Sunday 15 January 2012

David Rose On Instantiation

On 15 January 2012 at 08:31, David Rose wrote on Sysfling:
It seems to me that when reasoning about grammar, what's implicitly left to intuition is the lexical relations of the words that instantiate the grammatical categories we are interested in.






Blogger Comments:

Words do not instantiate grammatical categories.

If words — in this sense: lexical items — are the synthetic realisations of particular lexicogrammatical features (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 198-9), then they extend right along the cline of instantiation, from the general system, to the different probabilities of different registers, to different actualised texts (instances).