"Granting These Structural Orphans A Home"

Martin & Doran (2023: 44):

Structure markers make important contributions to the realisation of systemic options in many languages, though in some (such as those with adpositions at group rank) more than others (such as those where inflectional morphology carries a heavy load). And there are many cases, some reviewed above (e.g. nominal group complexes and embedded clauses in Korean and Tagalog), where structure markers make explicit what goes with what and cannot be ignored. Our goal here has been to suggest a way forward for grammarians disposed towards granting these structural orphans a home.

Blogger Comments:

[1] As previously explained, adpositions (and inflectional morphemes) do not function as structure markers. Instead, they mark functions in structures. To be clear, SFL construes structure as the relations between functional elements. As Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 451) make clear: 

Note that, although it is the functions that are labelled, the structure actually consists of the relationships among them.

A structure marker, in this view, is a marker of relations, not of functional roles. Because adpositions are not structure markers, they are irrelevant to the aims of the paper: a subjacency duplex analysis of structure markers.

[2] To be clear, genuine structure markers mark relations between elements. For example, linkers mark paradigmatic relations and binders mark hypotactic relations, but this is already theorised in SFL Theory (e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 453, 611), so any suggestion that these functions have been ignored or not been made explicit before this paper by the authors is misleading.

[3] To be clear, the authors end their paper, as they began, with a logical fallacy: presenting lexical metaphors that position the reasoned invalidation of their model as an immoral act. This is the fallacy known as an Appeal to pity (argumentum ad misericordiam): generating feelings of sympathy or mercy in the listener to obtain common agreement