Lise Fontaine Fullthesis Postomodification

A Systemic Functional Approach to Referring Expressions:
Reconsidering postmodification in the nominal group
Lise Margaret Fontaine
Thesis submitted in part fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Language and Communication Research
Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy
Cardiff University
2008
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This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
PhD.
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otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references.
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Abstract
This thesis explores the relevant systems which model the choices speakers
make when referring to objects. Referring expressions have received
relatively little attention in Systemic Functional Linguistics, although from a
purely structural perspective some work has attempted to account for
postmodification in the nominal group. The main goal of this thesis is to
produce a theoretical and analytical approach to referring expressions
including complex referring expressions in particular. This requires a shift in
perspective from structural (‘nominal group’) to functional (‘referring
expression’).
The research presented in this thesis explores three main areas:
• to develop a methodology for analysing referring expressions following

the system networks as closely as possible. The thesis offers
considerable detail concerning the methodology developed, including
the tagging of three corpora. The analytical framework taken adapts as
closely as possible the relevant system networks for referring
expressions. This offers a better understanding of the interaction
between the various functional components of these expressions.
• to contribute to the systemic functional theoretical model of language in

the area of referring expressions by presented a detailed description of
referring expressions. This includes the frequency and interaction of the
various functional components of referring expressions with attention to
variation and stability over individuals and text type.
• to develop a new theory of complex referring expressions which is

based on systemic choice rather than on structural or lexical
classification. As a result, the main theoretical contribution of this thesis
is a new perspective on complex referring expressions. This perspective
explores the transitivity patterns of these expressions and it also revises
the system network for ‘thing’.
In addition the thesis has produced an XML database of over 3,000 fully
analysed referring expressions and a second database including detailed
coding of complex referring expressions.
i
Acknowledgements
When I first set out to do a PhD, I could never have imagined the journey it would
take me on. Having nearly reached the end of this long, fascinating, difficult,
challenging, impossible journey, I am finally able to express my gratitude to those who
were so important, instrumental and supportive throughout. If only I could represent
this journey as a system network of meaningful options that I encountered along the
way!
There can be no PhD without a supervisor and so first and foremost I’d especially
like to thank my supervisor Gordon Tucker for countless hours of support,
encouragement and suggestions. Of course any errors in this thesis are my
responsibility alone but the success of the thesis is the result of the many discussions
and exchanges I have had with Gordon whose input has been invaluable.
A special thank you to Tom Bartlett for his very useful comments and probing
questions on the draft of this thesis.
I would also like to thank Robin Fawcett. Thank you Robin for getting me started
on this fascinating topic and for being so generous with your materials, knowledge
and experience. You have been consistently supportive and I have greatly
appreciated this.
There were times when I thought I would never complete this thesis. I have my
parents to thank for the fact that I have. I don’t know how they managed it but they
somehow raised me to believe I could probably do anything I wanted to. They both
supported me and encouraged me throughout my life. Any strength, intelligence,
determination and kindness I have come directly from them. They are the reason why
someone like me from a small town in remote Northern Ontario, Canada somehow
managed to get to this place. Thank you mom for being such a great mom. If my dad
were alive today, I know he would be very proud. My only regret is not getting to this
point soon enough.
I’m sure there were times when my children wished they had never even heard of
a PhD. I’d like to thank them for being so understanding and not complaining about
having a mother whose most frequent response has been ‘no, sorry, I don’t have time
right now’, especially when ‘now’ has lasted for years. Thank you Steven and Rowan
for being such amazing people and thank you Ashwyn for coming along just in time to
be part of the light at the end of the tunnel.
Anyone who has lived with someone in the final stages of their PhD knows what
challenges and sacrifices it brings. I’d like to thank my partner Kevan who has been a
constant source of support and encouragement, showing patience deserving of
sainthood. He has been picking up the pieces of my fragmented life for the last
several years and I’m sure that he is almost as relieved as I am that we are near the
end.
I would also like to thank Yves for believing in me and for being my intellectual
rock.
In addition to my family I have been very lucky throughout my life to have made
friends with really great people. Without naming individual names, it is important for
me to thank my close friends who have always told me I could do this. Their support
has been so important to me and I am really grateful.
Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Centre for
Language and Communication for their support and encouragement. There have
been many times when I had to pass on opportunities because of my commitment to
the PhD and everyone has been patient and understanding. I would like everyone to
know that I really appreciate the support and faith they have shown me.
ii
Abstract.........................................................................................................................i
Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................ii
1. A linguistic perspective on referring expressions ...........................................1
1.1 On referring expressions, noun phrases and nominal groups .......................1
1.2 Aims and scope .............................................................................................8
1.3 How this thesis developed ...........................................................................10
1.4 Overview of the thesis .................................................................................14
2. An overview of selected approaches to referring expressions ....................17
2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................17
2.2 Philosophical approaches to referring expressions .....................................19

2.2.1 Frege....................................................................................................19
2.2.2 Russell .................................................................................................21
2.2.3 Strawson ..............................................................................................22
2.3 Referring expressions from a computational linguistics perspective ...........23

2.3.1 Role of the computer model.................................................................24
2.3.2 The referring expression as discrimination task...................................26
2.3.3 Dale and Reiter ....................................................................................28
2.3.4 The role of action and plan in generating referring expressions ..........32
2.4 Psycholinguistic and cognitive approaches to referring expressions...........34

2.4.1 The implausibility of the philosophical view of referring expressions...35
2.4.2 The role of the addressee in referring expressions..............................37
2.4.3 Convergence........................................................................................40
2.5 Referring expressions and corpus linguistics ..............................................43

2.5.1 Collocation and multi-word patterns.....................................................44
2.5.2 Referring expressions in various text types .........................................45
2.6 Summary .....................................................................................................49
3. An overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics ...........................................51
3.1 Structure and function..................................................................................52
3.2 The multifunctional nature of the clause ......................................................54
3.3 System networks .........................................................................................56
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3.4 Transitivity....................................................................................................58
3.5 Summary .....................................................................................................62
4. Halliday’s Nominal Group.................................................................................64
4.1 An overview of the system networks for the nominal group ........................65
4.1.1 Halliday 1964 .......................................................................................65
4.1.2 Halliday and Hasan 1976.....................................................................67
4.1.3 Halliday 1977 .......................................................................................70
4.1.4 Halliday and Matthiessen 2004............................................................76
4.2 Description of the nominal group .................................................................79

4.2.1 The basic structure of the nominal group.............................................80
4.2.2 Head and Thing ...................................................................................81
4.3 Complex nominal groups in Systemic Functional Linguistics ......................84

4.3.1 Halliday’s nominal complex..................................................................84
4.3.2 ‘Of’ structures: measure nominals and other related structures ..........89
4.3.3 Martin’s (1992) nominal group and participant.....................................91
4.4 Summary .....................................................................................................95
5. The Cardiff Grammar.........................................................................................97
5.1 Overview of the Cardiff Grammar ................................................................98

5.1.1 Cognitive and social aspects of the Cardiff Model ...............................99
5.1.2 Primacy of production over understanding ........................................100
5.2 The main components of the model ..........................................................102

5.2.1 The overall planner ............................................................................103
5.2.2 The discourse planner .......................................................................106
5.2.3 The sentence planner ........................................................................106
5.2.3.1 The system networks .....................................................................107
5.2.3.2 Probabilities ...................................................................................111
5.2.3.3 Traversing the system network ......................................................112
5.3 Cardiff theory of functional syntax .............................................................114

5.3.1 The nominal group .............................................................................120
5.3.2 The prepositional group .....................................................................123
5.3.3 The quality group ...............................................................................124
5.3.4 The quantity group .............................................................................125
5.3.5 The genitive cluster............................................................................126
5.3.6 Transitivity in the Cardiff Grammar ....................................................127
iv
5.3.6.1 Compound participant roles ...........................................................128
5.4 Summary ...................................................................................................129
6. The place of referring expressions in the Cardiff model .............................131
6.1 Conceptual and formal representations of referring expressions ..............132
6.2 Planning a referring expression .................................................................134
6.3 System network for ‘referent thing’ ............................................................140
6.4 The formal representation of referring expressions ...................................151
6.5 Summary ...................................................................................................155
7. Towards a functional grammar of complex referring expressions ............157
7.1 Introduction ................................................................................................157
7.2 Postmodifiers as Complement and Adjunct...............................................159

7.2.1 The prepositional group as postmodifier............................................160
7.3 Issues concerning qualifier in the Cardiff Grammar...................................163
7.4 Current applications of transitivity in the nominal group ............................169

7.4.1 The transitivity of the prepositional phrase ........................................169
7.4.2 Nominalization ...................................................................................171
7.5 A theory of transitivity for complex referring expressions ..........................177

7.5.1 Transitivity..........................................................................................177
7.6 A Functional approach to postmodification................................................185

7.6.1 Criteria for analysing complex referring expressions .........................186
7.6.1.1 Participant Roles............................................................................187
7.6.1.2 Circumstance Roles.......................................................................190
7.6.1.3 Covert Relations ............................................................................191
7.7 Summary ...................................................................................................195
8. A methodology for the analysis of referring expressions ...........................198
8.1 Data Collection ..........................................................................................200
8.2 Construction of the Corpora.......................................................................202
8.3 Coding the data: converting theory to application......................................204

8.3.1 Coding the data..................................................................................208
8.3.1.1 Text Mode ......................................................................................208
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8.3.1.2 Scheme Mode................................................................................208
8.3.1.3 Coding Mode..................................................................................210
8.3.1.4 Review Mode .................................................................................211
8.3.1.5 Statistics Mode...............................................................................212
8.3.2 The coding scheme............................................................................214
8.3.3 Coding complex referring expressions...............................................224
8.4 Summary ...................................................................................................229
9. A functional analysis of simple referring expressions ................................231
9.1 Grammatical Categories ............................................................................232
9.2 Distribution of Referring Expressions ........................................................236

9.2.1 Thing and Nominal Group..................................................................236
9.2.2 Three main categories of thing ..........................................................238
9.2.3 Outsider Features ..............................................................................244
9.3 Head-only codings .....................................................................................245

9.3.1 Pronouns as referring expressions ....................................................250
9.4 The [head-plus] feature..............................................................................252

9.4.1 Determiners .......................................................................................254
9.4.2 Particularization .................................................................................259
9.4.3 Selection ............................................................................................261
9.4.4 Quantity..............................................................................................263
9.4.5 Modification in referring expressions .................................................265
9.5 Relationships among elements in simple referring expressions................267

9.5.1 Distribution of referring expressions across the clause .....................267
9.5.2 Modifiers ............................................................................................268
9.5.3 Determiners .......................................................................................270
9.5.4 Quantifying Determiners ....................................................................272
9.6 Summary ...................................................................................................274
10. A functional analysis of complex referring expressions .........................276
10.1 Frequency of complex referring expressions.............................................276
10.2 Relationship between modifiers and qualifiers ..........................................281
10.3 Ad hoc descriptions in complex referring expressions...............................284

10.3.1 Results for nominal groups coded with [by role in other situation].....286
10.3.1.1 Non-finite postmodifying clauses ...............................................289
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10.3.2 Results for nominal groups coded with [by relation with other thing] .292
10.3.2.1 Prepositions introducing a postmodifying prepositional group ...294
10.3.2.2 Apposition ..................................................................................297
10.3.3 Results for nominal groups coded with ‘postmodifier’........................298
10.3.4 Multiple qualifiers ...............................................................................299
10.4 Functional analysis of complex referring expressions ...............................301

10.4.1 Overt Situations .................................................................................303
10.4.1.1 Participant role for head element ...............................................304
10.4.1.2 Results head having role as Circumstance................................307
10.4.2 Covert Relational Situations...............................................................309
10.4.2.1 Role of completive in covert relational situations .......................310
10.5 Revised system network for [ad hoc description] ......................................311
10.6 Summary ...................................................................................................318
11. Conclusions .................................................................................................319
11.1 Main contributions of this thesis.................................................................320
11.2 Limitations of the research.........................................................................321
11.3 Directions for future research ....................................................................322
References ...............................................................................................................325
Appendix ..................................................................................................................334
vii
Dans le monde qui nous est donné, la science
implante des oasis d’ordre, de calcul, d’efficacité ;
mais existent, demeurent et deviennent d’immenses
forêts d’ignorance, d’erreur, de passion, de
souffrance, d’inquiétude.
(Fourastié)
Chapter 1: A linguistic perspective on referring expressions
1. A linguistic perspective on referring expressions
1.1 On referring expressions, noun phrases and nominal

groups
Most linguists are bound, in a sense, by a very long tradition in

grammatical studies of the categories of noun and noun phrase. Studies of
noun phrase (or nominal group) structure have been just that - studies of
structure. Focussing on the noun phrase forces the analyst into a position
where structure is the point of departure and consequently the driving force.
Looking at the problem a different way may perhaps shed some light on some
of the complexities and unresolved issues we are left with from studying the
noun phrase. This is not a study of the noun phrase and yet it is. The subject
of investigation here will be on the linguistic expressions speakers use to refer
to the things or objects that they want to say something about with a particular
focus on those expressions which are complex. For example, if we suppose a
speaker wants to say something to someone about someone having bought
something, the speaker will have in mind a particular event and particular
objects to which he or she wishes to refer. One possible realisation might be
as given in example (1).
(1) my friend bought a new coat
The situation, as realised in (1), has two participants: ‘my friend’ and ‘a new
coat’. What we are interested in here is the construction or composition of the
expression(s) produced by the speaker to refer to the object(s). The shift in
perspective is then on the referring expression rather than on the nominal
group.
1
As part of our language system, we know what resources we have

available to enable us to talk about things or objects. In doing so, a speaker
will construct an expression that will enable an addressee to identify what it is
that the speaker is referring to. Very generally, we have classes of ‘words’ that
function in a more or less similar way and certain classes of words tend to lend
themselves more readily to certain types of expressions than others. As a
result, when a speaker of English wants to talk about an object, he or she will
most often use nouns to identify the class of thing being targeted (see for
example Rjikhoff, 2002; Halliday and Hasan, 1976, Tucker, 1998, and Fawcett
2000). The construction of an expression to refer to a given object, whether or
not the expression includes a lexical classification of the object, typically leads
to the construction of a nominal group in grammatical terms.
Fawcett (2007) makes a distinction between the terms ‘object’ and ‘thing’,
although the distinction is not always clear in his writing, nor indeed is it always
so in this thesis. The fundamental distinction in technical terms is that ‘object’
is a cognitive semantic concept, i.e. a conception. It is assumed to be an early
‘pre-semantic’ representation of the referent. No claims are made as to what
this mental representation might be. For our purposes it is a term that refers to
the object, whether concrete, abstract, real or other, that the speaker intends
to refer to. However this is before the speaker begins to process how to refer
to it in any linguistic sense. Once in the linguistic system, the referent is called
‘thing’. ‘Thing’, then, is the term used to refer to the referent at a later stage of
language production or generation (this will be explained in Chapter 6).
This area of the English language system has been studied from various
perspectives, which has left us with a variety of terms for talking about it. In a
sense this is a challenging area of research since interest in how speakers
refer to objects or how they name objects has roots in philosophy, psychology,
semantics and traditional grammar studies. It is a primary notion, being
related to nearly every type of linguistic analysis from lexicography to
discourse studies. It is one of the key nodes in the mapping of the different
strands of meaning in a Systemic Functional model of the language system. In
order for us to talk about this thing that speakers do, we will need some
terminology so that we can identify it and share a mutual understanding of
what we mean when we use it.
2
According to Lyons (1977:23),
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’. We also want a term for the linguistic units that are
employed in order to ascribe particular properties to whatever is
being referred to.
Clearly, Lyons proposes that linguists adopt the term referring expression
in order to be able to talk about the linguistic units used by speakers to identify
whatever they are talking about. Although the term referring expression
originates in philosophical studies of reference and referring, it is currently
most commonly used in psycholinguistic research, philosophy and natural
language processing (usually in language generation). Linguistic researchers
tend not to use this term and instead focus on its related structural or syntactic
units like the noun phrase or nominal group. Oddly this structural classification
is also true for functional linguists where one might expect to find a more
functional approach (cf. Keizer, 1992).
The use of the term nominal group in place of the more standard noun
phrase has a rather long standing tradition of its own, although a more limited
scope. Halliday has consistently used the term Nominal Group, since as early
as his first major publications (1956), and Systemic Functional linguists have
followed suit in the use of this term. As Halliday and Hasan (1976:39) explain:
We retain the term nominal group in preference to the more

usual noun phrase, partly because it has been used throughout
Halliday’s writings and related publications, having originally
been taken over by Halliday (1956) from W. S. Allen (1951), but
more because, although the noun phrase and nominal group are
more or less equivalent, Halliday’s verbal group is very different
from the verb phrase, so that the term verbal group has to be
retained in any case, and by the same token, nominal group
belongs in a somewhat different conceptual framework from
noun phrase.
For the moment we will not concern ourselves with the distinction between
‘group’ and ‘phrase’ in Halliday’s model of Systemic Functional Linguistics.
3
The distinction is for our purposes an irrelevant point. It is sufficient at this

point to accept what Halliday and Hasan say, and to alternate between ‘noun
phrase’ and ‘nominal group’ in this thesis depending on the context of its use.
Noun phrase will be used when discussing it from a non-Systemic Functional
perspective and nominal group when presenting it from a Systemic Functional
perspective.
Lyons’ definition above may be more or less adequate for our purposes but
it is rather cumbersome: a referring expression is a linguistic expression that
serves ‘to identify (or refer to) whatever we are talking about when we make a
statement about something’. We can shorten this considerably by introducing
another term to mean ‘whatever we are talking about when we make a
statement about something’. The term used by Fawcett is ‘referent thing’
(1980:47), where ‘referent things’ are the ‘arguments of the proposition’ (ibid).
In Fawcett’s model, both of these are seen as inputs to the linguistic system;
each of these is “a more or less well-defined mental construct to which the
performer (speaker) wishes to refer” (ibid.:90). ‘REFERENT THING’ refers to the
mental construct a speaker has for the object (or thing) he or she wishes to
say something about and ‘REFERENT SITUATION’ refers to the mental construct a
speaker has for the situation in which one or more REFERENT THINGS play a role
(ibid.:47). In what we could call more common systemic functional
terminology, a ‘REFERENT THING’ will be interpreted as a participant in the
experiential meaning of the clause while the ‘REFERENT SITUATION’ will be
interpreted as a process. We will have more to say about experiential
meaning in Chapter 3 when an overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics is
given.
As a means of demonstrating these terms, we could take a somewhat
backwards perspective and consider the following example:
(2) the cat chased the rat
The example in (2) expresses the ‘REFERENT SITUATION’ as a process of

chasing and in which two participants are represented. The two participants
are the cat and the rat and each of these referring expressions identifies one of
the ‘REFERENT THINGS’ that the speaker chose to include as having a role in the
‘REFERENT SITUATION’. The form or structure of each of these two referring
4
expressions is a single nominal group (noun phrase). We will now consider

the relationship between referring expressions and the noun phrase.
The noun phrase is such a common unit that very few researchers define
it. It is one of those terms which is often taken for granted and it is assumed
that everyone knows what it is. The following definition, given by de Haan
(1989), is particularly interesting as it presents the noun phrase as the point of
departure, so to say, and suggests that a noun phrase can be used (by a
speaker) to refer to an object.
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. The head (the only obligatory element in the
structure of the noun phrase) may be a noun or a noun
equivalent. Semantically, a noun phrase can be used as a
referring expression. (de Haan, 1989: 8)
This may or may not be the case; we cannot be certain. However, most
research in referring expressions would suggest that it is in fact the other way
around; that the noun phrase is simply one possible structural realisation of a
referring expression. The speaker’s intention to refer to some object (i.e. to
build a referring expression) would precede the building of a noun phrase. We
will return to this in the following chapters when we consider this in more detail.
If we think back to example (2), it seems quite obvious that the speaker would
have the intention to refer before having an available noun phrase since the
speaker might have preferred to express the situation differently with different
referring expressions, even if each ‘REFERENT THING’ remained the same as in
(3) and (4).
(3) it was chased by the cat
(4) my neighbour’s cat chased that old rat
An additional argument against identifying the noun phrase with a referring

expression is that it is not certain that all languages have noun phrases yet all
language systems need to be able to let speakers refer to ‘things’. Field work
done on the Iroquois languages, namely Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Mohawk,
5
suggest that these languages do not in fact express referring expressions in

the form of noun phrases.
In Cayuga all content words that appear in actual utterances are

syntactically predicative, i.e. no further measures are required to
express an independent, complete proposition. Thus they
represent an expression that would constitute a sentence in
European languages. (Sasse, 1993:203; 1988:186ff, cited in
Rijkhoff, 2002:13n)
In Mohawk, “many entities are identified by means of morphological verbs

rather than nouns” (Mithun, 1996:636, cited in Rijkhoff, 2002:13). Rijkhoff also
cites examples of Mithun’s work on Tuscarora (ibid.):
English gloss Tuscarora

