Tuesday 25 September 2018

David Banks Conflating Participant And Circumstance

Alternatively (and I think I would prefer this), one could think of this as being some sort of physical action which resulted in our being in this situation. This would give something like:
I
got
us into this
Actor
Material process
Result

I
'm gonna get
us out
Actor
Material process
Result



Blogger Comments:

[1] Trivially, this flouts the descriptive convention of capitalising the function, Process, rather than its subtype, material.

[2] This conflates participant (us) and circumstance (into thisout) into a circumstance of Cause: result, realised by a nominal group.  On a material reading of such clauses, the conflation is of Goal and Location.  (On a relational reading, the conflation is of Carrier and locative Attribute.)

Interestingly, the conflation arises from confusing result, in the sense of a type of circumstance, with the (locative) outcome of a material Process; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 225-36).

As a consequence, both clauses are misinterpreted as intransitive instead of transitive, and the Actor as Medium instead of Agent.