Sunday 4 February 2018

On "Non-Referential" Nominal Groups

Bateman (1998: 11): 
Illustrations of these non-referential nominal groups include structural it, idioms, negation, and realisations for a range of grammatical functions such as Attribute, Range, Extent, and possessive Deictics.  There are also cases that Martin describes as “taking a single participant and splitting it in two’’ [p133], e.g., the top of the mountain where some facet of the whole is focused upon. The table on p134 sets out an overview of these kinds of incongruences in terms of the mismatch in participants and grammatical units.


Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin's "non-referential nominal groups" are said to be 'non-referential' in the sense of not (ideationally) denoting meanings transcendent of semiotic systems.  In SFL theory, nominal groups do not (textually) refer, and the reference items within them, and within adverbial groups, do not function as such as structural elements of the group.

[2] See Martin's misunderstandings on structural it here.

[3] See Martin's misunderstandings on idioms here.

[4] See Martin's misunderstandings on negation here.

[5] See Martin's misunderstandings on Attribute here.

[6] See Martin's misunderstandings on Range here and here.

[7] See Martin's misunderstandings on Extent here.

[8] See Martin's misunderstandings on possessive Deictics here.

[9] See Martin's misunderstandings on Facet expressions here and here.

[10] See the critique of the table here.

[11] To be clear, in SFL theory, the term 'incongruence' refers to grammatical metaphor (where wordings are not congruent with meanings).  Grammatical metaphor is a genuine motivation for the stratal distinction between meaning (semantics) and wording (lexicogrammar).  However, Martin's examples are not cases of grammatical metaphor, if only because there are no congruent realisations with which to contrast them.  Moreover, if they had been cases of grammatical metaphor, Martin's argument would involve using ideational metaphor to justify a stratification of textual systems (discourse semantic IDENTIFICATION vs lexicogrammatical reference).

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