Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, before Doran, Halliday (1985: 167) identified the Thing as 'the semantic core of the nominal group'.
[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, in the experiential structure of the nominal group, all the other elements have 'the function of characterising the Thing' (Halliday 1985: 167). The Thing specifies the class of thing, and the other elements specify some category of membership within this class (Halliday 1985: 160).
[3] To be clear, the first nominal group is the artificial invention of a non-native speaker of English, and the second is a reworking of it by Doran. To the extent that the Epithets can be swapped in this unnatural nominal group, it is because they vary little in terms of 'permanence'. Halliday (1985: 166):
By and large, the more permanent the attribute of a Thing, the less likely it is to identify it in a particular context. So we proceed with the very impermanent, quantitative characterisation that is nearest to a Deictic, e.g. three in three balls; through various qualitative features such as new in new ball; and end up with the most permanent, the assignment to a class, e.g. tennis ball. Within the qualitative characteristics, if more than one is specified there is, again, a tendency to more from the less permanent to the more permanent; e.g. a new red ball rather than a red new ball.
On the other hand, the reason why the prepositional phrases serving as Qualifier can be reversed is because they form a paratactic complex, as shown by the fact that either can be omitted.
[4] To be clear, a structure is a structure of a whole unit. Incongruously, Doran here proposes different structures obtaining between different elements within the structure of the same unit. That is, he proposes one structure for the relation between Epithet and Thing, and between Qualifier and Thing, but another structure with regard to the Classifier. (see the next post).
[5] To be clear, Doran's notion of nuclear dependency misconstrues the elements that characterise the Thing, Epithet and Qualifier, as elements that are dependent on the Thing — simply because they relate to the Thing. This misunderstanding derives from confusing interdependency (hypotaxis) with the 'dependency construct' in Halliday (1979):
