguistic experience,
their theory of figures, with its initial
complementarity of doing-&-happening and being-&-having, informs us
that the materialist perspective is complementary with a ‘relationalist’
perspective. As they say (Halliday & Matthiessen
1999: 132):
Figures of doing and being can be interpreted as complementary perspectives on a ‘quantum of change’. Construed as doing, a change appears as a change in the thusness of a participant. Construed as being, the change appears as an achieved or attainable result.
And this experiential complementary is no surprise, given that the
topology of process types locates existential processes as the overlap of
material and relational processes.