Saturday 14 February 2015

The Elaborative Potential Of Participants: Qualities

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 180-1):
Nominal groups have, in fact, far greater potential than verbal groups for creating experientially complex categories; and this reflects a fundamental difference between participants and processes. The nominal group has the potential for intersecting any number of qualities in the representation of a participant; and this makes it possible for the taxonomic ordering of participants to be considerably more elaborated than that of processes.