Sunday 3 May 2015

Confusing Nominal Group Structure With Non-Structural Reference

Martin (1992: 115):
And where both types of relevance phoricity are selected (via comparison and superset), the superset reference will be realised first, isolating a participant among the class made relevant by comparison: the biggest greener frog. So while there can be a number of greener frogs, of which one is the biggest, there cannot be a number of biggest frogs, one of which is greener: *the greener biggest frog.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This confuses nominal group structure — in construing experience — with the non-structural textual system of reference, and misrepresents the grammatical confusion as discourse semantic theory.

[2] This misunderstanding of set theory can be falsified by examples such as:
These two frogs are the biggest, but one is greener than the other.

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