RSSnegative parsing
Aug 08
suggestions solicited for parsing the aphorism
No news is good news
to demonstrate its two subtly different meanings.
Why is an instance ‘a token of a type’?
Aug 06
The organising principle of the cline of instantiation is attribution (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 14-5, 145).
Attribution is concerned with class membership.
Attribution + elaboration includes type–subtype relations.
But, the most delicate subtype has just a single member.
The relation between a category and its single member is identification.
The category and the member uniquely identify each other.
The member is the Token that realises the category Value.
An instance is the Token that realises the most delicate category Value.
This is the distinction between instance and subtype.
The Circumstantiality Of Agent, Beneficiary And Range
Aug 05
(1) Agent, Beneficiary And Range From Transitive And Ergative Perspectives
Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 295):
These, seen from a transitive perspective, are circumstantial: Agent
is a kind of Manner, Beneficiary is a kind of Cause and Range is a
kind of Extent; and they can all be expressed as minor processes. But
seen from an ergative point of view they are additional participants
in the major process: the nucleus of ‘Process + Medium’ has an inner
ring of additional participants as well as an outer ring of
circumstances surrounding it …
(2) Agent, Beneficiary And Range As Mixed Categories
Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 295):
Semantically, therefore, Agent, Beneficiary and Range have some
features of participants and some of circumstances: they are mixed.
And this is reflected in the fact that grammatically also they are
mixed: they may enter in to a clause either directly as nominal groups
(participant–like) or indirectly in prepositional phrases
(circumstance–like).
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