‘the boy looked at the goat’ r ak w á : ti hs w a hra tk á h tho ? katésk rahs
ra-kwá:tihs wa-hr-at-káhtho-? ka-téskr- ahs
h e_ is_ yo ung he_ lo oke d_a t_it it-s tinks
‘black snake’ r ò:rá :th v:

r- ò:-rá:thv:-”
h e_c limbs
Mithun’s interpretation of what she calls descriptive labels is that they are
all “surface morphological verbs ... (but) they clearly function in the same way
as formal nouns syntactically” (Mithun, 1976:31, cited in Rijkhoff, 2002:13).
This should illustrate that it is perhaps unreasonable to assume that all
languages have nouns and that all referring expressions are realized
linguistically as noun phrases. This is clearly an extreme position. It is beyond
the scope of this thesis to explore this area any further. It is sufficient evidence
however to suggest that the structural realisation of a referring expression is
language dependent and this should not be forgotten. This is especially
important since we will be analysing the English language. It is easy to rely on
dominant languages as a model for other language systems. However it does
seem clear that the correlation between a referring expression and its
realisation as a noun phrase is quite strong in English, although this is not
always the case as will be discussed later.
6
It is unfair to pick apart de Haan’s definition as it is taken here out of

context. Nevertheless, it does illustrate a valid point; we need to be clear on
how we see the objects of our analysis. As Rijkhoff (2002: 28) points out,
“noun phrases rather than nouns have referring potential ... speakers rather
than NPs are capable of referring ... the immediate referent of an NP, i.e. the
discourse referent, is a mental construct rather than an entity in the external
world.” In this view, only speakers can refer and they construct (or generate)
expressions in order to do so. Rijkhoff (2002:27) makes this very clear when
he explains that the referent is in the mind of the speaker:
The entities (NPs) refer to are not entities in the external physical
world. Referents of NPs are rather mental representations of
entities as they are created, stored, and retrieved in the minds of
the speech participants. ... Thus a distinction must be made
between a referent (mental construct) and its ontological
counterpart in the physical world, if it exists.
We will return to this in further detail in Chapter 2 when considering work done
on referring expressions in philosophy and semantics.
At this point then, we can define a referring expression as a linguistic
expression that a speaker produces in order to transmit his or her
representation of a given referent. Any attempt at a complete list would be
futile as it would near infinity, but for the purposes of illustration, examples of
referring expressions include: I, you, he, they, it, houses, the tall boy, a quick
trip, two apples, five of those oranges, a cup of coffee, etc. These referring
expressions can be said to be simple in the sense that they represent one and
only one referring expression. However, a referring expression may have
other referring expressions embedded in it as in, a car with a sunroof, people
who eat meat, etc. In doing so, the speaker creates a temporary ‘situation’
which relates the referents (this will be explained in detail in Chapter 7). This
relationship of embedded referring expressions is shown in (5) and (6):
(5) [a car [with [a sunroof] REx]]REx
(6) [people [who eat [meat] REx]]REx
7
We will call these expressions complex referring expressions (the definition

of complex referring expressions is given in Chapter 7). To date, there is no
satisfactory account of these expressions. This thesis addresses this in
particular while also providing a descriptive overview of all referring
expressions.
1.2 Aims and scope
Describing the aims of this thesis is more difficult than one might imagine
because of the paradox of what was said above: this is not a study of the
nominal group and yet it is. In this chapter, I have argued for a linguistic
perspective to the study of referring expressions. In English at least, this
means also studying the nominal group as it is the primary linguistic resource
for referring to an object (cf. ‘entity’ in Lyons, 1977 and in Keizer, 1992).
Although linguists generally disagree on the functions of constituent elements
of the nominal group, there is much agreement within specific theories as to its
syntax. With respect to referring expressions however the main difficulty is due
to the fact that they seem to relate directly to what is happening within the
brain of the speaker where the referent is some cognitive representation or
mental construct. This thesis does not intend to develop a cognitive model of
referring expressions per se, but rather to move as closely as possible in this
direction so that a fully functional account of referring expressions can be
developed.
There are two main areas of concern when dealing with referring
expressions from a systemic functional perspective. There is the
(simultaneous) relation between function and form. In formal terms (i.e. the
syntax), there is little more to do in describing the nominal group (provided we
ignore for the moment somewhat problematic expressions such as the top of
the mountain, or the side of the house, see Fawcett (2007) for a detailed
account and the discussion here in Chapter 4, Section 4.3.2 and Chapter 7,
Section 7.3). Fawcett (2000, 2007, and forthcoming b) provides a very
comprehensive account of the functional syntax of the nominal group.
However in terms of function, with respect to complex referring expressions,
there remains a great deal of work to do. As Fawcett (2004) explains, the
8
system network for these complex expressions is not currently organised

around the functions of qualifiers as it should be. It is instead organised with
respect to the structural units that can fill a qualifier (e.g. whether a relative
clause or prepositional group). We need a better understanding of the choices
speakers make in language production.
One aim in this thesis is to consider the functional nature of referring
expressions and specifically complex referring expressions. The assumption
here is that referring expressions and complex referring expressions in
particular express three main types of meaning, very similar to those
expressed in the clause (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). As will become
clear throughout the thesis, the research presented here draws in an
analogous way from the experiential metafunction of the clause for the
meanings expressed by the ad hoc situations set up within the referring
expressions. Although this thesis will be focussing on developing a model of
the transitivity of referring expressions (see Chapter 7), there is a case to be
made for the interpersonal and textual functions of these expressions. It is
beyond the scope of this thesis to consider whether referring expressions can
express meanings relevant to Interpersonal and Textual metafunctions, but we
should acknowledge research that supports this idea, in addition to Halliday’s
original view on this (Halliday, 1977 and Halliday and Mathiessen, 2004, for
example). Referring expressions have a speech function (Searle, 1969), thus
relating to the interpersonal function of the expression. In addition, work on the
interpersonal (connotative) meaning of nominal groups overlaps with work
done in lexicology and appraisal/evaluation (see Tucker 1998, Hunston and
Thompson 2000, Martin, 2000). Further, there is also an information structure
to these expressions which expresses a textual function (Fries 1999).
Another main aim of the thesis is to develop a theory of complex
referring expressions. In doing so, an extended model of transitivity is
developed and presented (see Chapter 7). Transitivity is therefore an
important concept in the research presented here as it is central to the
approach taken to complex referring expressions. Without going into too much
detail at this point, let us briefly consider what is meant by transitivity in
Systemic Functional Linguistics and consider how it might be a useful concept
for accounting for complex referring expressions.
9
Transitivity is the representation in language of PROCESS, the

PARTICIPANTS therein, and the CIRCUMSTANTIAL features
associated with them. This is an extension of a narrower
meaning whereby the form refers simply to the types of process,
as in ‘transitive and intransitive verbs’; we shall use it in the wider
sense, so that transitivity here refers to the ‘content’, or factual-
notional structure of the clause in its entirety. In other words, all
those features of the clause which contribute to the linguistic
representation of the speaker’s experience come under this
heading. (Halliday, 1969/1976:159)
Halliday took the traditional notion of transitivity and extended it to cover

‘content’ in the sense of ‘the linguistic representation of the speaker’s
experience’. In this thesis, transitivity is extended further to account for the
content of complex referring expressions. The arguments supporting
borrowing this concept and developing it are developed in Chapter 7.
However it is perhaps sufficient at this point to simply state that this notion of
transitivity can be applied to referring expressions. It will refer to the content of
the expression, whereby the content includes all the features of the expression
which contribute to the linguistic representation of the speaker’s experience.
In the case of complex referring expressions, it is the notion of transitivity that
best explains, in functional terms, the relation between the head and qualifier
of the nominal group (see chapters 4 and 5). Therefore in addition to
reviewing other approaches to referring expressions, a more detailed account
of Halliday’s transitivity will be presented in Chapter 3 as preparation for the
new theoretical developments presented in Chapter 7.
1.3 How this thesis developed
The preceding sections have attempted to set the stage, as it were, for the
presentation of the thesis. If the aims are not perfectly clear, this should be
understandable since the argument developed throughout this research –
although simple in thought – is complex and difficult to talk about. The main
problem is perhaps due to the fact that there is no functional or semantic term
for expressions which are realized as a nominal group. Butler (2003a:251)
calls them “nominal expressions which designate entities”. It is almost
10
impossible to talk about these expressions without opening up a can of

terminological worms. Even the referring expression to refer to referring
expressions is loaded if we consider the use of ‘designate’ as compared to
‘refer’ or ‘entity’ rather than ‘object’. Each of these carries theoretical
implications and in many cases each one is defined slightly differently by
different linguistic frameworks. Lyons’ suggestion (above) that linguists take
up the term ‘referring expression’ has not been particularly successful for some
unknown reason and yet we do not have such a term that we can use to
conveniently talk about these expressions. Nominal group (or noun phrase) is
a very comfortable, convenient and well-known name. However, using the
term nominal group forces a structural perspective and it is this common
perspective that is being challenged in this thesis.
This section seeks to explicitly frame the approach to the thesis taken here
and offer the reader a kind of overview that will be helpful at various points
throughout the thesis. There may be times during the thesis where the overall
plan is not obvious but I trust the reader to have faith in me as a guide.
The study of referring expressions caught my attention years ago when I
had planned to research the pragmatics of person reference. It was while
searching for work done on person reference that I met Robin Fawcett who
had, together with other members of the COMMUNAL project at Cardiff
University, developed rather extensive system networks for referring to things.
In one discussion, he commented that identifying pronouns for research might
be considered an odd place for a functional linguist to begin since this would
lead to a focus on form rather than on function. Agreeing that this was
somewhat problematic, I began to explore how one might look at person
reference from a more functional perspective. It seemed clear that setting out
to study the nominal group would be equally ‘unfunctional’. This led me to
considering all referring expressions.
There is a considerable gap in the systemic functional literature (and in
most linguistics literature) concerning how to talk about these expressions.
This constitutes the main driving force in this research: how can we develop a
framework (theory and analysis) for the study of how speakers refer to objects.
The way in which this thesis has approached this problem has been to
consider what other subject areas have contributed to the study of referring
11
expressions. The result of this can be found in Chapter 2 where contributions

to this area are reviewed from various fields. One thing is consistent
throughout all approaches; the referent is some concept in the mind of the
speaker. The problem for the linguist is to capture how the process of referring
to a referent is configured in the language system. To date, as stated above,
linguists have largely ignored this perspective and have focussed almost
exclusively on the nominal group. However even studies of the nominal group
are relatively rare. In fact, Fries (1970) published an important contribution to
the study of the nominal group yet it is rarely cited. Consequently another main
contribution of this thesis is a functional description of referring expressions as
realized by nominal groups. This empirically driven account is given in
Chapter 9.
Exploring this problem requires some understanding of the relationship
between referring expressions and nominal groups and what the theory has to
say about this. The research carried out in this area for the current research
draws on both Systemic Functional Linguistics in general and developments of
SFL in the Cardiff Grammar. The conclusion I have come to after studying
referring expressions from a linguistic perspective is that transitivity relations
are needed to explain complex referring expressions. This is why there is an
emphasis on transitivity throughout the thesis. However it is a broadened view
of transitivity as applied to referring expressions, so it is not exactly the same.
Following the two chapters which overview SFL in general and the nominal
group in SFL in particular, the Cardiff Grammar is presented. The Cardiff
Grammar has developed an approach to referring expressions and it forms the
basis for this thesis. A presentation of the Cardiff Grammar is given over two
chapters. The first describes the overall model of language and the functional
syntax developed in the model. The second includes detail concerning the
approach to referring expressions in the Cardiff model of language, including
an overview of the algorithm for referring and the relevant system networks.
The theory developed here concerning complex referring expressions is
not presented until Chapter 7. The reason for this is because it was felt that a
considerable volume of background knowledge was needed for an
understanding of the theoretical and descriptive contributions made by this
thesis. It is rare to find a detailed discussion of the system networks in any
12
systemic functional research (such a discussion is presented in Chapter 6).

Without this however, the theory of transitivity presented here would be very
difficult to follow as it is based on the existing system networks. Furthermore,
it also incorporates aspects of Halliday’s model of language (notably the view
of prepositional phrases as reduced clauses).
The theoretical side of the thesis is relatively straightforward in some
respects. However the same is not true for the analytical side. Developing an
analytical framework for the study of referring expressions from a functional
perspective is not obvious because it is not clear to what extent system
networks are designed for language analysis. The system network for thing is
vast and complex and consequently it cannot be converted into an analytical
scheme without considerable simplification. Consequently, the methodology
presented in Chapter 8 describes in detail the process of tagging the corpora
under study with an analytical scheme (using O’Donnell’s (1995) Systemic
Coder) that attempts to model the system networks as closely as possible.
As mentioned above, there are few dedicated detailed studies of the
nominal group. One objective of this study is to demonstrate that it is possible
to study the nominal group from a functional perspective. Chapter 9 presents
the statistical results of the frequency of occurrence and interaction of the
various functional components in referring expressions. It also considers
variation and stability over individuals and text type. A statistical account of
the functions of referring expressions is important due to the significant role of
probabilities in the system networks of the Cardiff model (see Chapter 5). The
results presented in Chapter 9 and in Chapter 10 will contribute to a more
accurate description of the probabilities in the relevant places of the system
network.
Chapter 10 is also a presentation of statistical frequencies but rather than
focusing on all referring expressions as is the case in Chapter 9, this chapter
focuses on complex referring expressions uniquely. In a sense this is both an
application and a test of the theory and methodology presented in Chapters 7
and 8 respectively. Given that the analysis is presented in such statistical
form, the data analysed is presented in an XML database on a CD-ROM in the
Appendix. This chapter also discusses the theoretical implications for the
system network for ad hoc descriptions. It offers a modified version of the
13
systems network based on functional features and in light of the work

undertaken here.
In closing this section, we will review the main aims of this thesis. They
are:
• to develop a methodology for analysing referring expressions following
the system networks as closely as possible.
• to contribute to the systemic functional theoretical model of language in
the area of referring expressions by presenting a detailed description of
referring expressions.
• to develop a new theory of complex referring expressions which is
based on systemic choice rather than on structural or lexical
classification.
The next section will complete this chapter with an overview of the thesis.
1.4 Overview of the thesis
Following this chapter, Chapter 2 presents an overview of the main

contributing disciplines to the study of referring expressions. This includes a
review of the literature related to referring expressions in the fields of
Philosophy, Natural Language Generation, Psycholinguistics, and to a lesser
extent, Corpus Linguistics. It summarises the main contributions and identifies
what is relevant for a linguistic approach to referring expressions. There is no
body of literature on referring expressions from a purely linguistic perspective
and this is the main motivating reason for why this chapter focuses on
relatively non-linguistic contributions. This chapter provides a historical view of
the development of referring expressions as a topic of research. This is
important as it helps motivate the move presented in this thesis towards
presenting the referring expression as a legitimate area for linguistic research.
Chapter 3 offers a general overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It
provides the necessary background to understanding the relationship between
function and structure in the theory. It also covers the basic concepts
14
concerning the system networks and it identifies the areas in the framework
that deal implicitly with referring expressions, namely participant roles in the
transitivity system. A particularly important contribution in this chapter is the
discussion of transitivity as this will form the basis of the theoretical
developments in Chapter 7.
Chapter 4 describes the nominal group within the framework of Systemic
Functional Linguistics. Its main goal is to explain the grammatical description
of the nominal group following Halliday’s description of the nominal group from
1964 to 2004. It also includes important discussions of complex nominal
groups which have direct implications for the view of complex referring
expressions presented in this thesis. In addition, Halliday’s ‘measure’
nominals are considered in terms of the challenges they create for the analyst.
Finally Martin’s (1992) work on the nominal group from his developments on
participants in discourse is also briefly considered.
In Chapter 5, the focus is on the model developed within the Cardiff
Grammar, which is the model the current work is based on. It provides the
framework for functional syntax used in the analysis. This chapter is essential
for understanding the terminology used in the Cardiff Grammar as well as the
basic relations in functional syntax such as conflation, componence, filling and
exponence. More detail is given here on the role of the system networks in
this model.
Chapter 6 offers an overview of the treatment of referring expressions in
the Cardiff Grammar from the generation perspective and from within the
Cardiff model of language. This is essential since the relevant system
network, which is the ‘thing’ network, is discussed in relative detail. This
includes a presentation of the relevant algorithm for referring to ‘thing’. As the
system network for ‘thing’ is referred to throughout the remainder of the thesis,
it provides the necessary background both for understanding the theoretical
developments in this thesis and the analytical approach to referring
expressions.
In Chapter 7 the main arguments are presented for why a new theoretical
approach is needed in the study of complex referring expressions.
Consideration is given here to the more standard or traditional approach to
postmodification in the nominal group. The main contribution of this chapter is
15
in the development of a broadened theory of transitivity in order to contribute a

functional approach to complex referring expressions.
Chapter 8 provides a description of the methodology for the research
presented in the thesis. It offers considerable detail in explaining the
relationship between the relevant system networks developed in the Cardiff
grammar and the coding scheme developed using the Systemic Coder
(O’Donnell, 1995) for the purpose of analysing the referring expressions. It
offers readers the explanations necessary for understanding the analytical
approach taken in this thesis.
The goal in Chapter 9 is to present the global descriptive results of the
analysis of all referring expressions. This includes the results of the frequency
and distribution of all referring expressions in text across three corpora, as
analysed in this research. The results are presented with a three-way
comparison: variation and stability for one speaker in one corpus; variation and
stability between two speakers of similar texts; and variation and stability
between different speakers of very different text types.
Chapter 10 presents the results of the very detailed analysis of complex
referring expressions. The new theoretical approach developed in Chapter 7
is put to the test on the three corpora studied and the results are presented
and explored.
Finally, Chapter 11 concludes the thesis and offers a discussion of
limitations and directions for future research.
16
Chapter 2: An overview of selected approaches to referring expressions
2. An overview of selected approaches to referring

expressions
Whales do not really belong with the fish they superficially resemble, since
the similarity of form and behaviour conceals radical differences of
structure and function. (Gareth Evans, 1982:1)
2.1 Introduction
This chapter presents an overview of the main approaches to Referring

Expressions. As there is no body of literature on referring expressions from a
purely linguistic perspective, the focus here will be on summarising the main
contributions to the study of these expressions while attempting to identify
what is relevant for a linguistic approach. Consequently, the chapter provides
a historical view of the development of referring expressions as a topic of
research. This is important as it helps motivate the move presented in this
thesis towards presenting the referring expression as a legitimate area for
linguistic research. The research fields reviewed here include Philosophy and
Logic, Natural Language Generation, Psycholinguistics and Corpus
Linguistics.
Referring expressions have been studied from a variety of approaches.
Not surprisingly, philosophers have been mostly concerned with definite
descriptions, truth values and existence. Semanticists look to identifying
referents, and to assigning meaning to expressions. Psycholinguists are
interested in how referring expressions are stored, expressed and recognized
in the brain and the psychological involvement in their linguistic representation.
Computational linguists have attempted to model the production of referring
expressions and in some cases work done in this field has set out to test
theoretical models of language production in order to see to what extent the
model can be said to function reasonably well. Corpus linguists have begun to
look at noun phrase occurrences, although this is a more difficult task since
17
parsing systems are not currently able to correctly identify referring

expressions in texts and hand tagging a large corpus for noun phrases is
incredibly time consuming. Nevertheless, work in corpus linguistics is
important in helping us to gain a better understanding of the frequencies and
composition of nominal groups in texts, although corpus linguistics has not, so
far, directly addressed the area of referring expressions (with the exception
perhaps of Biber et al 1998).
The main goal then of this chapter is to provide a historical overview of the
development of the study of referring expressions and to map the various
connections amongst the different fields that have contributed most
significantly. Another important goal is to identify the areas that are relevant
and important for a linguistic approach to referring expressions. This chapter
will also give some insight into the main issues concerning referring
expressions. An understanding of these areas is needed as background to the
linguistic exploration of referring expressions presented in this thesis.
The outline for the rest of this chapter is as follows. The next section will
present an overview of the most relevant work done on referring expressions
from the field of philosophy, where the major contributions from this field will be
reviewed. Following this, we will consider the main contributions to the study
and modelling of referring expressions from the field of natural language
processing (NLP). This is perhaps the area where the most concentrated work
is done on referring expressions. It is also the field overlapping most
significantly with models of language. This will then be followed by a summary
of work done in psycholinguistics. Although a full explanation of
psycholinguistics and cognitive science is beyond the scope of this thesis,
psycholinguistic research has important results to share with linguists. Finally,
this chapter looks briefly at views of referring expressions from the perspective
of Corpus Linguistics.
18
2.2 Philosophical approaches to referring expressions
One of the oldest problems in the philosophy of language,

indeed, one of the oldest problems in Western philosophy: the
nature of linguistic reference. (Searle, 1990:xiii)
2.2.1 Frege
The earliest studies of referring expressions (even if the term itself shifts in
definition depending on the field) stem from philosophy and logic. It was then
developed outward and into linguistics via two principal paths: one is through
semantics (e.g. Lyons, 1977) while the other is through computational
linguistics (e.g. Appelt, 1985). Searle’s work on reference has led indirectly
from philosophy to studies of discourse and pragmatics (e.g. Searle, 1969).
For the philosopher, the central notion is that of unique reference: the use
of an expression to uniquely identify some object. Philosophers working on
this topic seem to have focused almost exclusively on naming and what
constitutes a unique definite description. Evans (1982:1) summarises the
philosophical view of referring expressions as follows: “the class of referring
expressions has traditionally been taken to include proper names, definite
descriptions (‘the tallest man in the world’); demonstrative terms (‘this man’)
and some pronouns.”
Even among philosophers, there has been much dispute as to what
constitutes a referring expression. Part of the problem lies in interpretations of
the non-existence and/or truth value of the expression in question. The main
explorations attempted to resolve puzzles such as whether or not an
expression can be said to be referring if it has no reference and whether a
sentence containing an expression referring to something that does not exist
can be said to have reference.
The first real treatment of reference is attributed to Frege (1892), although
according to Searle (1969:77), it can be traced back as far as Plato. For Frege
a referring expression is an expression that refers to a unique object; in other
words, a definite description. In his view, a referring expression is a type of
sign and by sign Frege (1892/1993:24) means “any designation representing a
proper name, which thus has as its reference a definite object (this word taken
19
in the widest range)”. One of Frege’s greatest contributions, or at least his

longest lasting contribution, is his idea that any given referring expression will
have two different types of meaning: sense and reference. Frege (1892/1993)
demonstrated the need for this distinction most famously with his now classic
morning star/evening star example, given here in example (7).
(7) the morning star is the evening star
Frege’s claim was that each expression in (7) has a different sense but that
they both share the same reference. Reference, for Frege, is the actual object
being designated; in other words, the thing that is being referred to. According
to Frege (1892/1993:26) “the reference of a sign is an object perceivable by
the senses … an internal image”. Sense, however, is part of the meaning of
the sign but separate from reference. Frege defines sense as the mode of
presentation of the sign; the way in which the expression is present. As Frege
explains (1892/1993:24), “the sense of a proper name is grasped by
everybody who is sufficiently familiar with the language or totality of
designations to which it belongs”. It must be kept in mind that in Frege’s
terminology, sign and proper name mean the same thing as referring
expression.
In addition to this, he also claimed that an expression may have a sense
but no reference as in example (8) below (from Frege, 1892/1993:25). In this
example, the sense may be grasped but there is no unique object to which this
expression refers and therefore it cannot be said to have reference. As a
result, this expression would not be classed as a proper name (referring
expression) in Frege’s terminology. The opposite is not possible according to
Frege, it is impossible for a sign to not have a sense (i.e. it is impossible for a
sign to have a reference but no sense), since as he explains (1892/1993:25),
“to every expression belonging to a complete totality of signs, there should
certainly correspond a definite sense”.
(8) the least rapidly convergent series
20
2.2.2 Russell
Frege’s notion of sense was challenged by Russell (1905) whose work

became highly influential. Russell was more concerned with naming and he
argued that (Russell, 1919/1993:51) “a name is a simple symbol, directly
designating an individual which is its meaning, and having this meaning in its
own right, independently of the meanings of all the other words”. According to
Russell, these proper names are the only type of genuine referring expression.
Russell’s view of names is narrow as compared with Frege. For Russell,
proper names are indefinable.
Russell’s position (1905:479) is that there are three types of denoting
phrases:
(1) A phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; e.g.,
`the present King of France’. (2) A phrase may denote one
definite object; e.g., `the present King of England’ denotes a
certain man. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. `a man’
denotes not many men, but an ambiguous man.
Whereas Frege was concerned with the distinction between sense and
reference, Russell focused on the distinction between referring and describing,
where expressions which he calls descriptions are not referring expressions.
A description, according to Russell (1905:479), “consists of several words,
whose meanings are already fixed, and from which results whatever is to be
taken as the ‘meaning’ of the description”. This type of expression does not
constitute a referring expression for Russell. There are two types of
descriptions: definite and indefinite (or what Russell calls ‘ambiguous’).
Indefinite descriptions are of the form ‘a so-and-so’, e.g. a man, and definite
descriptions are of the form ‘the so-and-so’, e.g. the man (Russell,
1919/1993:46).
Russell (1905) used his theory of denoting to attempt to solve the problem
of the expression of entities which do not exist, e.g. the present king of France.
He presents the law of the excluded middle as a puzzle that can be solved by
his theory of denoting. The law of the excluded middle states that any
proposition can be determined to be true or false, such that either the
proposition or its converse must be true, i.e. “either ‘A is B’ or ‘A is not B’ must
be true” (1905:485). The problem with this for propositions containing non-
21
existing entities (i.e. the present king of France, as in the present king of
France is bald), is that the law will not hold. Clearly neither ‘the present king of
France is x’ nor ‘the present king of France is not x’ can be said to be true.
Russell solves this by distinguishing between primary and secondary types of
denoting phrases (ibid.:489).
2.2.3 Strawson
Russell’s position was challenged, most notably by Strawson (cf. Strawson,

1950), who argued that existence should not be a criterion for defining a
referring expression. The debate led Strawson (1950) to develop his theory of
presupposition which became a standard notion in the field of Pragmatics. It is
also likely that this work formed the first functional approach to the study of
referring expressions. In Strawson’s view, a referring expression is an
expression which has a uniquely referring use (ibid.:324); by the use of
‘uniquely referring use’ Strawson intends the use of expressions “to mention or
refer to some individual person or single object or particular event or place or
process, in the course of doing what we should normally describe as making a
statement about that person, object, place, event, or process” (1950:320).
These types of expressions include proper names, singular demonstrative
pronouns, singular person and impersonal pronouns and “phrases beginning
with the definite article followed by a noun, qualified or unqualified in the
singular (ibid.). However, he insists on the importance of the use of the
expression. He makes a three-way distinction amongst an expression, the use
of an expression and the utterance of an expression (Strawson, 1950:325-
326). Both the context of the utterance of an expression and its function are
very important according to Strawson. The following two examples, (9) and
(10), are given by Strawson to make this point.
(9) the king of France is wise (1950:325)
(10) the greatest French soldier (ibid.:320)
In (9), Strawson explains (1950:325) that the context of the utterance of the
expression the king of France is important since if uttered during the reign of
22
Louis XIV, some would say the sentence is true, while if during the reign of
Louis XV, many would say it was false. Similarly the expression the greatest
French soldier, in example (10), may be or may not be uniquely referring
depending on the function of its use. If uttered in the sentence Napoleon was
the greatest French soldier, then the expression is not referring since it is not
being used to refer to a particular individual, instead it is being used to say
something about a particular individual (Napoleon). However, if the same
expression is uttered in the sentence the greatest French soldier died in exile,
then it is used to refer to an individual (Napoleon).
It is through this realization that Strawson sees referring, not as something
that an expression does, but rather as something that can be used by a
speaker in order for the speaker to refer to some object. Therefore truth
values and the real world existence of objects become irrelevant in his
approach to the theory of referring (cf. Searle, 1969).
Linguistic reference has inherited a great deal from philosophical studies of
reference. Traces of its influences are present in most if not all linguistic
theories and this is most notably relevant in the use of concepts such as
definiteness, meaning, sense, and reference. Although much of what we glean
from philosophical studies of language is important, some of it carries with it
concerns and definitions that are not relevant for linguistic studies (e.g. the
arguments concerning definiteness, cf. Fawcett 1980). The use and meaning
of the term ‘reference’, for example, is inconsistent both in philosophy and in
linguistics (see Lyons, 1977:199 and Evans, 1982:7). Nevertheless, any study
of referring expressions must understand the roots of its development and very
clearly this lies in the earliest philosophical studies of linguistic reference. In
the next section, contributions to the study of referring expressions in
computational linguistics are considered.
2.3 Referring expressions from a computational linguistics

perspective
As shown in the last section, philosophers have contributed substantially to

the development of referring expressions by seeking answers to difficult
questions and sparking interest in reference. Many of these ideas can be
23
traced into modern linguistics, specifically the concepts of reference and

definiteness. Another branch of philosophical studies concerns logic and more
specifically mathematical logic. This area lent itself naturally to applications in
computer science, where systems were being developed to capture the logical
representation of language. In turn, this seems to have created a natural
bridge for logicians, mathematicians and linguists who sought to model
language computationally.
The goal of this section is to provide a brief overview of referring
expressions from the field of computational linguistics, and specifically from the
area of natural language generation. This presentation will try to focus only on
areas of concern to the linguistic approach taken here, for example definitions,
scope and problem areas. Since this thesis is not attempting a computational
contribution, we will not cover the more computational topics such as
programming or the development of algorithms. However it should be noted
that the Cardiff Grammar has been implemented computationally and we will
consider briefly the algorithm for generating referring expressions within this
model in Chapter 6.
2.3.1 Role of the computer model
The contributions of computational linguistics should not be

underestimated. Although there are limits to what we can do in linguistics,
borders that we share with other fields, we need to at least attempt to test out
our theories. As Melčuk claims (1997:2, my translation), linguists must be
committed to this:
Linguistics is in the same situation as all other natural sciences.

Language, which is a system of very complex rules, encoded in a
speaker’s brain in some unknown way, is inaccessible to the
direct observation of ‘pure’ linguists: we cannot open up heads,
neither can we penetrate them with electrodes in order to
observe language as it is stored in the brain. The only solution
we have is to develop models of language. Modern linguistics is
therefore a science that must have as its main task the
construction of models of particular languages and of human
Language in general; even if this is rarely said explicitly, this is
what is done.
24
We can build models and try to figure it out, but in the end, even with a
computer system that is trying to model human interaction, we cannot be sure
that this is in fact what humans do. Nevertheless, computational models are
the main means that we have at this point for testing models of language.
Computational linguistics is not always concerned with models of language.
There are cases of particular task-based programs that deal with an isolated
part of language. In language generation however, models of language are
needed in order to produce language in a way that resembles the output of a
human speaker (more or less accurately).
So while we would certainly not like to claim that computational systems
model what the brain is actually doing with language, we should not ignore
developments and discoveries from their implementation. In terms of referring
expressions, it does seem significant that certain types of expressions need to
be handled differently.
Referring expressions, as a domain of interest, have received the greatest
attention from the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The field of
NLP is where artificial intelligence, computer science and linguistics merge in
order to develop computational systems that can generate and/or understand
language. NLP covers a variety of computational linguistic tasks such as
machine translation, speech recognition, text-proofing, automated
summarisation, information retrieval and extraction, question answering,
natural language understanding and natural language generation. To one
extent or another, all NLP tasks are part of either natural language
understanding (NLU) or natural language generation (NLG). Machine
translation is an example of how these two areas need to work together since
to translate, the system must first understand in one language and then
generate language in another language.
In language generation, many approaches have been developed by
computational linguists to solve the problem of generating referring
expressions. For example, it has been approached from a Pragmatic
perspective (e.g. Appelt; 1985; Appelt and Kronfeld, 1987; and Dale and
Reiter, 1995), from a discourse perspective (e.g. Paris and McKeown, 1987),
from a syntactic perspective (e.g. Power, 1999), or indeed from the
perspective of the computational architecture itself, i.e. what the computer
25
system is actually able to do, regardless of whether it is a representation of

what humans actually do (e.g. Horacek, 1997).
Since this thesis is well anchored within a linguistics framework, we will not
pursue a discussion of computational architecture and, for similar reasons, we
will not pursue issues related to more pragmatic concerns. Although we are
concerned with language in use, in context, and thus as part of an ongoing
discourse, we will try to restrict ourselves to the referring expression itself as
seen within the clause.
2.3.2 The referring expression as discrimination task
Researchers working on referring expressions for language generation

purposes have narrowed down what is meant by the term ‘referring
expression’. Generating referring expressions is, according to Reiter and Dale
(1997:68), “the task of selecting words or phrases to identify domain entities”.
For humans, domain entities are an infinite set of entities (things) belonging to
a particular domain, including everything physical and imaginable. For any
given computer generation system, the set of domain entities must remain
finite and typically this set is usually constrained to some specific context. We
find this in work done on domain specific referring expression tasks, for
example weather reports (Reiter et al, 2005), automatic route descriptions
(Dale et al, 2005) or recipes (Dale, 1989). The actual task of generating
referring expressions can be described as follows: “referring expression
generation is usually formalised as a discrimination task, where the system
needs to communicate sufficient information to distinguish one domain entity
from other domain entities” (Reiter and Dale, 1997:68). The ‘other domain
entities’ in the set are commonly referred to as distractors (McDonald, 1981,
cited in Dale and Reiter, 1995:237). These entities are in competition for the
addressee’s identification of the intended object. For example, if a speaker
wishes to have the addressee pass him or her a pen that is on the addressee’s
desk, we could say that the set of domain entities would consist of all the
objects on the desk. If we assume that on the desk there are a number of
objects (pencils, markers, staplers, etc.) including several pens, then part of
the speaker’s task is to be aware of those objects which may distract the
26
addressee from being able to identify the pen that the speaker has in mind. In
this way, the entities in the set of domain entities play a role in generating
referring expressions to the extent that the expression generated must
eliminate the distractors and identify the target entity.
So in many cases, although clearly not all, referring expression generation
seeks to identify one unique object from a set of other possible referents.
There seems to be no question that this expression will be realized as a noun
phrase: referring expression generation is then a procedure for putting
together a noun phrase that will identify (and discriminate) one particular entity
(Reiter and Dale, 1997:68). Specifically, “the generation of referring
expressions involves finding a noun phrase that identifies an entity ... to the
hearer in the current discourse context” (ibid.:79).
The other concept that plays an important role in referring expression
generation is disambiguation or the process whereby the addressee is able to
identify the target referent unambiguously (Reiter and Dale, 1997:81). This is
one area where the computational system clearly differs from human language
generation as every speaker can think of instances where during the course of
a conversation one speaker generates a referring expression that is not
unambiguously identified (see below on Grice’s Brevity maxim). Otherwise we
would not likely ever hear the question which one. Nevertheless, the
computational system has no specific need to replicate human performance
and in fact it is far more likely that it needs to be efficient. Therefore
disambiguation is built into the algorithm for generating referring expression to
a degree that is probably not the case for human speakers.
The main developments have been in terms of computational efficiency
and in terms of what types of referring expressions could be generated,
including the extent of complexity of the resultant noun phrase. In Appelt’s
early work (1985:72); the only referring expressions that his system could
generate were “singular, specific, definite noun phrases that do not contain
explicit quantifiers.” It was not long before his system was developed to go
beyond simple discriminating descriptions. Dale (1989) developed EPICURE,
an NLG system that concentrated on referring expressions. This system
became a benchmark for the development of referring expression algorithms.
Heeman and Hirst (1995:6) took the representation of entities as “not simply
27
data structures, but (as) mental objects that agents have beliefs about.” This
was an important development following on views of referring that were
developing around that time concerning what beliefs speakers and addressees
may hold. This provided researchers with a link to psycholinguistic work done
on how speakers collaborate on referring expressions (we will discuss this
further in Section 2.4). Based on this, Heeman and Hirst (1995) were able to
develop a computational model of collaboration on referring expressions (see
Section 2.4.2).
2.3.3 Dale and Reiter
The major contributors to the computational generation of referring

expressions are Dale and Reiter who have become the foremost authorities on
generating referring expressions. We will only discuss one of their main
contributions as it is the one that has the most relevance to a linguistic
approach. This is their work on the incorporation of Gricean maxims (Grice,
1975) into the algorithm for generating referring expressions (Dale and Reiter,
1995). It should be noted that Dale and Reiter (1995) were not the first to give
consideration to Gricean maxims (see Appelt, 1985; Dale, 1989; and Reiter,
1990), but they were the first to include it into an algorithm for generating
referring expressions. Following a discussion of the role of Gricean maxims in
referring expressions, we will consider other important development
concerning the activity of generating referring expressions.
As we have just said, the research presented in Dale and Reiter (1995)
was not the first attempt at considering pragmatic issues in the generation of
referring expressions. Very early work (Appelt, 1985, Appelt and Kronfeld,
1989) sought to incorporate pragmatic constraints in their computational
models of referring. While including the constraints of communicative goals,
they did not in any explicit way develop Grice’s maxims into their models.
“(They) paid relatively little attention to conversational implicature and
(especially) computational cost” (Dale and Reiter, 1995:236). It is these two
last points that Dale and Reiter focussed on. By limiting their study to a
particular type of referring expression, they could really concentrate on how to
make computationally generated referring expressions more human-like.
28
They describe the type of referring expression used in the study as follows
(Dale and Reiter, 1995:235):
1. They are linguistically realized as definite noun phrases (for
example, the red cup), rather than pronouns, one-anaphora, and
other alternative linguistic mechanisms used for reference.
2. They refer to physical objects (for example, dogs and tables),
rather than abstract entities such as fields of mathematics.
3. They are solely intended to identify the target object to the
hearer, and are not intended to satisfy any other communicative
goal.
As they say themselves, generating referring expressions is “one of the

most ubiquitous tasks in natural language generation” (Dale and Reiter,
1995:233). This problem is everywhere in NLG. It was important not only to
develop a faster, more computationally efficient algorithm, but also to develop
a system that would actually include some if not many of the pragmatic
considerations that human speakers face. For example, “a good referring
expression generation algorithm should therefore be able to take into account
what is known about the hearer’s knowledge and perceptual abilities”
(ibid.:239).
The challenge faced in this task was how to incorporate Grice’s maxims
while avoiding the potential to create false implicatures. For this reason, it was
necessary to restrict the referring expression generated to those without any
other communicative goal (see point 3 above). The example used to illustrate
this is the following (taken from Dale and Reiter, 1995:251), shown in (11).
(11) Sit by the newly painted table
Here the speaker would have the additional communicative goal of warning
the addressee not to touch the table as they sat down.
29
Reiter and Dale (ibid.:252) interpret Grice’s maxims in a rather simplified

version for their purposes as show below. They only consider Brevity with
respect to the maxim of Manner.
Quality: A referring expression must be an accurate description of the

intended referent.
Quantity: A referring expression should contain enough information to
enable the hearer to identify the object referred to, but not
more information.
Relevance: A referring expression should not mention attributes that have
no discriminatory power, and hence do not help distinguish
the intended referent from the members of the contrast set.
Manner: A referring expression should be short whenever possible
They include one other constraint which deals with lexical preference for
the head of the nominal group, for example the selection of dog, a basic-level
lexical item, as compared to poodle, a non-basic-level lexical item, in referring
to this animal:
(12) the dog by the tree
(13) the poodle by the tree
In addition to the above Maxims, they included the following lexical

preference (Dale and Reiter, 1995:241): “Use basic-level and other lexically
preferred classes whenever possible.” They then experimented with degrees
of incorporating these considerations, in order to calculate the computational
‘cost’ of adhering to all the maxims and the lexical preference. Their focus was
on the maxim of Brevity because, according to them, “(it) subsumes the
Quantity and Relevance requirements, since a referring expression that
contains unnecessary or irrelevant information will also probably be longer
than required” (ibid.:242).
30
They considered how their results compared with studies in

psycholinguistics about what people actually do as speakers generating
referring expressions. Since this is the topic of our next section, we will not go
into any detail at this point. Dale and Reiter show very clearly that at least in
computational terms, adhering strictly to the maxim of Brevity is very costly.
Psycholinguistic evidence would seem to indicate that in fact, speakers do not
adhere to this maxim strictly when referring (see Levelt, 1989 for example and
further discussion on this in Section 2.4 below). In Dale and Reiter (1995:247),
the authors offer two main results. The first is that speakers tend to use
modifiers that are not strictly necessary (e.g. saying that red pen when there is
no other pen in sight). This violates the maxim of Brevity and consequently
speakers produce referring expressions which over specify the referent. The
second is that speakers may begin to refer (i.e. they may begin to speak)
before they have completed looking for distractors (e.g. saying that red pen
without knowing if there are other pens in sight).
Dale and Reiter do not suggest that generating referring expressions
should seek ‘psychological realism’; nor do they suggest that pragmatic
maxims should be strictly adhered to. If the point of referring is for an
addressee to identify the referent, then this should be the main goal of
generating referring expressions. They conclude that “one general lesson that
can be drawn from (their) analysis of the task of generating referring
expressions is that the Gricean maxims should not be interpreted too literally”
(ibid.:249). The incremental algorithm that they develop, which only
approximates the maxim of Brevity with no strict adherence to it, has been a
seminal piece of work mostly because of the following two accomplishments
(ibid.:257):
1. It is fast. (Its time increases linearly with) the number of distractors
and (is) independent of the number of potential attributes.
2. It allows human preferences and capabilities to be taken into
consideration. (It includes) ways of biasing the algorithm towards
generating referring expressions that use attributes and values that
human hearers find easy to process.

31
2.3.4 The role of action and plan in generating referring expressions
In addition to Dale and Reiter’s contributions, the other, perhaps more

significant, view of referring expressions that seemed to be gaining importance
at the same time was the view of referring as action and plan rather than as
description. The activity of referring became planning rather than describing.
This may seem trivial but it is quite important. They suggest that when
producing a referring expression, the speaker is planning the expression,
rather than describing an object; at least this is the perspective they take in the
computational model. Kronfeld is another major contributor to computational
models of referring. He built his approach to referring on Searle’s work on
speech acts. His view is that “a computational model of referring must show
how the successful use of a referring expression in a given context is due to
the solving of a planning problem — given also a goal, various rationality
assumptions, and relevant linguistic institutions” (Kronfeld, 1990:9).
In language generation, it is almost taken as given that there is a need for
a planning component. In fact, it is widely accepted that there are at least two
levels of planning: discourse or text/document level planning and what is called
microplanning. Microplanning is generally related to sentence or clause level
generation. As Reiter and Dale explain (2000:124),
there are no hard and fast rules we can use to determine which
tasks belong within microplanning and which more properly
belong in the domain of document planning or surface
realization: it is clear that many research groups are still
exploring the issues here ... document planning can be viewed
as primarily relying on domain knowledge, whereas surface
realization relies primarily on linguistic knowledge; microplanning
is then concerned with those tasks that require attention being
paid to interactions between domain knowledge and linguistic
knowledge.
There also seems to be consensus amongst those working in the field of

natural language processing concerning where generating referring
expressions fit into the overall picture of language generation. Viewed as
planning, the algorithm, which details the activity concerning the plan, is
carried out in the microplanner.
32
As explained earlier, there is a limit to what studies of computational

referring expression generation can contribute to a linguistic account. We
have sought here to consider only the most relevant contributions made by
computational linguistics in natural language generation. As linguists, we can
ask similar questions such as: ‘Is our model/analysis psychologically
plausible?’ ‘Does it need to be?’ ‘What pragmatic conditions affect the choices
speakers make in planning a referring expression?’ or ‘To what extent does
this model or represent what speakers actually do?’.
The treatment of referring expressions in NLP will most likely remain
restricted since the system can only refer to what it has in its domain, and this
is something entered by a programmer. It is unlikely that at any time soon, a
language generation system will be sophisticated enough to have a visual
perception system that would allow the generation of on-the-spot referring
expressions. This may be less of a problem for language understanding as
the input to the system would be language and whether oral or electronic text,
it would be a recognition problem. This is not a shortcoming of NLP. Most
applications are domain specific and any generation system would not likely be
required to produce descriptions of unknown objects. In addition, more than
simply identify, referring expressions in English carry far more information (e.g.
communicative goals). What is of particular interest for the linguist is the
information we gain by seeing how the various components of the modelled
language generation system work. Simply because a computational model
requires linear or parallel processing, for example, this does not mean that this
is how a human does it. However, what seems to show up consistently in the
research is that various tasks in natural language generation, including
referring expression generation, lexicalisation, and aggregation (generally the
combination of two or more structures), are intrinsically linked. This co-
dependency of occurrence makes it impossible to generate language without
imposing an arbitrary order to the various stages of computationally generating
referring expressions. We cannot say whether this has implications for the
human speaker. It should however make us stop and think about what is
influencing choices in these expressions since as linguists we often make
inferences and draw conclusions based on how speakers describe objects.
33
In summary, computational models, in the very least, offer us contributions

to this topic in helping us to see how components work together. Working
through what happens in the microplanner is very important (see Chapter 6). It
helps us separate out cognitive, psycholinguistic and pure linguistic behaviour,
even if there is some degree of overlap and fuzziness. There are differences
to be made between the different processing demands of various referring
expressions, certain factors need to be taken into account (like salience,
discourse, over specification, mutlimodality, etc.).
One of the limitations of work done in this field lies in the nature of the
tasks. Since generating referring expressions is seen primarily as a
discrimination task, it relies on the construction of ‘domain (context) sets’.
Resulting referring expressions are often controlled and limited, typically
involving only premodifiers and definite descriptions. More recent research is
evolving constantly, developing methods of over-specification in order to better
model human speakers and generating referring expressions in multimodal
settings.
2.4 Psycholinguistic and cognitive approaches to referring

expressions
Regardless of the field within which work is being done on referring

expressions, one recurring theme is what is going on in the speaker’s mind
and what the speaker believes is going on in the addressee’s mind. Needless
to say that with this attention to mind and language the study of referring
expressions has been an area of focus within psycholinguistic research. Much
of this work has been done in experimental settings as we will see.
Both the domains of the philosophy of language and the computational
modelling of language come (although via very different routes) to find that
there is a kind of separation, or rather a distinction to be made, between the
beliefs a speaker has and the linguistic choices available to him or her.
Psycholinguistics is the field that tries to maintain the balance between what is
going on in the brain and what is happening to the language system. This is a
concern, it seems, for all researchers interested in referring expressions.
34
As Searle explains (1990:xvi),

since an essential part of referring consists in invoking in the
hearer’s mind a representation of an object, the recognition by
the hearer of such an intention automatically produces such a
representation: as soon as the hearer recognizes that a noun
phrase is being used as a referring expression he knows that the
speaker is referring to a specific object he has in mind.
In this section, we will try to gain a better understanding of some of the

cognitive factors influencing the production of referring expressions by
considering contributions from psycholinguistic research. We will restrict our
discussion to the main results of experimentation in the production of referring
expressions from a psycholinguistic perspective. The psychology of these
expressions is beyond the boundaries of what we can accomplish here. There
is nevertheless important ground to be gained by understanding some of the
main issues dealt with within psycholinguistics.
2.4.1 The implausibility of the philosophical view of referring

expressions
If we recall from Section 2.2 above on philosophical approaches to

referring expressions, philosophers have spent considerable time on defining
these expressions; i.e. what is and what is not a referring expression.
Considerations such as existence and truth values seem to have dominated
the discussions. Experimentation in psycholinguistic research would seem to
indicate that these are not the preoccupations of speakers.
According to Clark and Wilkes-Gibb (1986:3), philosophy has failed in its
account of referring. They claim that the main reason for this lies in what they
call a “literary model” of reference. This approach holds the following four tacit
assumptions (ibid.):
• The reference is expressed linguistically with one of three standard

types of noun phrase: a proper noun (e.g., Napoleon, King George), a
definite description (this year, the man with the moustache), or a
pronoun (he, this, they);
35
• The speaker uses the noun phrase intending the addressee to be able
to identify the referent uniquely against their common ground;
• The speaker satisfies her intention simply by the issuing of that noun
phrase;
• The course of the process is controlled by the speaker alone.
In studying what speakers actually do during conversation, Clark and

Wilkes-Gibb (1986), found that these assumptions fail to account for ‘real’
instances of referring. Their work clearly shows that a literary model cannot be
used to account for conversation. Instead, they offer support in identifying
certain types of strategies speakers use when referring. The view that
reference can only take the form of one of three types of noun phrase is far too
limited to account for how speakers actually refer to objects.
Furthermore, speakers do not always intend for the addressee to be able
to uniquely identify the referent. For example, expressions like whatshisname
and thingamajig are called dummy noun phrases which serve as a kind of
holder until the correct referring expression can be found. These types of
expressions do not typically occur in written texts as the speaker has time to
find a more suitable expression which would enable the addressee to identify
the referent. By using a dummy noun phrase, the speaker “does not intend (it)
to enable their addressees to identify the referent uniquely. Dummy noun
phrases are uttered only as part of a more extended process” (Clark and
Wilkes-Gibb, 1986:6).
Concerning the third assumption, psycholinguistic research has shown that
initial referring expressions are seen as provisional; they are only deemed to
have been satisfied when the addressee has ratified the expression (Brennan,
2000:4). This may certainly hold with respect to spoken interaction; however it
is more difficult to ascertain when considering written language. Nevertheless,
it is reasonable to assume that writers will, when producing their texts, make
every attempt to ensure that the referring expressions used will be successful.
In a sense, satisfying the intent to refer is done in a hopeful manner, by
anticipating, as best as possible, the needs of the addressee.
Finally, the process of referring has been found to include not only the
speaker but also the addressee as we will see in the following sections.
36
Experimental research has shown that speakers share strategies for

collaboratively building referring expressions. They also develop agreements
in terms of establishing how objects will be jointly referred to. Furthermore,
they have been shown to influence each other in choices made in the structure
of referring expressions.
2.4.2 The role of the addressee in referring expressions
Clark and Wilkes-Gibb (1986) view referring as a potentially extended

process which is always carried out with the participation of the addressee.
They have identified several strategies that are used by speakers for referring
in collaboration with their speech partner. Once again we encounter the role
that beliefs have in referring (1986:7):
Suppose A, a man, is speaking to B, a woman, and refers to a

dog. In making the reference, according to most theories, A
intends the identity of the dog to become part of A’s and B’s
mutual knowledge or beliefs (see Clark & Marshall, 1981).
Establishing such mutual knowledge or belief is a stringent
requirement. To meet it, A must convince himself that the identity
of the dog is truly going to become part of their common ground.
If at any moment in making the reference he thinks it will not, he
should change or expand on what he has done so far. The same
requirement applies to B, since she is trying to understand A’s
reference. To meet it, she should find ways of letting A know, as
she listens, whether or not she is understanding him. Indeed, A
should suppose that she is cooperating in precisely this way.
Results in psycholinguistic research on referring are generally based on

experimental studies of behaviour. Clark and Wilkes-Gibb built their model
around a study they carried out on speech partners working on identifying the
correct referent from a set. Without explaining the experimental design, we will
simply summarize the model of collaboration that they developed.
37
accept RE
Initial RE repair RE
reject RE expand RE
replace RE
Figure 2-1: Model for collaboration in building referring expressions in conversation
The process of building a referring expression will always begin with what
Clark and Wilkes-Gibb call an initial referring expression. This may then be
either accepted or rejected by the addressee, or even rejected by the speaker.
Example (14) illustrates an initial referring expression which is accepted by
the addressee.
(14) Speaker A: Look at that fabulous car! (Initial RE)

Speaker B: yes, isn’t it great?! (Accept RE)
Rejecting a referring expression can happen in two ways. Either the

speaker monitors and self-repairs, in other words, the speaker rejects his or
her own initial referring expression, or the addressee rejects the initial referring
expression. This leads to a process of recovering, or “refashioning” (Clark and
Wilkes-Gibb, 1986: 20). Speakers will “refashion” the referring expression until
an expression is found that is accepted. Clark and Wilkes-Gibb have identified
three strategies for refashioning: repair, expand, and replace. This is modelled
in Figure 2-1.
With repair, whether self repair or not, information contained in the initial
expression is corrected. An example of this is shown in (15) where we see an
initial RE which is rejected by speaker:
38
(15) Speaker A: Look at that fabulous car, (Initial RE) I mean

truck (repair RE).
Example (16) shows an invented example of an initial referring expression

which is rejected by the addressee and refashioned by repairing the noun
phrase.

Speaker B: you mean truck (Reject and Repair RE)
With expansion, the description in the initial referring expression is kept

and is expanded on, as illustrated in example (17).

