Saturday 24 January 2015

Macro Circumstance: Preposition + Nominal Group

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 172):
The nominal group construes an entity — something that could function directly as a participant. Here however the entity is functioning only as a circumstantial element in the process: a location, or an instrument, or an accompanying entity, and so on … ; it enters into the clause by courtesy of the preposition, only indirectly so to speak.