Shooshi Dreyfus On 'Does'

After William Armour wrote to sys-func on 29 January at 13:19

1) Is the function of the 'does' in

While this notion does make sense on the surface,

one of emphasis, or something else?

2) How does it compare to

While this notion makes sense on the surface,

? No emphasis?

Shooshi Dreyfus replied on 12 February at 07:49:

And building on these comments, surely you can’t look at this properly till you see the co-text? Firstly, it’s a dependent clause and in order for us to understand it we need to see not only the independent clause with which it must be paired but also the rest of the text so we can see the prosody being “carried” through the rest of the text? Surely the “does”, in part, gets its meaning from all those other meanings around it that are contributing to whatever “argument” is being built here?

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be sure, the significant differences between the two clauses can be "looked at properly" by applying SFL theory, even in the absence of co-text:

While	this notion	does	make	sense	on the surface
	Subject	Finite	Predicator	Complement	comment Adjunct: qualified: validity
'reservation'				'reservation'
Given		New: contrastive	Given		New: contrastive

While	this notion	makes		sense	on the surface
	Subject	Finite	Predicator	Complement	comment Adjunct: qualified: validity
'reservation'
Given					New: contrastive

To be clear, both variants could be instantiated with the exact same co-text.

[2] To be sure, it is not necessary to see any other clauses in order to understand the differences between the two presented for discussion, as [1] above demonstrates.

[3] To be sure, any prosodies "being carried through the rest of the text" are relevant to the rest of the text.  The prosody "being carried through" the instances in question is TONE 4 which here realises the KEY feature 'reservation'.  However, this doesn't distinguish the two clauses, since it is instantiated in both.  The distinction between them is informational (textual), dependent on whether or not the Finite can be highlighted as contrastive.

[4] To be sure, the meaning of does is realised by its congruent grammatical function in this instance.