Speaker B: the one with the sun roof? (Reject RE)
Speaker A: no, the red one. (Expand RE)
With replacement, the rejected RE is replaced by a different description. In

example (18), taken from Clark and Wilkes-Gibb (1986:23), we find an initial
referring expression which is rejected by addressee and refashioned by
replacing the noun phrase.
(18) A. Okay, and the next one is the person that looks like
they’re carrying something and it’s sticking out to the left.
It looks like a hat that’s upside down. (Initial RE)
(19) B. The guy that’s pointing to the left again? (Reject and
Replace RE)
(20) A. Yeah, pointing to the left, that’s it! (Accept RE)
(21) B. Okay. (Accept RE)
39
As we can see then, initial referring expressions are always tentative; they
are seen as complete or successful only through the participation of the
addressee. This model accounts nicely for interactions which are in nature
collaborative. Some initial work done on collaborating on referring expressions
in non-collaborative settings suggests that the system presented in Clark
Wilkes-Gibb needs to be developed further. In a study of Safety Hearings
(Fontaine, 2004a), speech partners seem to develop different strategies
following a rejected referring expression depending on whether they are seen
as collaborating or not on the task at hand. The results in the particular case
studied show that the same witness will employ different refashioning
strategies depending on whether the referring expression was initiated during
an exchange with his lawyer or during cross-examination.
The issues concerning referring expressions are rather complex involving
intention, beliefs, cooperation, collaboration and power relations. For our
purposes here, we will not discuss this in any more detail. However, the point
needs to be made that building a referring expression is indeed a process
involving more than simply the speaker’s intentions.
We will turn now to a different type of collaboration among speakers with
respect to referring expressions. This concerns convergence.
2.4.3 Convergence
The notion of convergence is closely related to collaboration as in order to

converge, speakers must be collaborating. This is different, though, to the
sense of collaboration discussed above, as it is not collaboration with respect
to the process of building a referring expression, but rather in reaching an
agreement (albeit unconsciously) on the use of a particular expression.
Brennan and Clark (1996) have shown that in some experiments, referring
expressions vary considerably more across conversations than they do within
a given conversation. This has led researchers to suggest that there is a kind
of contract that is developed between two speakers in conversation; whereby
there is a kind of established agreement as to how objects will be referred to.
However, these results have been obtained through experimental task-
40
oriented activities. It would be interesting to see this explored in naturally

occurring data. The data analysed in this thesis is comprised of naturally
occurring conversations and one area of investigation is the degree of
functional and syntactic stability, or lack of variation, of referring expressions
for one speaker. To be able to compare with results such as those of Brennan
and Clark, the corpus would have had to include sufficiently large examples for
the same speaker in conversation with different partners. This is not the case
in the current research and was not the intention of this research at this stage
of its development.
Another important point made by Brennan and Clark (1996) is that when
speakers are referring, they are not describing a class of object, they are
making choices, both lexical and syntactic choices, based on the current
purposes of the referring expression; they are “conceptualizing an object”
(ibid.:1482). They point out that in terms of lexical choices, “there is still a
great deal of variability … the problem is that most objects can be
conceptualized in indefinitely many ways.” (ibid.)
Despite this fact, it seems that in experimental settings at least, speakers
will repeat referring expressions previously used by their addressee. For
example, Garrod and Anderson (1987) observed this phenomenon in
descriptions given by participants for their positions in a maze where
interlocutors tended to converge on referring expressions.
Cleland and Pickering (2003) explain lexical and syntactic convergence by
the notion of priming: “One way such convergence could occur is by largely
automatic processes in which interlocutors are primed to produce forms that
are equivalent at different levels of representation” (ibid.:10). They felt that this
type of automatic alignment would readily occur at the lexical level. However,
results from their research indicate that the notion of priming can account for
syntactic alignment for complex referring expressions as well.
They conducted three different experiments. The first attempted to
determine whether speakers could be primed to use complex referring
expressions, specifically those formed with a relative clause. The second
considered the influence of semantically related nouns (in head position); this
was done to see if lexical semantics could contribute to increasing the effects
of priming. Finally the third set of experiments tested the effects of close
41
phonological relationships on syntactic priming. Results showed that

“speakers used a complex noun phrase containing a relative clause (e.g. the
square that’s red) more often after hearing a syntactically similar noun phrase
than after hearing a simple noun phrase, and that this effect was enhanced
when the head noun (“square”) was repeated” (Cleland and Pickering, 2003:2).
These results were confirmed and the rate of priming enhanced when “prime
and target contained semantically related nouns (e.g., goat and sheep)” (ibid.).
Finally, there were no effects found when “the prime and target held a close
phonological relationship (e.g., ship and sheep)” (ibid.).
Cleland and Pickering (2003:27) have shown that:
it was possible to prime people into using the relative-clause

construction; when the noun and adjective were the same in the
prime and target descriptions, 32%, 47% and 31% of
descriptions used a relative-clause construction following a
relative-clause prime in Experiments 1, 2 and 3 respectively.
Without such priming, the use of the relative clause construction
was rare.
As we stated earlier in this chapter, linguists cannot account for

phenomena that take place beyond the boundaries of linguistic theory,
modelling and analysis. However, having hopefully now gained a better
understanding of some of the main psycholinguistic issues that feed into the
linguistic system, we can begin to develop a linguistic approach to the study of
referring expressions. It should be clear at this point that producing a referring
expression is a complex phenomenon and not restricted solely to the intention
of the speaker to identify a definite object. Certainly speaker intention is very
important but only so within a model that includes the role of the addressee. In
conversation at least, referring expressions seem to be produced in a way that
is at times provisional, incremental and collaborative. However, this use of
‘collaborative’ should be considered in a very broad sense; i.e. working
together, whether in a helpful or hindering sense.
In the next section, we will consider referring expressions from a much
broader view. The contributions from corpus linguistics enable us to detect
general patterns amongst large numbers of speakers in a variety of text
42
situations. This is in contrast to the almost introspective, focussed approach

taken in psycholinguistics.
2.5 Referring expressions and corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is growing in popularity as a means of investigative

research and also as a means of supporting and/or confirming other
approaches. Although it does not set out to study referring expressions per se,
it does look for patterns in typically very large samples of language. This tends
to involve using computers to facilitate the management of the large corpora
and also the analysis undertaken by the researcher. Consequently it has
developed approaches that have helped to shed some light on what speakers
are doing as a kind of collective. The types of pattern that we are interested in
are the ones which target referring expressions.
Most studies target noun phrases as they are, at least in English, the most
common structure realising referring expressions. The study of referring
expressions is a particularly challenging area for the corpus linguist. The
problem lies in how to automatically identify the boundaries of the group. An
additional problem is how to augment the tagging or coding which may be
automatically available.
In a large corpus study of postmodifying clauses, de Haan (1989)
developed a very elaborate coding system for his 2430 examples of
postmodifying clauses, in a corpus of approximately 130 000 words. The data
he used was completely computerized, i.e. both the data and the descriptive
criteria were computerized. He states that “it makes the findings more
consistent and reliable” (ibid.:3). It also has the added advantage of making
both the methodology and the results transparent and therefore creating a
reliable source for comparison with other studies. We will return to de Haan’s
work in Chapter 10.
In this section we will consider some of the contributions of corpus
linguistics to the study of referring expressions in terms of lexical collations and
syntactic patterns in a variety of texts. We will also consider briefly some
problematic issues in the presentation of results for comparative purposes.
43
2.5.1 Collocation and multi-word patterns
One of the main contributions of corpus linguistics has been in its ability to
help us discover recurrent patterns. In the study of referring expressions, this
type of research can be of value for a number of reasons. Patterns found in
very large corpora may reflect a kind of cultural norm of convergence for
certain types of referring expressions. They may also be indicators of
multiword or formulaic sequences that suggest the sequence functions rather
as a unit, stored and retrieved whole, rather than being generated by the
grammar. Both cases have significant implications for the notion of speaker
choice in language production. In this section we will consider some
contributions from the study of such multiword expressions to the study of
Stubbs (2004) did not set out to study referring expressions but his work on
very frequent phrases has identified multi-word patterns that form part of
particular referring expressions. He introduces the term phrase-frame to
account for a string of words (n-gram) with one variable slot. The example
given by Stubbs is plays a * part in where * marks the variable slot.
Expressions such as it plays a significant part in do not necessarily affect
referring expressions although what is expected to follow in would be a
referring expression: e.g. it plays a significant part in the overall picture or it
plays a significant part in people’s lives (both examples taken from a simple
Google search). A related type of string can also be taken from a corpus
analysis. This concerns focussing on the parts of speech or the word class of
words. Strings identified using parts of speech are called POS-grams.
Searching for POS-grams can also be done in combination with lexical items
as in the following: PREPOSITION + DETERMINER + singular-NOUN + of +
DETERMINER (e.g. ‘at the end of the’ and ‘in the middle of the’). This pattern
was identified by Stubbs as “one of the most frequent 5-POS-grams in the
BNC (British National Corpus).” The top three 5-phrase POS-grams identified
by Stubbs were as follows with examples to illustrate each.
(22) [ in the * of the ] in the corner of the cupboard
(23) [ at the * of the ] at the top of the mountain
44
(24) [ to the * of the ] to the left of the house
Each of these forms part of a referring expression and can be accounted

for semantically, according to Stubbs (2004), as denoting “wholes and parts of
things, especially with reference to the centre or the periphery of places and
periods of time.” In terms of understanding referring expressions, the question
to be asked is what thing is being referred to? For example, in (22), does the
speaker intend to refer to cupboard or corner? This brings us back again to
the question of what is going on in the speaker’s mind and what the speaker’s
intention is. As linguists, we cannot fully account for this, however we need to
develop models which can potentially allow for these distinctions.
2.5.2 Referring expressions in various text types
As has been shown in several corpus studies, different text types can vary
considerably in terms of grammatical realisation (Biber et al, 1999, Biber et al,
1998, Quirk et al, 1985). According to Biber et al (1998), “texts from different
registers often differ dramatically in the use of referring expressions”. This
specific element tends to be reduced to studies of nominal groups (or noun
phrases) in texts.
In this section, we will compare results from two very large corpus studies
of the noun phrase, illustrating the difficulty in researching this area of the
grammar.
Quirk et al (1985) studied approximately 17 000 noun phrases from the
Survey of English Usage. They made a two-way distinction in classifying noun
phrases. The first class is the simple noun phrase, where the head is not
modified; this would include cases of determiner + noun and noun only noun
phrases. As a subclass of the simple noun phrase, noun phrases realised by
either a name or a pronoun are further classified. The second class contains
examples of the complex noun phrase; this includes all other types of noun
phrases. There was a further distinction in this class for multiple modification,
where a noun phrase was found to have more than one type of modification
(e.g. more than one adjective, or an adjective and a postmodifier).
45
Table 2-1 Noun phrase structure and distribution for the entire sample (Quirk et al,
1985:1351)
Entire Simple Noun Phrases Complex Noun Phrases

Sample Total
Position All Names + All Multiple
Pronouns Modification
Subject 46.6% 39.8% 34.3% 6.8% 2.7%
(7898) (6749) (5821) (1149) (456)
Not 53.4% 28.0% 13.0% 25.4% 10.5%

subject (9063) (4753) (2193) (4310) (1777)
Total 100.0% 67.8% 47.2% 32.2% 13.2%
(16961) (11502) (8014) (5459) (2233)
Unfortunately the remainder of the table seems problematic since the

results for the frequency distribution do not add up the way they do in the first
part of the table. In Table 2-1, the “All” columns for simple noun phrases and
for complex noun phrases sum to equal the figure in the “total” column.
However in Table 2-2, this is not the case and although it is difficult to be
certain where the error occurred, we can assume that the figures given in the
“total” column for the individual corpora results is erroneous, thus marked with
an asterisk. The assumed correct figures have been added to the table in
parenthesis. We can also assume that the error was in reproducing the table
and that the results presented in Quirk et al. (1985) are accurate.
46
Table 2-2: Noun phrase structure and distribution for the individual corpora (Quirk et
al, 1985:1351)
Categories Total Simple Noun Phrases Complex Noun Phrases
All Names + All Multiple
Pronouns Modification
Informal Subject *2984 2064 1941 148 62
Speech (2212)
(4192) Not *2220 1169 677 811 327
subject (1980)
Fiction Subject *4466 2220 1943 211 92
(5234) (2431)
Not *3991 1682 754 1121 434
subject (2803)
Serious Talk Subject *3693 1745 1478 343 127
(4599) (2088)
Not *3602 1273 599 1238 492
subject (2511)
Scientific Subject *1831 720 459 447 175
writing (1167)
(2936) Not *2456 629 163 1140 524
subject (1769)
The main observations made from these results are as follows (ibid.:1350-1).
• Less than 1/3 of all noun phrases in the entire sample are complex,
therefore approximately 2/3 of all noun phrases are without any
modification.
• Scientific writing differs most significantly from other text types due to a
much higher frequency of complex noun phrases and specifically a
much higher frequency of noun phrases with multiple modification.
• Almost 50% of all noun phrases consist of pronouns or names.
They conclude that “even such coarse-grained comparisons as these make

clear how sensitive is the noun phrase as an index of style and how
responsive it can be to the basic purpose and subject matter in varying types
of discourse” (ibid.:1352).
Biber et al (1999) present very similar results, confirming largely what was
demonstrated by Quirk et al (1985). However they offer much more detail, for
47
example, showing a frequency distribution of modification with head noun

types and exploring various types of postmodifying structures (Biber et al,
1999:580). In terms of raw data, unlike Quirk et al (1985) they tend to only
give their results in terms of percentages rather than offering the actual
frequency occurrences, making it difficult to reconstruct results for comparative
purposes. For example in academic writing, Biber et al (1999) found that 60
per cent of all noun phrases have some type of modifier whereas Quirk et al
(1985:1351) found that this was the case in some 54 per cent of noun phrases
for the same text type. We can make this comparison because Quirk et al
(ibid.) have provided the actual figures from their study.
It is often difficult however to make such comparisons since sometimes the
results are not transparent or insufficient information is given in order to
reconstruct the needed information for the comparison. For example, Biber et
al (1999:623) found that approximately 10 to 15 per cent of noun phrases with
a relative clause postmodifying the head occur in subject position. Although
Quirk et al (1985) do make a distinction between noun phrases in subject
position and those in other positions, they do not make a distinction concerning
types of modification. Consequently, we do not have sufficient information to
compare with Biber et al (1999). This is not necessarily a flaw in the study but
it shows that in many cases the results are limited in terms of how they can be
used by other researchers.
As Biber et al (1998:9) point out, “corpus-based analysis should be seen as
a complementary approach to more traditional approaches”. From what we
have seen in this section, corpus linguistics has the potential to contribute
greatly to our understanding of referring expressions, given an appropriate
research design. It enables a view of emerging patterns in language as a
collective; a collective of speakers, a collective of texts, or of an even larger
collective. A corpus can be designed, or an existing corpus can be exploited,
in order to meet the demands of most linguistic investigations. If we do
consider corpus linguistics as a complementary approach, then the potential
for a much fuller picture emerges. The difficulty is reconciling the approaches
into a coherent model.
48
2.6 Summary
This chapter set out to provide a historical overview of the development of

the study of referring expressions with its beginnings in Philosophy and to map
the various connections amongst the different fields that have contributed most
significantly to the study of referring expressions, focussing specifically on
Natural Language Generation, Psycholinguistics and Corpus Linguistics.
Through this exploration, we have seen that linguists can glean from other
approaches those elements that are relevant to a linguistic approach to
referring expressions. Not all issues of concern in philosophy are necessarily
concerns for the linguist. We do not need to adhere to the debate on
definitions in philosophy but rather can define the expressions for our own
purposes. In contrast, distinctions identified in philosophy concerning
differences in naming, denoting, and describing, for example are relevant and
will be discussed in Chapter 9 when considering the results of the analysis of
simple referring expressions.
By considering work done in natural language generation, a window into
modelling referring expressions is opened. This enables us to test theories of
how speakers refer, or rather to test how a computer system can implement
the various components. The interaction of various components can be highly
informative in helping linguists to sort out some of the problems they face in
dealing with referring expression; for example, the interaction of lexis and
grammar.
We have also seen that one main central notion in the study of referring
expressions is what is going on in the speaker’s mind and what the speaker
believes is going on in the addressee’s mind. The boundary faced by linguists
here is not in determining cognitive process or representations but rather in
determining how this informs in turn the lexicogrammatical system. Being
aware of the role of speaker intention and the role of the model of the
addressee which is held by the speaker will give linguists a better perspective
on the study of referring expressions.
Finally, studies of referring expressions in very large samples of language
offer a broad view of the realisation of these expressions. In contrast to a
focus on one individual speaker, we gain a sense of how the ‘collective’
49
language system works when viewed across very large collections of texts.
Certain texts seem to have canonical patterns, the most obvious of which are
found in academic prose as we have seen. Results from studies in corpus
linguistics would seem to indicate that there are external factors, other than
speaker intention, acting on the generation of referring expressions.
This chapter has presented the vast and complex nature of the study of
referring expressions from the most important contributors in the field. In the
next chapter, an overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is given
which explains the foundations of the approach taken here to referring
expressions. The most important concept drawn on from SFL is that of
transitivity and consequently part of Chapter 3 is devoted to a discussion of
Halliday’s views on transitivity. Therefore many key concepts in SFL are
explained in the next chapter and these are necessary as they contribute to
the theoretical approach to referring expressions presented in this thesis.
50
Chapter 3: An overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics
3. An overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics
The theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) dates back to

