On 30/9/12, on the sysfling list, Sabiha Choura wrote:
I have met the following difficulty while analysing my corpus:
Adiposity and low aerobic fitness in children are associated with a clustering of cardiovascular risk factors.
Is the process "are associated" an identifying circumstancial process expressing accompaniment or an identifying intensive process?
Identifying:circumstantial:causative
Cause = time x obligation
Obligation is gradable, so is cause
may do : will do : must do ::are associated with : arise from : are caused by
Blogger Comments:
[1] Viewed from 'round about', the clause is intensive, not circumstantial, since it has an implicit Assigner, and the system of ASSIGNMENT has the feature 'intensive' as an entry condition. Click here for a transitivity analysis.
[2] Cause is not "time x obligation"; cause and time are features of ideational construals, whereas obligation is a feature of interpersonal enactment. The ideational and interpersonal metafunctions are distinct perspectives on language: language viewed in terms of its function of construing experience vs language viewed in terms of its function of enacting interpersonal relations.
[3] "Obligation is gradable" — so is the greyscale from white to black. This red herring exemplifies the type of logical fallacy concerned with fallacies of relevance: attempts to prove a conclusion by offering considerations that simply don’t bear on its truth.
[4] May and will are low and median values, respectively, of probability (modalisation) not obligation (modulation).
[5] The meanings are associated with and arise from are not low and median values of are caused by. See, for example, correlation does not imply causation.
