Some Of The Problems With Interpreting A Nominal Group "Focus" As A Subjacency Duplex

Martin & Doran (2023: 34):

Generalisation of subjacency structure for adpositions of all kinds opens up a host of possibilities. In (25) for example the Focus structure in (1) is reinterpreted along these lines, which obviates the need for an experiential Focus Marker function realised by of. This analysis more readily acknowledges that the of is not in fact a constituent of the embedded nominal group, but rather “modifies” it. It also opens the way for acknowledging that the of does not have the possibility for internal constituency itself (a regular feature of subjacency markers), unlike many of the other words within the group — that is, it acknowledges that the of is not in fact part of the experiential constituency hierarchy that underpins SFL’s notion of rank.

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[1] Again, adpositions are not structure markers, but markers of functions (clause roles); see Matthiessen (1995: 370). Because they are not structure markers, they are irrelevant to the concerns of the paper: interpreting structure markers in terms of subjacency duplexes.

[2] To be clear, 'Focus' is Martin's rebranding of Halliday's 'Facet'. It is a particularly poor rebranding, since it uses a textual distinction for an experiential construal, and because the term already has a place in the theory as the Focus of information.

[3] To be clear, here the authors have misinterpreted a genuine structure marker (of) as an adpositional function marker and reinterpreted the misinterpretation as a subjacency duplex. Importantly, the structure marker of is not a marker of one nominal group function, such as Facet, as demonstrated by all the nominal groups with this of where the Head and Thing conflate, as in the king of Bohemia.

[4] This is misleading, because it is not true. To be clear, in SFL Theory, modification is a hypotactic relation of subcategorisation. Halliday (1985: 170):

for the purposes of the nominal group we need to take account of just one such relationship, that of subcategorisation: ‘a is a subset of x’. This has usually been referred to in the grammar of the nominal group as modification, so we will retain this more familiar term here.

Clearly, the preposition of does not subcategorise the nominal group the tops. Moreover, this analysis misinterprets a nominal group and the preposition of the following prepositional phrase as a two-unit complex (duplex).

[5] This is a very serious misunderstanding of the ranked constituency of SFL Theory. On the one hand, the word of is monomorphemic: it consists of one morpheme; that is its 'internal constituency'. On the other hand, the ranked constituency hierarchy is a model of form, not experiential meaning. What is true is that the type of structure favoured by the experiential metafunction, segmental, is based on constituency (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 85).

[6] To be clear, all the constituents of this nominal group are accounted for by the logical analysis:

However, the authors' problem is, again, methodological: instead of starting with function (Value) and asking how it is realised in form (Token), they start with form (Token) and ask what function (Value) it realises. In this case, instead of starting with the Facet and asking how it is realised, they start with a preposition and ask what function it realises.

On the basis of Halliday's editions of IFG (1985, 1994), the multivariate analysis of this nominal group is: