Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, in the experiential structure of the nominal group, 'the Classifier indicates a particular subclass of the thing in question' (Halliday (1985: 164). However, the reason why the Classifiers cannot be swapped in Doran's example is explained by the logical structure. 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’. … The basis of the subcategorisation, of course, shifts as we move to the left: ‘what type of ...?’, ‘what quality of ...?’, ‘how many ...?’ and so on – this is the principle underlying the experiential structure.
So in Doran's example:
the structure construes:
- what type of neutrinos? electron neutrinos.
- what type of electron neutrinos? solar electron neutrinos.
That is, the reason why the Classifiers cannot be swapped is that 'solar' is a subtype of electron neutrino, but 'electron' is not a subtype of solar neutrino.
[2] To be clear, the interdependency relation in the nominal group is the regressive hypotaxis in the logical structure from neutrinos to solar.
[3] 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. In this case, he proposes a structure type for the relation just between Classifiers in a nominal group.
[4] To be clear, there are two degrees of interdependency: hypotaxis and parataxis. The relation that obtains in the logical structure of a nominal group is hypotaxis, and the relation between the two Classifiers in Doran's nominal group is thus hypotactic. In terms of Doran's own model, this makes it a relation between two satellites in a nuclear structure, not a relation of linear dependency.