Halliday’s early writings in the late 1950s and 1960s, notably Halliday (1956
and 1961). At the base of Halliday’s theoretical work in developing his theory
of linguistics is the notion of choice. For Halliday, language is one type of
semiotic system and is seen as a resource for making meaning. According to
Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:23), “meaning resides in systemic patterns of
choice”. SFL attempts to model language use by exploring these patterns. It
is this concept of choice which is central to the theory of SFL. As Halliday
explains (1969/1976:3),
Grammar is based on the notion of choice. The speaker of a

language like a person engaging in any kind of culturally
determined behaviour can be regarded as carrying out
simultaneously and successively a number of distinct choices.
These choices are represented in SFL as networks of systems which

attempt to represent the choices available to speakers of a given language. A
system, as we will see below, is a representation of a set of options. Halliday
and Matthiessen (2004:22) state that system is the ordering of paradigmatic
patterns. They offer a simple example of one such system which represents
the positive or negative polarity of a clause, as seen in Figure 3-1 (see Section
3.3 below for more detail on system networks). According to Butler
(2003a:156), it is Halliday’s development of system into connected networks
linking systems which created “a truly systemic linguistics”.
Figure 3-1 The system of POLARITY
51
Halliday’s work is rooted in the Prague School of Linguistics and he was

greatly influenced by both Firth and Malinowski (see for example Firth, 1951,
and Malinowski, 1923). Firth’s concepts of ‘system’ and ‘structure’ formed the
basis of Halliday’s theory. As Lyons (1991:219) explains the distinction
between these two terms as follows: “system is a set of commutable terms in
paradigmatic opposition (and) structure is a complex of syntagmatically related
elements which operates as a unit at some higher level of analysis”. Halliday
developed Firth’s concept of system further making system theory more
explicit and he sought to incorporate the social functions of language. As
Halliday states (1970:26): “the internal organization of language is not
arbitrary but embodies a positive reflection of the functions that language has
evolved to serve in the life of social man”. Therefore, at the foundation of SFL
is the view of language as a social function.
It is precisely this focus on the functions of language that led Halliday to
develop his own ideas about how the theory should work. The functions of
language include both the functions that language serves, i.e. how people use
language, and linguistic functions, i.e. the grammatical and semantic roles
assigned to parts of language. What is fundamental for Halliday is that
language serves a social purpose. Therefore his position is that a theory of
linguistics must incorporate the functions of language in use.
The remainder of this chapter is organised as follows. The next section
outlines the important relationship in SFL between structure and function.
Then in Section 3.2, the multifunctional nature of the clause is explored,
illustrating how the three main metafunctions map onto the clause. Following
this is an explanation of system networks and the notation developed in SFL,
specifically in terms of how it relates to the important and central notion of
choice. Finally, the last section focuses on the representation of the
experiential metafunction and the relevant parts of its related system, which is
called transitivity.
3.1 Structure and function
An important concept throughout the development of SFL is the

relationship between function and structure. In SFL, it is meaning or function
52
that is the driving force, leading to structure as an output of the language

system. Halliday adopted a three way view of linguistic functions, offering
insight into what he considers to be the three main functional components of
language. These are the interpersonal component, the experiential
component, and the textual component (Halliday, 1970:27-28). The
experiential component serves to “express our experience of the world that is
around us and inside us” (ibid.:27). This area is concerned with how speakers
represent their experience. The interpersonal component expresses “the
speaker’s participation in, or intrusion into, the speech event” (ibid.). Halliday
explains that these two components are not distinct and they each encompass
semantic and lexicogrammatical connotations (ibid.:28). However, the textual
component, in Halliday’s view, is somewhat different from the other two as this
function is “an integral component of the language system” and he considers it
to be “intrinsic to language” since it has the function of creating text (ibid.).
This is an important distinction as unlike many other linguistic theories, SFL
places utmost importance on the text rather than the clause.
The components have come to be known as metafunctions within SFL.
The notion of representing experience was further developed under the
heading of the ideational metafunction to include both experiential meaning
and general logical relations. However when discussing the metafunctions,
the logical is often left out and the three main metafunctions are usually given
as follows: the experiential metafunction, the interpersonal metafunction, and
the textual metafunction. The reason for this lies in the nature of the unit in
question since the logical function only applies to complexes and not to
simplexes (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:63, for example). The nominal
group, as an element of the clause, is part of the clause simplex and so is not
typically concerned with logical analysis (although as we will see in the next
chapter, this is not always the case and the nominal group may have a logical
structure). For this reason, this chapter will not discuss the logical function and
therefore not the ideational metafunction. In the study of referring expressions,
we are interested in the linguistic expressions speakers use to represent
objects. This close relation between experiential meaning and referring
expressions is explicitly stated by Thompson (2004:86) who explains that “from
the experiential perspective, language comprises a set of resources for
53
referring to entities in the world and the ways in which those entities act on or
relate to each other”. Consequently, we will only briefly cover the interpersonal
and textual metafunctions for the sake of completion and focus instead on a
more detailed account of the experiential metafunction.
3.2 The multifunctional nature of the clause
The central unit of analysis in SFL is the clause. As discussed above,

there are three main functional components to the grammar and these are
integral to understanding the types of meaning identified in the clause. With
the ideational component (expressing both experiential and logical meanings),
the clause is seen as representation; the speaker’s representation of
processes and participants. The interpersonal component sees the clause as
exchange; the speaker’s action and interaction with the addressee. Finally,
with the textual component, the clause is seen as message; the speaker’s
means of organising the message and creating text. Each type of meaning
expressed in the clause has associated to it specific systems which express
the meaning potential of the grammar. The clause, as an instance of
language, therefore holds traces of these meanings, which are recoverable
through analysis. The analysis in SFL, on a basic level, is done through a
three-strand analysis of the main meanings expressed in the clause.
The experiential metafunction, which will be considered in more detail
below, covers the range of processes and their participants (see Table 3-1
below on page 61 for the full list of processes and participants). A very
common process type, for example, is the material process, which has
associated to it specific participants; the most obvious of these is Actor,
representing the active participant relative to the process. One of the main
functions of the clause within the strand of interpersonal meaning is that of
Subject, which together with the Finite serves to determine the Mood structure
of the clause. Finally, the main element of relevance within the clause in terms
of the textual metafunction is Theme, which functions as a means of
“grounding what (the speaker) is going to say” (Halliday and Matthiessen,
2004:58).
54
The three-strand analysis is illustrated below in Figure 3-2, an example

taken from Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:182). This example also illustrates
the typical unmarked form of the clause where the three main roles from each
of the three main strands of meaning are conflated and represented
simultaneously in a single element, the lion. The primary interest for a study of
referring expressions is the actual expressions themselves rather than the
multiple functions a referring expression may have. This is not to say that
these functions are insignificant. In this study, the significance of the
interpersonal and textual metafunctions at the clause level is greatly reduced,
which explains why, in this chapter, emphasis will be given to the experiential
metafunction.
Clause the lion caught the tourist

Experiential Actor Process:Material (active) Goal
Meaning
Interpersonal Subject Finite Predicator Complement
Meaning Mood Residue
Textual Meaning Theme Rheme
Figure 3-2: Three-strand analysis of the clause (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:182)
To return to a point made in passing above, Figure 3-2 shows a

constellation of functions which is considered to be unmarked. Clearly this is
not always the case and the three functions discussed above will not always
align as they have in this case. Some other element of the clause may have
been chosen to be Theme and yet another element may have been chosen to
be Subject. Therefore in an example such as in the morning, the tourist was
caught, the Theme is in the morning, the Subject is the tourist and the Actor is
not represented (although recoverable if known). As shown in Figure 3-3, all
three functions are represented but they are disjoint rather than conflated.
55
Clause in the morning the tourist was caught by the lion

Experiential Circumstance Goal Process:Material (passive) Actor
Meaning
Interpersonal Adjunct Subject Finite Predicator Adjunct
Meaning Mood
Residue
Textual Theme Rheme
Meaning
Figure 3-3: Disjoint Subject, Theme, and Actor (adapted from Halliday and
Matthiessen, 2004:182)
It is important to note one important distinction to be made in this

presentation of SFL. In both examples above, the meanings represented are
those inferred by the analyst as having been selected by the speaker. In SFL,
the grammar is represented as system networks which reflect the options
available to the speaker. As analysts, we deduce the selection of options
based on the instance presented.
Clearly this has been a very brief overview of the nature of the English
clause in SFL. This is necessary however in order to have sufficient time to
discuss the more relevant features of SFL theory. We will now consider the
role of system networks in SFL generally and then, in the final section of this
chapter, look specifically at the system of transitivity.
3.3 System networks
As stated above, the central notion developed by Halliday is the concept of

choice: speakers make choices in producing language. System for Halliday
(1970:26), then, is “a set of options in a stated environment; in other words, a
choice, together with a condition of entry”. Influenced by Lamb’s work on
stratification theory (c.f. Lamb 1962), Halliday views the language system as a
network of subsystems each related by entry conditions where the systems are
arranged “in simultaneous and hierarchical relationship” (Halliday, 1969/76:3).
Halliday’s grammar is then entirely based on the notion of choice - choice from
the speaker’s perspective – whereby the choices available to the speaker are
represented as options in a system in a network mapping the relationship
56
amongst systems. The notation for representing system networks is given in

Figure 3-4, where the network shown has two systems and system a
represents two options which can be selected whilst system b represents
three. This simply means that for system a, for example, there is a choice
between feature c and feature d. Furthermore, a feature may be a condition for
entry to another related system or subsystem and this would be represented
with further systems branching off from that feature. This will be presented in
more detail in the next section.
Figure 3-4: Basic System Notation
In the next section, we will explore the representation of semantic options

for one particular system; the system of transitivity. Earlier in this chapter, it
was stressed that the experiential component more than any other functional
component is of particular importance to the study of referring expressions.
This is not only due to their role in the clause but also in terms of their function
of representing parts of our world. In this latter sense, referring expressions
will inherently express, internally, experiential meaning and therefore it is
reasonable to assume that the system of transitivity is important to
understanding referring expressions generally. For this reason, transitivity is
given a detailed explanation here so that the reader will be equipped in later
chapters to understand the analytical approach taken in this thesis to referring
expressions.
57
3.4 Transitivity
Transitivity has special meaning in SFL. It is a very important concept,

often working as the foundation for any analysis within a SFG framework; i.e.
from the analysis perspective, it is through the transitivity of a clause that the
full analysis is derived. Although many textbooks teaching SFL analysis do not
begin with the analysis of experiential structure, there is a strong simultaneity
in the relationship amongst the three strands of meaning. Halliday and
Matthiessen (2004) begin the analysis of the clause through the textual
metafunction but the identification of Theme is determined by locating the first
part of the clause to have some kind of experiential function (ibid.:66). It could
be argued then, even though there is no scope to do so here, that transitivity is
central to any analysis of the clause. Although transitivity is not the main focus
of this thesis, it does, indirectly, play an important role in the research and
theoretical perspective taken here. Therefore we will discuss some of the
main issues involved in this concept at this point and consider it in further
detail in Chapter 7 and 8 in its role as the basis for the treatment of complex
Traditionally, transitivity is a concept that is associated with the verb; i.e. a
verb is either transitive or intransitive (or copular). However, the distinction is
always based on the presence or absence of the various roles involving
objects: direct object, indirect object, no object and even whether one of these
can occur as subject. Some grammarians have developed criteria, which fall
into three categories: distribution, semantic and syntactic (Abraham, 1984:2).
Regardless of which approach is taken, transitivity concerns the distribution of
‘things’ whether this means arguments, objects or participants. What is at the
origin of the term though is the notion of transfer. “Transitivity is traditionally
understood as a global property of an entire clause, such that an activity is
‘carried-over’ or ‘transferred’ from an agent to a patient” (Hopper and
Thompson, 1980:251).
In traditional syntax, transitivity is determined by the number of arguments
that a verb has. For Halliday (1970:30), “transitivity is the grammar of
processes ... and the participants in these processes, and the attendant
circumstances.” In developing his theory of language, Halliday broadened the
58
traditional notion of transitivity. The focus, in SFL, then, is no longer on the

verb, as though transitivity were a property of the verb. For Halliday,
transitivity is instead a notion to be applied to the entire clause, extending
beyond verbs and objects and even arguments, given that he also includes
circumstances.
Participant, in the Hallidayan sense, is very close to what we have been
describing as a referring expression. Halliday finds the term Participant
undesirable as it seems to limit itself to humans; however he meant for it to
represent all entities and he had at an early point suggested that the term
‘participating entity’ would be more accurate (Halliday, 1969:160); cf. the
concept of theta role in generative grammar. If Halliday’s early terminology
and meaning is incorporated in the term Participant, it becomes easier to see
the relationship between the notion of participant and that of referring
expression.
Halliday has been clear that his use of transitivity is a generalisation of its
traditional uses in grammatical description. He extends transitivity to refer
generally to that which “defines some of the roles which nominal elements may
occupy” (Halliday, 1966:61). It is really from this that we begin to understand
that transitivity is about relating ‘participating entities’ (Participants) in the
clause; in other words, entities which are participating in a given situation as
represented by the speaker. It is for this reason that, as we will argue in
Chapter 7, the concept of transitivity can also be generalised for application to
complex referring expressions (cf. the notion of ‘range’ in Chapter 4).
Having now motivated the need here for a discussion of transitivity in SFL,
the remainder of this section will be devoted to that task. This presentation will
include the various types of processes involved in expressing experiential
meaning and the associated participants. It will also include a presentation of
circumstances.
The transitivity system is a vast and complex system. Consequently a
greatly simplified overview is given here. In Figure 3-5, we get a glimpse of
the most recent system network for transitivity (Halliday and Matthiessen,
2004) where we find six main types of process. The distinction among these
types of process is related to the type of meaning each represents as well as
59
the associated role of the potential participants for that particular type of
process.
Figure 3-5: Simplified view of Halliday’s (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:173)

system network for transitivity
This system (Figure 3-5) only shows the process types. As stated earlier,
this is the system that represents the choices available to the speaker in terms
of experiential meaning. Experiential meaning, as we have already seen,
covers the range of meanings available to the speaker in representing his or
her experience of the world. The role of the system network is to represent the
options available in the grammar. Therefore, this system network represents
the choices available to the speaker, in terms of how he or she can represent
his or her own experience. Each process type is explained briefly in Table 3-1,
along with its respective participants.
For example, as a spectator at a football match, a speaker wanting to
comment on a particular move during the game will choose one of these six
types of meaning to represent the experience that they want to express
(however unconsciously). This might be through a material process such as
John kicked the ball, or a mental process such as John saw the ball, or a
relational process such as John is a great footballer. In each example, the
participants included are represented as having different functional roles. John
in each case is either represented, by the speaker, as Actor, Senser or Carrier,
respectively. However it is important to make clear that these relations are not
arbitrary, each process construes a different type of experience.
60
Table 3-1: Simplified presentation of Halliday’s Process Types and Participant

Roles (Adapted from Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:260), Participants
underscored
Process General meaning Participants Canonical example
expressed
Material doing, happening Actor, Goal, John[Actor] hit the ball[Goal]
Scope, John[Actor] gave the ball[Goal] to
Beneficiary Jane[Beneficiary]
Behavioural behaving Behaver John[Behaver] is laughing
Mental sensing, seeing, Senser, John[Senser] likes Jane[¨Phenomenon]
thinking, wanting, Phenomenon
feeling
Verbal saying Sayer, Receiver, John[Sayer] told me[Recipient] a
Verbiage story[Verbiage]
Relational being
Attributive attributing Carrier, Attribute John[Carrier] is nice[Attribute]
Identifying identifying Identifier, John[Identified] is the lawyer[Identifier]
Identified;
Token, Value
Existential existing Existent There was a lake[Existent].
The process and participants represented in the clause reveal only part of
the transitivity picture. If we refer back to the description of transitivity given by
Halliday (1970:30), transitivity also includes ‘the attendant circumstances’.
The circumstances are seen as peripheral to the core of the clause. They
describe the process or situation in some way. In standard SFL, there are nine
main types of Circumstance. These are listed in Table 3-2, where each type is
illustrated with examples. If we reconsider the examples above, each one is a
representation of experience and in each case, additional meaning could have
been included in the form of an attendant circumstance. Considering each of
the examples again in turn, the speaker may have chosen to express the
following representations, where circumstances are underscored, processes
are in bold and participants are in italics: John kicked the ball very quickly; At
that point, John saw the ball; For over three years, John was a great
footballer.
Language is instantiated through the system networks. In the examples we
have see in this discussion of transitivity, the system network representing the
experiential metafunction, the systemic choices selected lead to the realization
of an instance of language (in these cases, the clause). The categories we
have discussed represent the functions or types of meanings that can be
identified in the clause but nevertheless result from the selections made by the
61
speaker. A detailed discussion of the internal functions of the clause is

certainly beyond the scope of this thesis. The goal of this section was to offer
a basic understand of transitivity and its relationship to the clause.
Table 3-2: The Nine Basic Types of Circumstantial Elements (adapted from
Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:262)
Type question answered example
Extent distance how far? He ran three miles[Circ.:Extent:distance].
duration how long? He ran for three days[Circ.:Extent:duration]
frequency How frequently? He ran every day[Circ.:Extent:frequency]
Location place where? He ran in Toronto[Circ.: location: place]
time when? He ran last year[Circ.: location: time]
Manner means by what means? He saved her with a rope[Circ.: manner:
quality how? means]
comparison like what? She saved him quickly[Circ.: manner:
degree How much? quality]
She ran like the wind[Circ.: manner:
comparison]
She loved him more than anyone[Circ.:
manner:degree]
Cause reason why? She ran because she loved to[Circ.:
purpose for what purpose? cause:reason]
behalf on whose behalf? She ran to raise money[Circ.:
cause:purpose]
She ran for her sister[Circ.: cause:behalf]
Contingency condition under what In the event of fire[Circ.: contingency:condition]
conditions? leave the building
default what negative Without an agreement[Circ.:

conditions? the plan will fail
contingency:default]
concession with what Despite her help[Circ.:

concessions? contingency:concessions], the plan failed.
Accompaniment comitative who/what with? John ran with Jane [Circ.:
accompaniment:comitative]
additive Who/what else? John wears mittens in addition to his
gloves[Circ.: accompaniment:additive]
Role guise what as? She spoke as his mentor[Circ.: role:guise]
product what into? He was transformed into a prince[Circ.:
role:product]
Matter what about? He warned me about the film[Circ.:
matter]
Angle source according to whom? According to the lecturer[Circ.:
angle:source],
the class is cancelled
viewpoint from whose To me[Circ.: angle:viewpoint], he’s an idiot.
viewpoint/perspective?
3.5 Summary
Although we have only taken a glimpse at Systemic Functional Linguistics,

it should be clear that there is great potential in this framework for accounting
for language both (and simultaneously) from a formal and functional
62
perspective. The most fundamental notion is that of choice; speakers make

choices (or rather they select) among the systemic options available. As
Halliday and Matthiessen explain (2004:23), “a language is a resource for
making meaning, and meaning resides in systemic patterns of choice”.
Therefore language is modelled through various system networks and it is in
these vast system networks that we find meaning. Structure, in SFL, is “the
outward form taken by systemic choices, not as the defining characteristic of
language” (ibid.).
The next chapter will focus on the nominal group exclusively. Its main goal
is to discuss, in considerable detail, the important relation between the
semantics and syntax of the nominal group. It will also provide a historical
overview of the developments with respect to the nominal group in Systemic
Functional Linguistics. In doing so, some important considerations are raised
which have a direct impact on the approach to referring expressions presented
further in this thesis.
63
Chapter 4: Halliday’s Nominal Group
4. Halliday’s Nominal Group
The previous chapter provided an overview of Systemic Functional

Linguistics in a very general sense covering the main concepts of function,
system and choice. In particular it explained the experiential metafunction and
its associated systems and functions. As stated in the first chapter, the main
linguistic resource for referring expressions is the nominal group.
Consequently it is of particular importance to the study presented here. The
main goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the development of the
nominal group within standard Systemic Functional Linguistics and to identify
any potentially problematic areas that should be considered in a linguistic
study of referring expressions.
The first part of this chapter (Section 4.1) will focus on a historical
presentation of the main functional elements of the nominal group as
represented in system networks. This allows us to gain some insight as to the
components of these expressions which are seen to be significant in functional
terms from the speaker’s perspective, or at least, from the way it is modelled in
SFL. Following this in Section 4.2 will be a discussion of the lexicogrammatical
analysis of the nominal group, with a presentation of the individual functional
elements of the nominal group as we consider its experiential structure.
Section 4.3 describes nominal complexes or the complex nominal group where
the focus is on the experiential structure of postmodifiers in the nominal group.
This chapter concludes with a presentation of one of the main challenges in
the description of the nominal group – ‘of’ structures. These structures are
problematic (cf. Fries, 1999 and Chapter 7) as they challenge our
understanding of the basic experiential structure of the nominal group as we
shall see below.
64
4.1 An overview of the system networks for the nominal

group
The first publication of Halliday’s analysis of the nominal group in detail

appeared in Cohesion in English (Halliday and Hasan, 1976). Although the
1976 account does not treat referring expressions specifically, it does deal with
a particular type of referring expression in the form of reference, nominal
substitution, and nominal ellipsis. These nominal groups are referring
expressions in the sense we are using in this thesis (cf. Chapter 2). In
addition, this work offers very informative and relevant details concerning the
development of the nominal group. The same year, Kress (1976) published a
selection of papers by Halliday. In one particular paper in that collection,
‘English system networks’ (Halliday 1964/1976:131-135), previously
unpublished, Halliday presents (along with other systems) the principal
systems of the nominal group. It is believed that this represents the earliest
account of the system of the nominal group in SFL. Unfortunately the systems
are not annotated or discussed so we can only consider them very briefly
before moving on to more recent developments of the nominal group.
4.1.1 Halliday 1964
As stated above, Halliday’s 1964 account of the nominal group seems to

be the earliest one in print, even though it was not published until 1976. In the
1964 system network, the system of the nominal group includes the range of
(networked) systems that determine the output (i.e. the expression of a
nominal group). Figure 4-1 below illustrates this early system. Initially, three
systems are entered simultaneously: CLASS_AT_HEAD; POSSESSION; and
NUMBER. Originally, then, possession and number were not seen as types of
determiner or types of modifier, but rather as having their own independent
systems, external to HEAD, DETERMINATION and QUANTIFICATION.
65
Figure 4-1: partial view of Halliday’s principal systems for nominal group
(1964/1976:131)
Without explanation, it is difficult to be certain about the interpretation

