Monday 17 February 2020

'Narrowing' In Prepositional Phrases (Embedding) And Nominal Groups (Hypotaxis)


Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 567):
Perversely, however, English tends to go the other way [see previous post], and this employs embedding not hypotaxis (hence many of the prepositions could be replaced by of):
(it’s) [ at [ the back right-hand corner [ in/of [ the top drawer [ in/of [ the small cupboard [ against [ the far wall [ in/of [ the main bedroom [ to the left of [ the landing [ upstairs]]]]]]]]]]]]]
The address on the outside of an envelope forms a similar sequence.
This ‘narrowing’ relationship is in fact the same as that found in the nominal group, where the ‘logical’ structure of the Premodifier is a hypotactic sequence of words. This also goes ‘in reverse’, hence the ordering ... γβα; but it is hypotactic, not embedded:
ζ those ε two δ splendid γ old β electric α trains