Wednesday 2 March 2016

Misconstruing Stratification, Metafunction And Metaphor

Martin (1992: 448):
Considered from the the perspective of group rank as opposed to clause rank meanings, all of the topical Themes in [6:30] are in fact 'interpersonal' ones: first and second person pronouns (I, you, you, you, I, we, you, you, we) and the metaphorical modulation my responsibilities.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the wordings at group rank and clause rank (lexicogrammatical stratum) realise meanings (semantic stratum).  The wordings of lexicogrammar are a lower level of symbolic abstraction than meanings.  Lexicogrammatical wordings are tokens of semantic values (meanings).

[2] All of the topical Themes in [6:30] are experiential Themes — by definition.  At group rank, personal pronouns serve as the Thing of a nominal group.  At clause rank, nominal groups with personal pronouns as Thing can function experientially as participants and interpersonally as Subject or Complement.  Personal pronouns serving as Thing in a nominal group also function textually in the cohesive system of personal (co-)reference.

[3] Genuine metaphorical grammatical realisations of modulation are the explicit forms, as exemplified by I want you to leave (subjective) and it is necessary for you to leave (objective).