Halliday intended for this system network and it is presented here for the sake
of completion. As an example though, we can see that to produce a nominal
group such as those three mice, the speaker is supposed to have selected the
‘nominal’ option in the CLASS_AT_HEAD system, then ‘noun’ and some class of
noun. Then two systems are entered simulateously: DETERMINATION and
QUANTIFICATION. These two systems are not shown here to save space. The
DETERMINATION system includes the options of ‘specific’ and ‘non-specific’
which lead to the realisations of, for example, ‘this’ or ‘some’. The
QUANTIFICATION system has the options of ‘cardinal’ and ‘indefinite’ which lead
to the realisations of, again, simply as an illustration, ‘three’ or ‘a bit of’.
Therefore in this version of the nominal group system, the production of those
three mice infers that the following systemic options were selected: {(‘nominal’)
(‘noun’) (‘determined’ (‘specific’ (‘selective’ (‘demonstrative’ (‘plural’))))
(‘quantified’ (‘cardinal’ (‘integer’ (‘numerical’))))}. One point of interest here
though is the distinction between nominal and non-nominal in head position.
66
For Halliday, all nominal groups must have a head element, so the difference
made here reflects the difference found in examples (25) and (26), where the
head element is underscored. In (26), the head is non-nominal as it is a
number (called Numerative in later work). This is in contrast to other
approaches that would treat the head as being left empty (ellipted) as in (27)
for example.
(25) those two apples (head is apples)
(26) those two (head is two)
(27) those two (head is ellipted)
In (25), the head of the nominal group is apples (nominal) but in (26) it is
two (non-nominal). Therefore following the options in the network, the option of
‘noun’ is selected for example (25), i.e. apples and ‘non-nominal’ is the option
selected in producing example (26), i.e. two.
The sketches of the systems presented are lacking in detail to the point
where we cannot reasonably discuss them further except to compare the
treatment of person reference presented in Halliday and Hasan (1976), shown
in Figure 4-3 below.
Although these early descriptions have since changed form substantially
from Halliday (1964), we can see the beginnings of the types of meanings
expressed with the nominal group. To continue our discussion of the relevant
system networks, we will turn to work done by Halliday and Hasan (1976) on
person reference. It should be noted that their work focussed on cohesion and
so it approaches reference from this perspective. In other words, they
developed reference in terms of its textual cohesion rather than considering
any potential textual meaning within the referring expression itself.
4.1.2 Halliday and Hasan 1976
The foundation for our discussion of referring expressions can be found in

Halliday’s earliest writings although the term ‘referring expression’ is never
explicitly mentioned. In more recent work, the focus seems to have shifted
67
from theory building to how to apply the theory (cf. Halliday 1994 and Halliday
and Matthiessen, 2004).
Reference, in the sense used by Halliday and Hasan (1976:31) is to be
distinguished from lexical items having a semantic interpretation “in their own
right” as opposed to those items which are “directives indicating that
information is to be retrieved from elsewhere”. We can see this distinction
clearly in example (28) taken from the corpora of this thesis, where some
referring expressions have a semantic interpretation and others require this
information to be retrieved from elsewhere. Not every use of ‘he’ in this
example has the same referent, yet the speaker and addressee have no
trouble in understanding who is being referred to (coreference is marked with
the index i or j, to mark the referent for ‘he’ in each case).
(28) Johni went to see the doctorj and hej did some tests and
hei?j? also said hei had a sinus infection. I’m glad hei finally
went.
There is one instance where the referent is unclear, in he also said, he

could refer to either John or the doctor, but in this example, it is not particularly
important; it is clear who did the tests, who has a sinus infection and who
finally went (to the doctor).
Reference, the term for referring expressions which derive their meaning
from elsewhere, is divided into two categories: endophoric and exophoric, as
can be seen in Figure 4-2 below. The use of he in each case in example (28)
above is endophoric:anaphoric; in other words its meaning is retrieved from
within the text in a preceding section of the text. In philosophical terms, these
are cases of the definite referring expression (see Chapter 2). Note that
speaker and addressee reference is always exophoric; in these cases, the
terms do not refer to any preceding or following text, their meaning is always
retrieved outside the text, in the situation.
68
Reference
↓
Exophoric Endophoric
[situational] [textual]
↓
anaphora cataphora
[to preceding text] [to following text]
Figure 4-2: Taxonomy of Reference from Halliday and Hasan (1976:33)
The term ‘referring expression’ covers Halliday and Hasan’s ‘reference’ but
it is much broader, extending beyond it since we would want to include those
expressions having a semantic interpretation of their own (e.g. lexical items
such as nouns). Reference, seen as a cohesive device, as is the case for
Halliday and Hasan, does not include, for example, initial referring
expressions; those expressions which are interpretable in their own right. For
a reference to be anaphoric or cataphoric, there must be a referring expression
in the text with which it is co-referential (e.g. the doctor and John in example
(28) above). In a sense, this type of reference (i.e. naming and exophoric
reference), must precede endophoric reference.
Figure 4-3 illustrates Halliday and Hasan’s (1976:44) system for person
reference. Although it is presented more as a taxonomy than a system
network, we clearly get a sense of the division between two major categories
that person reference can have. In referring to a person, there is a selection to
be made between the person having a speech role or some other role. Within
speech roles, the person may have the role of speaker or addressee. In other
words, the reference is to the speaker or to the addressee. In the case of
other roles, further distinctions can be made between singular and plural and
human and non-human.
69
Figure 4-3: System network for person reference (Halliday and Hasan, 1976:44),
with examples in italics
In order to reconcile the 1964 and 1976 versions of the nominal group’s
systems, the person system would seem to replace the ‘personal’ option in the
1964 CLASS_AT_HEAD system (cf. Figure 4-1 above). The 1976 version is
clearly more functional, capturing functional distinctions in terms of person
reference, even if ‘person’ as a system name must be seen as very broad and
rather closer to the notion of ‘thing’. As Halliday and Hasan (1976) was
devoted to cohesion and not to the nominal group, we need to turn to Halliday
(1977) to begin to complete the picture of the systemic options of the nominal
group.
4.1.3 Halliday 1977
The system networks for the nominal group in Halliday (1977) offer more
detail but the system networks remain unannotated. Using an example (see
example (29) below) taken from Halliday (1977:208), we begin to see
Halliday’s first complete theoretical vision of the nominal group. Table 4-2 on
page 76 shows Halliday’s analysis of the nominal group; interpreting it from
each of the three semantic components: ideational (experiential and logical),
interpersonal, and textual. It should be noted that the example given by
Halliday is a full clause. However since the unit we are focussed on is the
nominal group, we will ignore, for our purposes, the treatment of the other
elements of the clause.
70
(29) a pair of unoiled garden shears (from Halliday, 1977:208)
As for the clause, Halliday also considers that the nominal group expresses
three types of meaning (see also Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:328-329).
The first of these is the Ideational component which is further divided between
the logical and the experiential component. According to Halliday (1977:177),
logical meaning only applies to complexes (containing paratactic or hypotactic
structures): “complexes are univariate (recursive) structures formed by
paratactic or hypotactic combinations … at the rank in question … all other
structures are multivariate (non-recursive)”. The nominal group, like the
clause, can be a complex (univariate) or a simplex (multivariate). The main
difference in terms of the logical component is that simplexes have no logical
structure. As Halliday states: “the logical component is distinct from the other
three (components) in that all logical meanings, and only logical meanings, are
expressed through the structure of ‘unit complexes’: clause complex group
complex and so on” (Halliday, 1977:178). Therefore, for the nominal group we
are currently considering, a pair of unoiled garden shears, there is no logical
structure since this nominal group is a simplex. However, at the level of word,
Halliday states that there is a complex: “groups consisting of more than one
element are simultaneously structured both as word constructions
(multivariate) and as word complexes (univariate)” (ibid.:210) and therefore
there is a logical analysis to be made at the level of word complex for the word
complex formed by unoiled garden shears (see example Figure 4-5 below).
We will return to complex nominal groups in Section 4.3.1 below when we
consider the Qualifier element of the nominal group and the grammatical
structure of nominal complexes.
The experiential component includes the various types of participants as
well as other semantic distinctions. The system network for nominal group
with respect to experiential meaning is shown in Figure 4-4.
71
Figure 4-4: Simplified system network for nominal group with respect to the
Experiential Component (from Halliday, 1977:213)
As can be seen from Figure 4-4, the entry point to the system network for
the nominal group is (+Thing). Consequently, ‘thing’ is also at least one of the
entry conditions for the system network for Participant Type. It is impossible to
discuss this system network any further as there is insufficient information. We
will nevertheless discuss the analysis following the explanation given by
Halliday (1977). Figure 4-5 illustrates the logical and experiential component
for the word complex.
unoiled garden shears

Logical γ β α
← Modifier Head
Experiential Epithet Classifier Thing
Figure 4-5: logical and experiential components for unoiled garden shears
For Halliday, modification is a form of hypotactic expansion. This is odd

and points to a problematic area of the framework. Halliday’s full treatment of
the nominal group a pair of unoiled garden shears is shown in Table 4-1.
72
Table 4-1: Analysis of the logical and experiential component of a pair of unoiled
garden shears
a pair of unoiled garden shears
Logical β : α : Head
Modifier
α : Head β : Modifier
γ:Modifier β: Modifier α : Head
Experiential Numerative: Epithet Classifier Thing:
Measure Common
One difficulty with the above analysis is that Halliday classifies this nominal
group as a simplex and with regard to a pair of unoiled garden shears, he
states that it “contains no logical structures” (Halliday, 1977:209). However,
his analysis does provide for a logical structure for the nominal group, in
addition to the logical structure of the word complex (unoiled garden shears).
The only possible interpretation is that the logical structure is in fact meant to
account for the entire nominal group, a pair of unoiled garden shears; as a
word complex.
What is of particular interest in the presentation of this example is that at
one point Halliday hyphenates ‘pair-of’. In the analysis of the experiential
functions of this nominal group, he labels ‘pair-of’ as Numerative.
Figure 4-6: Simplified system network for the prepositional group with respect to
the Experiential Component (Halliday, 1977:215)
73
It is important to note here Halliday’s treatment of prepositional groups with

respect to the experiential component. The relevant system is shown in Figure
4-6. As we can see, upon entering this system, two other systems are entered
simultaneously: ‘type of process’ and ‘nominal group’. Although it is not stated
explicitly, we can assume the nominal group completing the prepositional
phrase is assigned a role of medium. From the analysis presented, the of in
pair-of is not treated as a prepositional group. In other words, of unoiled
garden shears is not labelled as a prepositional group. Therefore in terms of
the experiential structure of the nominal group in the above example, the
presence of of does not introduce a prepositional phrase and there is no
Qualifier in the nominal group, even though in terms of the logical structure of
this nominal group, there is a postmodifier.
As stated above, Halliday also analyses the interpersonal component of
the nominal group. He does not consider prepositional groups to have an
interpersonal structure. The simplified system network for the interpersonal
component of the nominal group is presented in Figure 4-7. The entry to the
initial system is again ‘nominal group’ and two systems are entered
simultaneously: ‘person’ and ‘connotation’. As we have only a simplified view
of the system network and there is no explanation of it, we can only comment
on the distinction for person, which clearly models a fundamental choice
between ‘speech role’ and ‘other’. This is an important distinction as it reflects
a fundamental distinction in referring. It is also a distinction that has been
maintained and developed in Systemic Functional Linguistics (see the Cardiff
Grammar in the next chapter). From the representation in Figure 4-7, the
interpersonal component concerns mainly the speech role of the referring
expression and any connotation assigned to it. As Halliday points out, “there
are connotative choices in verbs and adverbs as well as in nouns” (1977:223).
Although this is unlikely to apply to ‘speech roles’ (i.e. I, you, we), it will
certainly be relevant to ‘other person role’ in the selection of nouns
(Thing:object).
74
Figure 4-7: Simplified system network for the nominal group with respect to the
Interpersonal Component (Halliday, 1977:217)
Finally, the nominal group is also analysed from the perspective of the
textual component. With respect to the textual component, as Halliday points
out (1977:224), the order of the elements within the group is fixed, “but it is the
thematic principle that determines this fixed sequence and explains why in the
verbal and nominal group, the element that has deictic value comes first: this is
the element that relates to the ‘here and now’”. A simplified view of the system
network representing the semantic options for the textual component of the
nominal group is given in Figure 4-8. What is illustrated here is the system
network for ‘deixis’ and determiners. The combined description of the three
components can be seen in Table 4-2.
75
Figure 4-8: Simplified system network for the nominal group with respect to the
Textual Component (Halliday, 1977:219)
Table 4-2: Full analysis for the nominal group a pair of unoiled garden shears
(Halliday, 1977:221)
a pair of unoiled garden shears
Logical β: α : Head
Modifier
α : Head Β : Modifier
γ:Modifier β : Modifier α : Head
Experiential Numerative: Epithet Classifier Thing:
Measure Common
Interpersonal Connotation Person:
other
Textual Deictic
4.1.4 Halliday and Matthiessen 2004
The presentation of the nominal group given in Halliday and Matthiessen

(2004) replaces previous accounts given in earlier editions of Halliday’s
Introduction to Functional Grammar, IFG, (1985 and 1994). Neither of the
earlier versions of IFG included any part of the system networks for the
nominal group and this is why they are not included in this section. The
76
description of the nominal group itself in terms of the experiential structure has
not changed considerably since then. The one area that has changed
significantly concerns the logical structure of the nominal group but this is an
area that will be discussed in the next section.
Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) present a partial view of the system
network for the nominal group and the only view we get is of the
DETERMINATION system. In a sense, this is the view of the nominal group
system relative to textual meaning. The Deictic, as an element of the
experiential structure of the nominal group, has, according to Halliday and
Matthiessen (ibid.:322), “the greatest specifying potential” and is therefore
what comes first in the structure of the nominal group. There is no
presentation of the system networks for the nominal group concerning
experiential or interpersonal meaning. We will discuss the experiential
structure in the next section.
The DETERMINATION system is illustrated in Figure 4-9, the output of which
is an expression which would function as Deictic in the structure of the nominal
group (see Section 4.2.1 below). This system has changed in terms of
organisation from the 1977 version presented above. The restructuring
includes the ‘non-specific’ and ‘specific’ options, especially the much improved
‘person’ option, which reflects the person system described in Figure 4-3 and
Figure 4-4 above. It is not clear how this system would produce embedded
possessive nominal groups such as my father’s (example from Halliday and
Matthiessen, 2004:314) since there is no option for this shown in the system
network. Due to lack of space, the system network shown here does not
provide the full set of options for the ‘non-interactant’ option. The missing sub-
networks are as follows:
‘non-interactant’ → {‘one only’ OR ‘more than one’};
‘one only’ → {‘non-conscious’ OR ‘conscious’};
‘non-conscious’ is realised as Deictic:its;
‘conscious’ → {‘female’ OR ‘male’};
‘female’ is realised as Deictic:her;
‘male’ is realised as Deictic:his;
‘more than one’ is realised as Deictic:their.
77
Presumably the option that would lead to realising my father’s as Deictic

would stem from the ‘non-interactant’ option where there would, at some point,
be the option to re-enter the nominal group system to embed the possessive
nominal group.
Figure 4-9: System network for Deixis in the nominal group (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004)
We can reasonably assume that similar system networks exist for the
remainder of the functions of the nominal group. This would represent the
options available for the selection of Thing, Numerative, Epithet, Classifier and
Qualifier (see below for the full description of the nominal group). In the
absence of such a description from Halliday and Matthiessen 2004, we can
only refer to Halliday 1977 as the most complete presentation of the system
networks for the nominal group, especially when the various sub-networks he
presents are seen together. We have no way of knowing what options are
available for completing the picture of the nominal group in systemic terms.
We will now turn to the description of the structure of the nominal group in
order to better understand how the elements all fit together.
78
4.2 Description of the nominal group
The move away from the more traditional Noun Phrase was not without
good reasons initially. From his earliest writings, Halliday has preferred the
term Nominal Group in place of Noun Phrase for two main reasons. The first
is that he followed other linguists using nominal group (for example Allen,
1951). In what is considered to be the first publication of his theory of grammar
(Halliday, 1956), Halliday uses the term nominal group and has consistently
done so since. More importantly, however, there were terminological issues in
the wider model as compared to other popular linguistic theories at the time.
The distinction between group and phrase is at the centre of these issues. As
we saw in Chapter 1, Halliday’s use of nominal group rather than noun phrase
reflects the considerable differences between his verbal group and Chomsky’s
verb phrase, rather than any fundamental differences between the nominal
group and the noun phrase (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 39). Although
Halliday’s nominal group shares enough features and structure with
Chomsky’s noun phrase to be considered as a relatively similar unit, there is
no verb phrase in Halliday’s model. Instead, Halliday considers the verbal
units of the clause to form a group, which he naturally labels the verbal group.
Wanting to avoid any problems that might arise due to misunderstanding the
terminology, nominal group, which is clearly differentiated from noun phrase,
was preferred. Currently, Halliday’s followers have all adopted the term
nominal group.
There is however there is one type of phrase in SFL which makes the
distinction between group and phrase theoretically significant. For Halliday
(2003:19), the terms are not equivalent: “words expand to form groups ...
clauses contract to form prepositional phrases ... clauses and phrases get
embedded inside (nominal groups)”. The preposition acts as a reduced
process and the embedded nominal group is the complement of this process.
The parallels between the prepositional phrase as reduced clause and a
clause is shown in examples (30) and (31), both from Halliday and
Matthiessen (2004:360). The experiential meaning represented in prepositional
phrases is therefore Process and Participant, where the Participant, i.e. the
embedded nominal group, functions as Range (Halliday and Matthiessen,
79
2004:361), regardless of whether the prepositional phrase serves as

Circumstance or Qualifier. The prepositional phrase is a type of minor clause
in SFL, which makes it different from the category of group. There is a
category of prepositional group, where the preposition may be modified in
examples such as right behind (ibid.:359).
across the lake

(30)
(reduced) Process Participant (Range)
crossing the lake

(31)
Process Participant
4.2.1 The basic structure of the nominal group
The nominal group is seen basically as having a head element and the
potential for modification, both pre- and postmodification. The elements of
Halliday’s nominal group are essentially as follows (Halliday and Matthiessen
2004):
Ngp → Deictic, Numerative, Epithet, Classifier, Thing, Qualifier,
where one element must serve as head in the nominal group.

