Rebranding Co-Reference, Comparative Reference And Substitution As Reminding, Relevance And Redundancy Phoricity

Martin (1992: 100):

English nominal groups not only code all three types of phoricity, but combine them freely; for example:

the bigger frog     reminding + relevance

the big one           reminding + redundancy

a bigger one         relevance + redundancy

the bigger one      reminding + relevance + redundancy

Blogger Comments:

[1] As previously explained, this misattributes the function of reference items to the structure of the domain in which they appear, in this instance: nominal groups.

[2] Not one of the four examples is from text [3:88] — each is a constructed example, isolated without co-text. It is therefore impossible to know whether the demonstrative reference of the is cohesive (anaphoric), structural (cataphoric) or neither (exophoric/homophoric).

[3] As previously explained, Martin's "reminding phoricity" is merely a rebranding of personal and demonstrative reference (Halliday & Hasan 1976), which Halliday & Matthiessen (2004, 2014) characterise as two types of co-reference.

[4] As previously explained, Martin's "relevance phoricity" is merely a rebranding of comparative reference (Halliday & Hasan 1976).

[5] As previously explained, Martin's "redundancy phoricity" is a rebranding of ellipsis–&–substitution (Halliday & Hasan 1976), a non-referential cohesive system which he misconstrues as a type of reference.