Referring and the nominal group

1. Referring and the nominal group Lise Fontaine Cardiff University LinC Summer School and Workshop 2010

2. outline • A few words about terminology • Brief overview of the CG • The place of referring in the CG • Structure of the nominal group • Walk through of the referring process • Analysing some challenging nominal groups

3. <buy> Hi Jane, what’s new? Well, • I bought that phone I wanted • I bought a new phone • I bought the new motorola • you know that phone I wanted, well, I bought it • remember I told you I was going to buy a new phone? I couldn’t buy the one I wanted so I bought a different one.

4. Why ‘referring expression’? • What can we call these expressions?: • Discourse referent, referent, entity, thing, object, participant, term, nominal group, referring expression ...  When you name something you take away the possibility that it could have been something else annonymous

5. Participant vs. participant • Participating entity  Participant(Halliday, 1969:160) • Term participant is misleading • But ‘participating entity’ is “clumsy” • Participant = element that enters into the transitivity structure … identified in relation to the process (e.g. ‘actor’ or ‘beneficiary’); inherently associated to Process • Combination of roles on one element of structure: Identified/Goal (they elected John their spokesman) • Semantic category  how our experience of the world (is) construed (Halliday, 2004:178)

6. Participant vs. participant • participant (Martin, 1992:129) • “a person, place or thing, abstract or concrete, capable of functioning as Agent or Medium in TRANSITIVITY” • “all participants are realised through nominal groups but not all nominal groups realise participants” (Martin, 1992:129) • Ngps not realising a participant: • Attributes, e.g. He is a nice man • meteorological it, it’s raining • Some indefinite nominal groups, e.g. he didn’t see anyone • Range/Scope in some cases, e.g. take a bath, have dinner, play tennis.

7. Do we need a term? Lyons (1977:23) states: a term is required for the linguistic units that serve to identify (or refer to) whatever we are talking about when we make a statement about something. The term that is most commonly used in philosophical semantics for this purpose is ‘referring expression’.

8. Referring Expression “a noun phrase is a string of words which syntactically is a constituent with an internal structure containing a determiner, a modifier and a head ... Semantically, a noun phrase can be used as a referring expression.” (de Haan, 1989: 8) Tuscarora (Mithun, cited in Rhijkhoff, 2002:13) 'the boy looked at the goat'

9. Referent as mental construct • referent is in the mind of the speaker as some sort of cognitive representation or mental construct. • Rijkhoff (2002:28), “the immediate referent of an NP, i.e. the discourse referent, is a mental construct rather than an entity in the external world.”

10. A Glimpse of the system network for referent thing (Fawcett, 1980) performer I, we interactant addressee you ReferentThing naming John, Mr Smith recoverable_thing it, her, the red one outsider classification a dog, a dog that is black seeking specification who, what

11. Partial view of the main generative components of the COMMUNAL computer model

12. Main components of SFG (from Fawcett, 2000:36 and Fawcett, Tucker & Lin, 1993:121)

13. Four key concepts which contribute to the syntax of any unit in the Cardiff grammar • the system network that defines the language’s meaning potential, • the selection expression of features chosen from it on any one traversal of it, • the realization rules that these trigger, and • the structure that is their output in any one instance, consisting of syntax and items. (Fawcett, 2007:8)

14. A very small systemic functional grammar for the English clause (Fawcett, 2008a:93)

15. Four components to the realization rules: Tucker (1998:47): • Rule number • System feature(s) • Any conditions on the rules • Rule operations. e.g. ‘the woman gave the ticket to the man’. 1 2 60 : thing : if congruent_thing then ngp, if minor_relationship_with_thing then pgp. 4 3 ‘the woman’ ‘to the man’

16. The basic categories and relationships of syntax (Fawcett, 2008a:74-75) a unit is composed of one or more elements Elements are filled by units or expounded by items the lowest element is expounded by an item

17. Nominal group syntax: (d)* (m)* h (q)* determiner modifier head qualifier (&) (rd) (v) (pd) (qd) (v) (sd or od) (v) (dd) (m)* h (q)*

18. Elements of the nominal group

19. The chemo pills she takes are working

20. basic logical form (Lin, 1993) event(event1[agent=object1, process=work]), <work>

21. Following the first pass of the network • Selections have already been made concerning Subject and Theme (see Fawcett, Tucker & Lin, 1993). • Therefore, object1 is already known to be Agent/Subject/Theme. • There is an assumption made here within the CG model that the selection of Theme takes place before lexicalisation. • Potentially problematic

22. Role of preselection • All referring expressions are generated by preselection. • [referent thing] is preselected to fill the Agent conflated with Subject/Theme.

23. The basic algorithm for generating a referring expression (Cook, 1991:34)

24. .....

25. Alex it what great chemo pills what are working which/that are working

26. Cultural classification system will lead to noun items and a realization rule to expound the head of the nominal group with the selected item , i.e. h < “pill” the red ones

27. modifiers and qualifiers

28. Ad hoc descriptions

29. the selection expression has been given as: { [thing], [congruent thing], [stereotypical thing], [outsider], [cultural classification potential], [count cultural classification], [plural cultural classification], [particularized plural], [ad hoc description], [not by age], [by general epithet], [not by affective attitude], [not by minor relationship with thing], [by role in other situation], [classifying description of thing by role in situation] }. Cultural classification system: pill (h < “pill”)

30. Output from the first pass through the first pass through system network for THING

31. The final labeled tree diagram after re-entry

32. Nominal group syntax • Analysing nominal group grammar

33. A challenging nominal group Long story short, we end up staying in a parking lot which is two streets away from a garage that ends up directing us to a shop that can rebuild alternators for 1975 Datsuns and is just two streets over from them.  This is something that we were not able to do in Vancouver, we had tried with little success

34. Draw trees for these nominal groups: • I’d like a little house with a yard • Tomorrow is the parade, friends across the street rent a hotel room downtown and make a party of it • and the chaps. are other parents that I know and trust • It’sa fact he’s known for at least a year • He was one of the guys that found him • There are a variety of management techniques outlined in the handbook • mom arrives home the same day the girls head down • I had a hard time getting ready for the anniversary • There are an estimated 425,000 woodlot owners in Canada who collectively own more than 18 million hectares of commercial productive forest land