Beatriz Quiroz On Value In Thematic Equatives

Beatriz Quiroz wrote to SYSFLING on 20 Nov 2021, at 02:28:

Could any one explain why 'nominalised' clauses in thematic equatives should be analysed always as Value, as Halliday an Matthiessen (2014) say on p. 285? Is there any lexicogrammatical pattern substantiating such analysis? Somewhere in the SFL literature?

and then on 21 Nov 2021, at 10:58:

I'll give you a full translation of the original example in Spanish:

"What we can notice when we follow this path is a clear evolutionary tendency towards centralisation".

The original example in Spanish appears in a pedagogic text in high-chool Biology. It's the last clause, serving as a hiperNew in a paragraph that explains the different characteristics of nervous systems in various species, going from intertebrates to vertebrates, scaffolding (without saying it until the very end) 'the tendency towards centralisation' as we move from simpler to more complex nervous systems. The paragraph itself is the macroTheme in a section on the nervous systems in the animal kingdom.

We've been discussing a simplified version of this example off list with Tom Barlett, trying to use 'represent' and 'exemplify as an agnate verb, with rather weird results! So here it goes:

"What we can notice when we follow this path is (represented by/exemplified by) a clear evolutionary tendency towards centralisation", and therefore "A clear evolutionary tendency towards centralisation represents/exemplifies what we can notice when we follow this path" (!?)

Apart from the fact the agnations sound weird to me both in English and in Spanish, semantically (I mean, in the wider context of the whole paragraph and within the text), I think the previous clauses in the paragraph are the ones serving as examples of 'a clear evolutionary tendency towards centralisation', rather than the other way around. But perhaps the 'what we can notice ...' clause makes the difference?

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the lexicogrammatical pattern that substantiates the analysis is that, in every instance of a thematic equative clause, it is always the Value participant — rather than the Token — that is realised by the nominalisation. That is, the question is poorly conceived. See also here.

[2] To be clear, this instance conforms to the claim (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 285) that 

in a thematic equative, the nominalisation is always the Value. 

That is, what we can notice is expressed by a clear evolutionary tendency towards centralisation — not what we can notice expresses a clear evolutionary tendency towards centralisation.

Significantly, Quiroz did not provide any alternative analysis of her own.

[3] To be clear, other clauses in the co-text are irrelevant to the question of whether the nominalisation serves as Value or Token in the identifying clause. The clause relates these two participants, and nothing else.

[4] To be clear, any perceived semantic "weirdness" here can be attributed to the very technical grammatical metaphor in the Token participant, combined with the fact that Quiroz and Bartlett have not distinguished the nested dependent clause when we follow this path from the dominant thematic equative clause what we can notice is a clear evolutionary tendency towards centralisation.