Tuesday 5 February 2019

Possessive Deictic vs Classifier: Determination

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 378):
Unlike nominal groups embedded as possessive Deictics, nouns serving as Classifier have no determination system, so they do not refer to particular participants only to generalised ones: contrast the Minister’s decision with ministerial decision.

Blogger Comment:

Note that 'refer' here has the sense of ideational denotation, rather than that of reference in the cohesive sense.  The two senses are confused in Martin (1992) and Matthiessen here helps to maintain that confusion.