… ‘reversible’ means operative/receptive:[identifying] ‘a happy mother is made by a happy baby’[attributive] ‘a mother is happy’/*’happy is a mother’ (except poetically)‘Notional reasoning’ here means deriving grammatical categories from lexical notions. …
and to Tom Bartlett on SYSFLING on 6 Mar 2022, at 22:43:
… Features like [identifying] and [attributive] are defined in relation to each other (eg by your examples), not by dictionary-like glosses. Notional reasoning imagines such glosses.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, the agnation here is in terms of thematicity, not voice. What Rose presents as the poetic 'receptive voice' agnate is actually a 'marked thematicity' agnate:
Even in assigned attributive clauses, which do admit a voice contrast, Attribute can never conflate with Subject:
[2] This misunderstands the meaning of 'notional reasoning'. In grammatical analysis, 'notional reasoning' means arguing for a analysis solely on the basis of the meanings being construed, without grounding the analysis in the lexicogrammatical systems of the wording, as exemplified by the previous two posts by David Banks. As Halliday (1985: xx) explains:
If we simply took account of differences in meaning, then any set of clauses or phrases could be analysed in all kinds of different ways; there would be no way of preferring one scheme over another. The fact that it is a 'functional' grammar means that it is based on meaning; but the fact that it is a 'grammar' means that it is an interpretation of linguistic forms. Every distinction that is recognised in the grammar — every set of options, or 'system' in systemic terms — makes some contribution to the form of the wording.
