Friday 8 March 2013

Process Nominal Groups


Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 439-40):
[Consider] we saw the turning of the boats.  Here the process has been nominalised at the word rank, with turning as noun … .  The structure is that of a nominal group having [a] prepositional phrase with of as Postmodifier; the Complement of the of phrase corresponds to what would be the Complement if the process was realised as a clause. … Where there would be an explicit Subject, if the process was realised as a clause, what corresponds to this is the ‘possessor’ of the process, as in his handling of the situation