Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 725, 726):
When the realisation of a whole figure is downgraded through metaphor from clause to nominal group, its elements will, of course, also be downgraded: the process is nominalised and serves as Thing (except in the case of a qualitative attributive relational clause, where it is the Attribute that is reconstrued as Thing, as noted above); the other elements of the figure are realised either as downranked groups/phrases serving as Qualifier or Deictic (instead of as ranking ones, serving in a clause) or, by a further step, as words serving as Classifier, Epithet or post-Deictic. For example, my original intention in my original intention was to write a saga covering three generations of the Okonkwo family in one book is structured as Deictic ^ Post-Deictic ^ Thing, corresponding to the congruent clause Subject ^ Adjunct ^ Predicator: see Figure 10-15.
