David Rose On 'The Days Of Auld Lang Syne'

David Rose replied to Rosemary Huisman on asflanet on 22 Feb 2024, 20:32:

So the actual structure is a nom gp

the days of auld lang syne

The Scottish National Dictionary gives multiple glosses for syne, including ‘ago’. In which case it’s an ellipsed embedded clause

the days [of old] [[long ago]]

(Qualifier probes are which days? and which days of old?)

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, Rose provides constituency and two functions, but no structural analysis. Returning to the original Scots wording, and applying the standard model of SFL Theory, lang syne is an adverbial group that elaborates the prepositional phrase of auld in a paratactic complex that serves as the Qualifier of days:

Both units of the Qualifier realise the meaning 'in the past', with the second elaborating the first, and the relation is paratactic, because neither depends on the other:

The days of auld (old)
The days lang syne (long ago)

However, on the model of Halliday (1994: 193):

 the logical structure is:

Shooshi Dreyfus On Circumstantial Meaning

Shooshi Dreyfus wrote to SYSFLING on 6 Mar 2022, 16:00:

Right, so here’s where I’d like to push us to think beyond clause constituents and up to circumstantial meaning, which can be realised a cross a range of grammatical structures. For example:

On the table (circumstance location place) there is a book

The book on the table (Qualifier) is mine

The book is on the table (Participant in relational clause – not going to argue about which)

How does one explain how this meaning can move around like this? By thinking of it as more than a clausal constituent. 

H&M and JRM point to this in different places but Jing Hao I have a paper on this if anyone is interested. 

It makes SO much more sense to think like this (sorry if that’s notional Jim) and helps students NOT make the errors of analysing beta enhancing clauses (eg when the book was on the table, I spilt my tea on it) and Qualifiers etc as Circumstances.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Halliday does far more than merely "point" to this — it is his model. Circumstantiation constitutes one domain of manifestation of the transphenomenal fractal types of expansion and projection — transphenomenal because they operate across various categories of phenomena, and fractal because they are organising principles across different scales; see, for example, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 268).

That is, the meanings that are realised as circumstances are also realised across a range of other grammatical domains, as outlined by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 670-3), who exemplify this for 'cause' as follows:

[2] To be clear, this type of variation can be explained by the fact that a prepositional phrase that realises the meaning 'spatial location' can serve as a circumstance or circumstantial participant of a clause, or be rankshifted to serve as the Qualifier of a nominal group.

[3] To be clear, these types of student errors reflect an inability to analyse formal constituency, since:

• mistaking a β clause for a circumstance is mistaking a clause for a prepositional phrase, and
• mistaking a Qualifier for a circumstance is mistaking a rankshifted prepositional phrase for a ranking one.