Wednesday 2 July 2014

Semantic Types: Delicacy

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 66):
These semantic types are categories to which phenomenological instances are ascribed; they thus embody the fundamental principle of generalising across phenomenological variation. And they are located somewhere in delicacy between the most general type, the all-inclusive class of ‘phenomenon’, and the most delicate types we can recognise as being codified lexically in English.