David Kellogg On Identifying Clauses

David Kellogg wrote to sys-func on 23 Dec 2023,  at 12:24:

I am not sure if "typical" structures are the object of interest here: after all we are talking about verbal art. But even in ordinary life, I'm quite wary of making statements about "canonical" order without any corpus evidence.

For example, what about questions? Consider:

a) "What is your name?"

b) "What, after all, are names?"

You can see that in a) the order is Token Value, but the Token doesn't map onto the Subject but rather onto the Complement.

In b), which is surely much less common in life if more typical of verbal art, the order is Value-Token and the Subject does map onto the Token…

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is not true. Token does map onto Subject, and Value onto Complement. Cf. What serves as your name? The information that the clause demands is the decoding of a Token by reference to a Value.

[2] To be clear, the sequence is Value^Token because the sequence is Complement^Subject. The information that the clause demands is the encoding of a Value by reference to a Token.

. 

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 180):

In other words, ‘identifying’ clauses select for voice; they have an ‘operative’ and a ‘receptive’ variant. The difference is entirely systematic, once we recognise the structure of Token and Value: the ‘operative’ voice is the one in which the Subject is also the Token (just as, in a ‘material’ clause, the ‘operative’ is the variant in which the Subject is also the Actor. The most important difference is that the typical verb of the ‘identifying’ clauses, namely be, has no ‘passive’ form; so clauses like the villain is me and I am the ugly one do not look like ‘receptive’ clauses. But they are. This appears clearly when we substitute a different verb, one which has a ‘passive’ form, as in the villain is played by me.