… the clause complex is realised graphologically as a ‘sentence’ … . The sentence is the highest unit of punctuation on the graphological rank scale and has evolved in the writing system to represent the clause complex as the most extensive domain of grammatical structure.
… many of them may also occur as post–Deictic; in that case their deictic function consists rather in referring to, or even constructing, an occasion of shared experience as in a miserable few dishes of peanuts.
In terms of the modal structure of the clause, prepositional phrases serve as Adjuncts, and in terms of experiential structure, they serve as circumstances.
… language as the expression of certain very general logical relations … the logical component defines complex units …
From a typological point of view, construing experience in terms of categories means locating them somewhere in [a] network of relations.
… the social personæ of the interactants … is a model of the interpersonal and ideational distance between speaker and listener.
… mental clauses with an Inducer …
… the mental distinction between ‘emanating’ and ‘impinging’ is … the distinction between ‘middle’ and ‘effective’.
[With] decoding clauses (those where Token = Identified/Medium) the passive [ie receptive] is … rather rare. By contrast, in an encoding identifying clause, where the Token is Identifier/Agent and the Value is Identified/Medium, passive [ie receptive] is more or less as frequent as active [ie operative] … but only the active [ie operative] will accommodate a further agency …
… the variable is one of extension. … does the process extend beyond the Actor, to some other entity, or not?
Experiential time is time as a feature of a process: its location, its duration or its repetition rate in some real or imaginary history. Interpersonal time is time enacted between speaker and listener: temporality relative to the speaker–now, or usuality as a band of arguable space between positive and negative poles. Textual time is time relative to the current state of the discourse: ‘then’ in the text’s construction of external reality, or in the internal ordering of the text itself.
To differentiate them in analysis, we can apply textual probes: in principle, being an element of the clause, a circumstance is subject to all the different textual statuses brought about by theme, theme predication and theme identification. … In contrast, a Qualifier cannot on its own be given textual status in the clause since it is a constituent of a nominal group, not of the clause; so it can only be thematic together with the rest of the nominal group it is part of.
There is no simple diagnostic criterion for deciding every instance; but a useful pointer is provided by the thematic structure, which gives an indication of how the clause is organised as a representation of the process …
When it is specified for time, the tense may be like that of ‘material’ clauses rather than like that of ‘relational’ ones … That is, coming into being is construed on the same model as activities, as far as time is concerned; but it is still construed as a configuration of being …
Like other processes, processes of attribution unfold through time. In the unmarked case, the phase of the unfolding is left unspecified (‘neutral’); alternatively, it is specified in terms of time, appearance or sense–perception …
… this there is a pronoun. The proportionality is:the : that : it :: a(n) : one : there
Semantics has nothing to do with truth; it is concerned with consensus about validity, and consensus is negotiated in dialogue.
… whereas conjunctions set up a grammatical (systemic–structural) relationship with another clause, which may be either preceding or following, the relationship established by conjunctive Adjuncts, while semantically cohesive, is not a structural one (hence they can relate only to what has gone before). These Adjuncts often are thematic; but they do not have to be.
… the speaker or writer is making explicit the way the clause relates to the surrounding discourse (textual), or projecting his or her own angle on the value of what the clause is saying (interpersonal) …
A text can be interpreted as an ongoing process of selection of features — an ongoing instantiation of a more permanent system.