Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 145-6):
Extending figures can thus be used to construe meronymic taxonomies. In other words, they are (among other things) a theory of constituency, semantic composition, and other meronymic relations in language; so they can be used to create further relationships of the same kind. For example, the following paragraph establishes a meronymic taxonomy for sentences in Hawaiian:
Sentences are sequences bordered by periods, question marks, or exclamation points. In Hawaiian they can be thought of as simple, verbless, or complex. The most common simple sentence consists of verb phrase ± noun phrase(s). Verb phrases contain verbs as their heads; verbs are defined on the basis of potential occurrence with the particles marking aspect, especially ua (perfective aspect) . Noun phrases contain nouns or substitutes for nouns; these are names of persons or places, or are defined on the basis of potential occurrence after the article ka/ke (definite), or the preposition ma 'at'.