David Rose On Qualifiers

David Rose wrote to sysfling on 13 Apr, at 12:25:

Qualifiers specify a Thing, so the semantic probe (from ‘above’) is which or whose Thing?

Which year?

The year [1920]

Which city?

The city [of Rome]

and again at 12:45:

Focus attends to some aspect of the Thing – a facet, part, class or group. The Thing doesn't specify the Focus. Focus is realised by an embedded nom gp, usually linked to the nom gp by the structure marker ‘of’.

[green leaves of] the trees, [some historic buildings of] Rome

Qualifier is realised by an embedded clause or prep phrase

In The city [of Rome], ‘of’ is a preposition, specifying which city.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the Deictic, Numerative, Epithet, Classifier all serve to characterise the Thing (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 382), so the probe 'Which Thing?' does not uniquely identify a Qualifier. For example,

• which year? this year: Deictic
• which year? the third year: Numerative
• which year? a good year: Epithet
• which year? a leap year: Classifier

Likewise

• which city? her city: Deictic
• which city? the next city: Numerative
• which city? a polluted city: Epithet
• which city? the eternal city: Classifier

[2] To be clear, 'Focus' is Martin's use of a textual concept to rebrand embedded experiential elements preceding the Thing in a nominal group.

[3] This should go without saying, since it is the Thing that is characterised in a nominal group.

[4] To be clear, these are simply nominal groups with Qualifiers:

• green leaves [of the trees]
• some historic buildings [of Rome]

[of the trees] qualifies leaves in terms of type, [of Rome] qualifies buildings in terms of location.

[5] Trivially, Qualifier is also realised by an embedded adverbial group, as in

• some 4,000 million years [ago]

[6] Clearly, the structure-marking preposition of does not specify which city:

• which city? of.