Tuesday 29 January 2019

Adjectives Of Interpersonal Quality: Epithet Vs Post–Deictic

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 377):
As we have seen, many of them may also occur as post-Deictic; in that case their deictic function consists rather in referring to, or even in constructing, an occasion of shared experience as in a miserable few dishes of peanuts. But whereas with adjectives of experiential quality the difference between Epithet and post–Deictic is rather clear (e.g. the three famous musketeers, the famous three musketeers), with the interpersonal ones the difference is much less, and there is no sense of ambiguity in the meaning (contrast those lovely two evenings in Bali and those two lovely evenings in Bali).