David Rose On "Lexical Meanings And Lexical Relations In Grammatical Analysis"

David Rose replied to Robert Spence's analysis of two lexically dense relational clauses on the sys-func and sysfling lists on 4 April 2017 at 13:09:

… I am also intrigued by the roles of interpreting lexical items in the grammatical analysis. For example, the first clause is interpreted as receptive circumstantial identifying, subclassified as Cause:purpose, from synonymy of ‘purpose’ with the lexical item ‘aim’ and the embedded clause ‘to (do)’ …

The primary clauses are attributive, in which each 'experimental method’ is classified as 'an isothermal process’ or 'an isochoric process’. That seems to be the function of the non-specific Deictic “an”, to indicate a class of items. …

What’s particularly intriguing to me is the extent of assumptions of lexical meanings and lexical relations in grammatical analysis. This is most apparent in Halliday’s discussion of relational processes in IFG, which I found baffling until I started recognising the lexical assumptions implicit in his categories.  Has anyone else experienced this?

Blogger Comments:

[1] These false claims proceed from a misunderstanding of the theoretical dimension of delicacy (but see also point [2] below).  The subtypes of process are located intermediate between the most general systems and the most delicate systems that specify individual lexical items.  Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 198-9):

… we can differentiate both processes and participants into finer and finer subcategories, until we reach a degree of differentiation that is associated with the choice of words (lexical items). Note that it is not (usually) the lexical items themselves that figure as terms of the systems in the network. Rather, the systems are systems of features, and the lexical items come in as the synthetic realisation of particular feature combinations. 

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 65) provide an example of how the combination of more delicate process type features can specify lexical items:

[2] This misunderstands the reasoning behind the grammatical analysis of the clause (shown here).  The clause construes a relation of identity between an embedded clause complex of cause: purpose (to investigate the properties of air…) and a nominal group of cause: purpose (the aim of this experiment); see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 500ff) on 'nouns of expansion'.

[3] The two 'primary' clauses are embedded and identifying, not attributive (as detailed here).  Each identifies (encodes) one experimental method.  The nominal groups with the non-specific Deictic an function as Identifier Token, not Attribute.

David Rose On Cause

On 30/9/12, on the sysfling list, Sabiha Choura wrote:

I have met the following difficulty while analysing my corpus:

Adiposity and low aerobic fitness in children are associated with a clustering of cardiovascular risk factors.

Is the process "are associated" an identifying circumstancial process expressing accompaniment or an identifying intensive process?

To which David Rose replied:

Identifying:circumstantial:causative

Cause = time x obligation

Obligation is gradable, so is cause

may do : will do : must do ::

are associated with : arise from : are caused by

Blogger Comments:

[1] Viewed from 'round about', the clause is intensive, not circumstantial, since it has an implicit Assigner, and the system of ASSIGNMENT has the feature 'intensive' as an entry condition.  Click here for a transitivity analysis.

[2] Cause is not "time x obligation"; cause and time are features of ideational construals, whereas obligation is  a feature of interpersonal enactment.  The ideational and interpersonal metafunctions are distinct perspectives on language: language viewed in terms of its function of construing experience vs language viewed in terms of its function of enacting interpersonal relations.

[3] "Obligation is gradable" — so is the greyscale from white to black.  This red herring exemplifies the type of logical fallacy concerned with fallacies of relevance: attempts to prove a conclusion by offering considerations that simply don’t bear on its truth.

[4] May and will are low and median values, respectively, of probability (modalisation) not obligation (modulation).

[5] The meanings are associated with and arise from are not low and median values of are caused by.  See, for example, correlation does not imply causation.

Mick O'Donnell Mistaking A Dependent Clause For A Circumstance

Michael O'Donnell wrote on sysfling on 3/7/12:

"we have been raised to love and care" 

Actor: -

Process: material (have been raised)

Goal: We

Circumstance: "to love and care" (which is maybe Result, as Reason/Purpose don't fit).

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, O'Donnell's analysis here is:

However, systemically, the instance is agnate to 

The systemic difference here is just the finiteness of the dependent clause.

On this basis, the instance can be analysed as