David Rose On Nominal Group Structure

David Rose replied to Christian Matthiessen on SYSFLING on 14 Apr 2024, at 08:36:

here are some of the examples from your nom gp table described as Focus structures. From above the types of Focus are semantic categories (class/part/facet/group), from around they are compared with agnate examples, from below they are all linked by the structure marker ‘of’.

class (+/- attitude)

[my hero] of a friend

[my kind] of a friend

[that genius] of a student

[that type] of a student

part

[the city] of Rome

[the suburbs] of Rome

facet (abstract)

[the concept] of friendship

[the reality] of friendship

My own preference for this analysis is its simplicity, compared with a double experiential/logical analysis with moveable Head. My students also find it relatively simple. Their main difficulty is distinguishing ‘of’ as structure marker of Focus, from ‘of’ as preposition in Qualifier.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 394):

[2] To be clear, the experiential function that Martin merely rebrands with the textual term 'Focus' was previously described as

• Pre-Deictic and Pre-Numerative in Halliday (1985, 1994),
• Facet in Matthiessen (1995), and
• Extended Numerative in Halliday & Matthiessen (2004, 2014).

[3] To be clear, 'part' is a relation of extension, whereas the relation here is elaboration.

[4] To be clear, the 'Focus' analysis is an experiential analysis. It doesn't dispense with the need for a logical analysis. On the contrary, the analysis only arises from comparing the experiential and logical functions.

[5] To be clear, the logical Head does not move. In the above examples, it is always served by the word that precedes the structure marker of. What varies here is the experiential function that conflates with the logical Head.

[6] Trivially, of is both a structure marker and preposition in both cases.