Thursday 7 March 2019

Cline Of Generality


Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 386):
On this scale, the most general type of noun is in fact a pronoun, which is the limiting case of anaphoric generalisation … There is no clear grammaticalising towards the ‘particular’ end of the cline, though it is perhaps worth remarking that the function of Classifier in the nominal group provides the resource for expanding any class of thing into more particular subclasses.