Thursday 3 September 2015

Misconstruing Unassigned vs Assigned As Single vs Double Agency

Martin (1992: 280, 281):
Identifying clauses can first be divided into those with an additional agent and those without..  This additional agent may have the function of assigning Token to Value…

Blogger Comment:

To be clear, there is only an additional Agent in an identifying clause if it is both assigned and encoding, and this is only possible in operative voice (Halliday 1994: 165).  (In encoding clauses, Token conflates with Agent.)  Unassigned decoding clauses are middle: they have no Agent.

decoding
‘yacht’
means
a light, fast sailing ship
Medium
Process:
Range
Token/Identified
identifying
Value/Identifier

encoding
‘yacht’
means
a light, fast sailing ship
Agent
Process:
Medium
Token/Identifier
identifying
Value/Identified

The accompanying system network (Fig. 5.4.) misconstrues unassigned vs assigned as single agency vs double agency.