Summary Of Section On Adpositions

Martin & Doran (2023: 22, 17):

In this section two difficulties with an experiential analysis of structure marking adpositions have been reviewed – arising from the relation of these structure markers to nominal group complexes and embedded clauses. By way of working towards an alternative analysis working around these problems we need to step back and reconsider work on types of structure in SFL. In particular we need to focus on the complementarity of experiential and logical meaning, a complementarity passed over briefly above in relation to the tiers of experiential and logical structure proposed by Halliday with Matthiessen (2014) in Figure1.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this section of this paper on structure markers was concerned with adpositions, which are not structure markers, and so are irrelevant to the concerns of the paper. The misunderstanding arises from mistaking functions, elements of structure, for structures, the relations between functions, as previously explained. The adpositions discussed were all lower rank markers of clause rank transitivity functions.

[2] To be clear, the two problems arose because the authors attempted to interpret adpositions as constituents of nominal groups, nominal group complexes and embedded clauses, instead proposing a phrase that consists of an adposition and a nominal group, nominal group complex or embedded clause. So, on the one hand, there are no problems in this regard, and on the other hand, the non-problems are irrelevant to the concerns of the paper: structure markers.