Saturday 20 April 2013

David Rose On Thematic Attributive Clauses

On 20/4/13, David Rose wrote on the sysfling list:

In IFG3 p404, two examples are given of "a special construction where the dependent precedes the dominant"...
||| [=b:] A science and transport museum, ||...
||| Widely considered to be his most inventive work of fiction, ||…
Criteria are then given for the 'special construction' "where the Process is implicit and the Attribute is typically the only explicit element of the clause".
However the second example doesn't match these criteria, and is not analysed or discussed. Is this example an error?
Most confusingly, "These elaborating clauses are always ‘intensive attributive relational’ ones", which seems to imply that whenever an elaborating dependent clause precedes the dominant it is always ‘intensive attributive relational’.
Is this second example in error, or am I?

Blogger Comments:

[1] As the co-text implies, the second example is analysed as an embedded clause serving as Attribute.  The embedded clause is itself an assigned identifying clause, in which the Assigner and Token are left implicit.

(being)
widely considered to be his most inventive work of fiction
Process: attributive
Attribute
widely
considered to be
his most inventive work of fiction
Manner: degree
Process: identifying
Value

[2] Not confusing.  In instances of non-finite elaboration, it is the "special construction where the dependent precedes the dominant" and "where the Process is implicit and the Attribute is typically the only explicit element of the clause" that is always an intensive attributive relational clause, as Halliday & Matthiessen write, and as Rose quotes.