Monday 13 December 2021

The Derivational Priority Of Congruent Wording

 Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 235):

We have also seen that there is a derivational priority because of the loss of information: given she announced that she was accepting we can derive the announcement of her acceptance, but given the announcement of her acceptance we do not know who made the announcement, she or someone else ('they'); whether she had accepted, was accepting or would accept; or whether it was a case not of her accepting but of her being accepted — twelve possible rewordings in all.