Wednesday 7 January 2015

Degree Of Participanthood: Goal Vs Range: Individuation

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 167-8):
There is a further contrast between Goal and Range in the degree of individuation that is typical of each. [In the typical case of Goal], what is impacted is a specific representative of a class, or a specific set of representatives; and this is typical of the degree of individuation of the Goal. […] Representatives of a class can be impacted (regardless of whether they are specific or non-specific at the point in the discourse in which they occur); but it is harder to impact the general class itself [cf Range: he plays piano]. Consequently, if the Goal is a general class rather than a set of specifiable representatives, it has a lower degree of participanthood. This appears iconically in the grammar in the limiting case of a clause where the Goal is simply that class of phenomenon that can serve as Goal of that particular type of figure: the grammar allows us to select ‘goal-intransitive’, which means that the Goal is simply not specified — for example:
he drinks _ heavily [alcohol]