Halliday calls this a “multivariate structure: a constellation of elements each
having a distinct function with respect to the whole” (Halliday, 1994:193). The
‘thing’, as Halliday calls it, is very similar to what we have been referring to as
‘thing’ with the exception that for Halliday it refers to one word and in this work,
following Fawcett (1980 and 2004), it refers to the entire expression. Thing, as
an element of experiential structure in the nominal group is the ‘semantic core’
for Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:325) and relates to Fawcett’s
cultural classification (1980, and Tucker, 1996) as we shall see in the next
chapter.
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4.2.2 Head and Thing
There is a strong relation between ‘thing’ and the head of the nominal
group in English. In SFL, we expect that the Head of the nominal group will be
conflated with Thing, as this is the most usual instance (Bloor and Bloor,
2004:150 and Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:331). This combination makes
sense somehow in that the semantic core of the referring expression is what
will occur in the role of head. In other words, given that there is a denotational
relationship between the ‘thing’ (i.e. the noun) selected and a class of thing,
the head itself does not refer to a particular thing. It is the expression in its
entirety that is used by the speaker to refer to a particular object. It will be this
element that can be modified as in example (32), modified from Halliday and
Matthiessen (2004:332).
(32) the white cup
The white Cup

Deictic Epithet Thing
Modifier Head
In (32) it is clear that the class of object being referred to is a cup and
specifically, the speaker is referring to a particular white cup.
The main distinction between Thing and head for Halliday and Matthiessen
(2004:325) is that Thing is an element of experiential structure and Head is an
element of logical structure. Furthermore, “(Thing) may be common noun,
proper noun or (personal) pronoun” but there could be other elements as head,
for example Deictic or Numerative. In other words, the head and thing are not
necessarily conflated in the nominal group (see example (33)). When the head
is a Deictic or Numerative, the expression is called a ‘measure’ nominal
(Halliday, 1994:195 and Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:332), as shown in
Figure 4-10.
(33) a cup of tea
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nominal group a cup of tea

experiential Numerative Thing
structure
logical structure Premodifier Head Postmodifier
β α
Figure 4-10: Analysis of ‘measure’ nominal (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:332)
For Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:332), in the logical structure, ‘cup’ is

Head of the nominal group. In this case, Thing is said to be embedded in a
prepositional phrase functioning as Postmodifier (ibid.). It is very difficult to
see clearly how, if at all, the logical and experiential structures map onto each
other. One important development in Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) as
compared to earlier developments of the nominal group is the exclusion of the
Postmodifier from the logical representation (ibid.:332n), where having the
Postmodifier within the scope of the logical representation “appears to
complicate the description without adding to its explanatory power”. This
means that although the pre-modifier can be interpreted in terms of logical
structure, the postmodifier cannot. We will not consider this problem any
further at this point as we will come back to it in more detail in Section 4.3,
when we discuss the grammar of complex nominal groups (i.e. the Qualifier
element of the nominal group).
Finally, there is one construction where the nominal group contains only a
modifier. The only case where this occurs is in relational processes where the
Attribute is expressed as an adjective within a nominal group as in example
(34), from Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:331). The analysis for this example
is shown in Figure 4-11. There are alternative approaches to this (Tucker,
1998) where the Attribute can be expressed as a quality group or as a nominal
group, depending on the class of head. There is no adjectival group in
Halliday’s SFL. However there is an adverbial group (Halliday and
Matthiessen, 2004:354).
(34) you’re very lucky
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You ‘re very lucky

Carrier Relational Process Attribute
Nominal Group Verbal Group Nominal Group
Epithet
Head
Figure 4-11: Epithet as Head in the nominal group
In example (34), the Epithet is considered the Head element. Halliday

does not explain what happens to Thing in these cases. It is clear that in this
framework, Head, as an element of logical structure, must conflate with at least
one element of experiential structure in the nominal group. Halliday’s reason
for opting for this analysis is because these groups cannot function as Subject
in the clause (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:331). Furthermore, the
construction is seen as an equivalent to example (35), an invented example,
where the Attribute is realised as a full nominal group. The analysis for this
example is shown in Figure 4-12. Halliday considers adjectival expressions to
be a kind of nominal group and there is no group for adjectives in standard
SFL (cf. the Cardiff grammar, especially Tucker, 1998). It should be noted that
Halliday does sometimes refer to this type of nominal group as ‘adjectival
group’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:331).
(35) you’re a lucky person
you ‘re a lucky person

Carrier Relational Process Attribute
Nominal Group Verbal Group Nominal Group
Deictic Epithet Thing
Pre-modifier Head
Figure 4-12: Thing as Head in the nominal group
The nominal group is a rich resource for expressing meaning. It has the
potential for considerable complexity. This is described in the next section
where the nominal group is considered in further detail, focussing on the
functional grammar of more complex nominal groups. A firm understanding of
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this area is essential to the analysis of referring expressions presented in this

thesis.
4.3 Complex nominal groups in Systemic Functional

Linguistics
In this section, we will consider Halliday’s functional account of the syntax

of complex nominal groups. In doing so, we will also consider special ‘of’
structures, or Numeratives as Halliday calls them, since they have a direct
impact on the analysis of nominal groups, specifically concerning the head
element of the nominal group.
4.3.1 Halliday’s nominal complex
As we saw above, Halliday’s experiential structure of the nominal group

includes the potential for modification after the head. The analysis for example
(36) (from Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:324) is shown in Figure 4-13.
(36) the children in blue hats
nominal group
the children in blue hats
Logical structure Premodifier Head Postmodifier
Experiential Deictic Thing Qualifier
structure
prepositional phrase
process Range
Logical structure pre-modifier head
Experiential structure Epithet Thing
Figure 4-13: Analysis of the children in blue hats
One difficulty with the presentation in Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) is

that much of the fine detail concerning the experiential structure of the nominal
group is missing where it concerns the Qualifier. Halliday states that the
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distinction between Premodifier and Postmodifier is not functional (1994:192,

and Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:330) but rather is dependent “on the rank
of the modifying term”. The distinction for Halliday is in the information
structure and “not in their logical or experiential meaning” (ibid.). In this sense
then, Halliday sees all modification in the nominal group as having “identifying
potential” (ibid.:332). In terms of the experiential component, this is governed
by an ordering in terms of specifying potential, from greatest at the left to least
at the right. He relates this to the textual metafunction: “the principle which
puts the Theme first in the clause is the same as that which puts the Deictic
first in the nominal group: start by relating to the speaker in the context of the
speech event” (ibid.). In this view, we would expect the Qualifier to have the
least specifying potential.
The Qualifier, for Halliday, has a characterizing function (Halliday,
1994:188 and Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:324): “the characterization here
is in terms of some process within which the Thing is, directly or indirectly, a
participant. It may be a major process, i.e. a relative clause; or a minor process
– a prepositional phrase”. This is a very important point and we will return to
this idea and develop it much further in Chapter 7. If we now relate the
analysis above to Figure 4-6 (Halliday, 1977), the system for the prepositional
group, we begin to be able to consider that prepositional phrases that function
as Qualifier can be seen as introducing a situation and that the nominal group
completing the prepositional phrase may have one of the following functions:
extent, location, manner, cause, matter, or accompaniment (where the
‘process’ is with). The 1977 system for nominal group is not annotated or
explained and therefore we cannot be certain of its interpretation. It does
seem clear from Figure 4-6 that Halliday meant this system to only apply to
prepositional phrases in the role of Circumstance. It may be reasonable to
assume that a fuller array of functions could be applied to prepositional
phrases in the role of Qualifier. This idea will be developed in the study of
referring expressions presented in Chapter 7 where it will be argued that the
relationship between the Head and Qualifier can be explained by transitivity.
However in more recent work (Halliday, 1994 and Halliday and
Matthiessen, 2004), the completing nominal group is labelled as having the
participant role of ‘range’ as we saw in Figure 4-13 above. Essentially then,
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Halliday sees all Qualifiers as characterizing Thing as a participant in terms of

some process, whether a major process (i.e. clause) or a minor process (i.e.
prepositional phrase).
The Qualifier is also seen as a type of expansion in Halliday’s framework,
although it is considered less relevant than expansion at the level of the clause
(Halliday, 1994:243). A Qualifier is by nature an embedded element; whatever
fills the role of Qualifier will be an embedded structure. The relationship then
is that “a clause or phrase comes to function as a constituent WITHIN the
structure of a group” (ibid.:242), in this case, the nominal group. Therefore the
relationship is not one of hypotaxis or parataxis but is the outcome of a
recursive process of generating the nominal complex.
Halliday classifies Qualifiers as having three types of relations with respect
to the ‘expansion’ of the nominal group: elaborating, extending and enhancing.
Expansion was developed to account for relations between clauses. The
generalisation of expansion to embedded expansions does not fit the picture
very well for postmodification in the nominal group. The notion of expansion
as applied to the clause accounts for the clause complex; in other words
extension (or expansion) beyond the boundaries of the clause. To date, all
instances of postmodification in the nominal group are considered to be
embedded constituents, in other words they do not extend the nominal group,
they are part of it; the Qualifier is a functional component of the nominal group
itself. It would seem then that there is a minor theoretical area of difficulty at
this point: either there is a need for a nominal group complex, or there is a
need for a new interpretation of the relation between the nominal group and
the Qualifier.
There are three types of expansion in Halliday’s model. His discussion of
these is restricted to embedded clauses as Qualifier. Since in his framework
prepositional phrases, as phrases rather than groups, are treated as a kind of
reduced clause, it is reasonable to assume that expansion also applies to
prepositional phrases functioning as Qualifier. Halliday (Halliday and
Matthiessen, 2004:426) gives two examples of embedded expansion by a
prepositional phrase, given here in examples (37) and (38). However Halliday
and Matthiessen (2004) do not offer a discussion of the analysis.
86
(37) the man at the next table
(38) the house by the bridge
It is reasonable to assume they would be grouped with defining relative

clauses and classed as the first type of expansion as we will see in the
following.
The first type is elaborating expansion where the group is expanded “by
further specifying or describing” (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:396). The
most common example of this type of expansion is the relative clause as in
example (39), from (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:428).
(39) The only person who was kind to him at all
This function of further describing seems to fit well with the purpose of referring
expressions. Examples (37) and (38) above are also examples of this type of
expansion as they further specify the referent.
The second type of expansion is called extension which has the function of
adding some new element, “an addition, or else a replacement, or an
alternative” (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:405). This is perhaps the most
difficult type of expansion to accept as accounting for the relation between the
Qualifier and the rest of the nominal group. As Halliday points out “the only
sense of extension which produces embedded clauses is that of possession
introduced by whose, of which/which or a ‘contact’ relative ending with of” (ibid.
432). An example of this is given in (40), from (Halliday and Matthiessen,
2004:433).
(40) I recently read an incredibly well-written story about a

couple whose thirty-something-year-old son dies of an
illness
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The third type of embedded expansion is enhancing, which functions to

“enhance the meaning by qualifying it in one of a number of possible ways: by
reference to time, place, manner, cause or condition” (ibid.). In this case, the
Qualifier is seen in terms of a relationship with the Head where the relationship
can be identified as circumstantial (ibid.:432). Halliday identifies two types
(Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:432): one is where the circumstantial role is
found in the qualifier as in examples (41) and (42) (meaning that the Qualifier
contributes circumstantial information for the head) and the other is where the
circumstantial role is found in the head of the nominal group as in (43)
(meaning that the head ‘completes’ some circumstantial function for the
Qualifier).
(41) the house where she lived (from Halliday and

Matthiessen, 2004:432)
(42) death by drowning (ibid.:434)
(43) the time you should leave (ibid.:436)
With three pages devoted to elaboration in the nominal group, half a page
to extension and five and a half to enhancement, it seems clear that the
function of expansion does not readily lend itself to explaining the function and
relation of the qualifier to the rest of the nominal group. It seems more a case
of trying to apply an existing framework for the clause to the nominal group
rather than attempting to account for embedded clauses or groups which
function as postmodifiers. With the current syntactic description of
postmodification being a case of embedding, we clearly do not have a case of
expansion in the sense of ‘tacking on’ as we find in paratactic or hypotactic
clause expansion. It is the result of recursion in producing a referring
expression (see Chapter 6). There is a loop and a re-entry into the system to
complete a satisfactory expression within the expression of the first level
expression. Expansion, on the other hand, is quite different when considered
systemically as, although there is a re-entry into the system, it is at the
completion of a unit. Recursion is a process that is taking place
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simultaneously within one unit. Expansion then is a sequential process while

recursion is a simultaneous (in loose terms) process. This is why it will be
argued in Chapter 7 that an additional participant role is conflated with the
head of the nominal group in the case when the nominal group expresses a
Qualifier (c.f. the discussion above concerning the characterizing function of
the Qualifier).
4.3.2 ‘Of’ structures: measure nominals and other related structures
There is one final area that we need to consider before ending this brief
presentation of Halliday’s treatment of postmodifying structures in the nominal
group. This concerns what we will call for the moment ‘of’ structures. We have
already seen an example of how problematic these structures are in example
(29) above, a pair of unoiled garden shears. Other examples of this type of
structure include the top of X, the tallest of X, several of X, etc. How these
forms are treated directly impacts on the overall structure of the nominal group
and in particular whether or not a nominal group of this type is classed as
having a Qualifier or not. For example, in a pair of unoiled garden shears, if
the Head element is taken as pair, then of unoiled garden shears would
constitute a Qualifier, postmodifying the head. Alternatively, if shears is the
Head element, then there is no Qualifier as an element of the nominal group.
In our discussion above, we saw that there are some problems with Halliday’s
account of these types of expressions. This is an area where there is
considerable difficulty in capturing both the function and syntax of these
expressions.
For Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), these particular ‘of’ structures are
extended numeratives, expressing meanings such as measure (a pack of
cards), facet (the front of the house) or variety (a kind of owl) among others
(examples from Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:333). In such cases, Halliday
states that the Thing and Head elements are disassociated (i.e. not conflated).
In terms of syntax, this is somewhat of a neat solution as it avoids the
complications we saw earlier in example (29), a pair of unoiled garden shears.
However this can be problematic from the analytical perspective as it is difficult
to motivate how or why the Thing would be embedded (i.e. recursively
89
generated). This difficulty is resolved relatively well in the Cardiff grammar as

we will see in the following chapters. The main difficulty for the analyst is
understanding the consequences of losing sight of the functional relations of
Thing, since it is, in a sense, the head of the nominal group in terms of
experiential meaning and therefore also the pivotal element of the referring
expression.
Halliday’s analysis (2004:335) of the facet expression given below in
Figure 4-14 for example (44) shows the distinction he makes between the
experiential and logical components of the nominal group, although the label of
Qualifier in the logical structure may be an error as it is typically an element of
the experiential structure of the nominal group. The two components are
further illustrated in Figure 4-15 below.
(44) the tops of the hills
the tops of the Hills

Experiential Facet Deictic Thing
Logical (Modifier) Head Qualifier (sic)
Figure 4-14: Analysis of the tops of the hills from Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:335)
In this view, hills, as Thing, is part of an embedded nominal group in the

role of Qualifier. In terms of the experiential component of the nominal group,
there is no function assigned to of, the tops functions as a pre-modifier, facet
and the Thing is hills (cf. Martin, 1992 below as well as Renouf and Sinclair,
1991, and Fawcett, 2000). The logical component does not include an element
called Thing, instead we find tops as Head with a pre-modifier and a
postmodifier (Qualifier). Recall that prepositional phrases have no logical
structure (Halliday, 1977:178 and Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:361) and
therefore it is not included in the analysis for this component. The labelling
given by Halliday more than suggests that Thing is a term that belongs to the
experiential component and Head is a term that belongs to the logical
component. Since Head and Thing most often conflate, we should assume
that the experiential and logical components map onto each other. It is very
difficult to see how this could occur for these special Numerative structures.
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Figure 4-15: Comparison of the experiential and logical analysis for example (20)
4.3.3 Martin’s (1992) nominal group and participant
Before closing the discussion of these structures, we will briefly consider

Martin’s work (1992) on the nominal group since he has developed this area in
further detail and it does not differ significantly from Halliday’s with the
exception that he has explicitly separated four pre-Head elements as follows:
pre-deictic, pre-numerative, pre-epithet and pre-classifier (Martin, 1992:132-
135). However, Martin does not discuss the Qualifier element at all, except to
state that it is an element of the nominal group and that it is a “clear case” of
how the nominal group can realise more than one participant. It is also his
notion of participant that is of interest to this thesis as it seems to be very close
to our use of referring expression as we will see in this section.
Martin’s (1992) structure of the nominal group is as shown in Table 4-3
below. He only describes the experiential structure of the nominal group and
does not consider the problem of identifying the elements of the logical
structure of the nominal group. It should be made clear that this is not a
criticism since his purpose is to explore the structure of the nominal group in
terms of its potential to refer to more than one participant. Example (45)
illustrates this point, where as Martin explains we find three participants
realised in one group: John, Mary and the friend (Martin, 1992:132).
(45) John’s friend who Mary had never met

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Table 4-3: Nominal group structure following Martin (1992)

Pre-D. D. Post-D. Pre- Num. Pre-Ep. Ep. Pre-Cl. Cl. Thing Q
Num.
key: D.=Deictic; Num.=Numerative; Ep.=Epithet; Cl.=Classifier; Q=Qualifier
Martin’s interest lies more in discourse than the clause and his interest in
referring expressions is in relation to tracking participants in text or what he
refers to as “participant identification”. For example, he would consider any
embedded nominal groups within the nominal group as separate ‘participants’
for the purpose of phoricity, e.g. anaphora and cataphora, (1992:98) and
reference chains (ibid.:140). Participant identification, according to Martin
(ibid.:95), “refers to the strategies language use to get people, places and
things into a text and refer to them once there”. The way this is done in
English is through the nominal group (ibid.:97). As Martin points out
(ibid.:129), “all participants are realised through nominal groups but not all
nominal groups realise participants and some nominal groups realise more
than one”. His definition of participant states that a participant is “a person,
place, or thing, abstract or concrete, capable of functioning as Agent or
Medium in TRANSITIVITY” (Martin, 1992:129). Since it is traditional in SFL to
capitalise functional labels, ‘Participant’ refers to a function of the experiential
metafunction and ‘participant’ in Martin’s sense refers to a particular function of
a nominal group within a text, since a participant is a reference to a thing (in its
broadest sense).
Although Martin (1992) does not describe the nominal group in full detail,
he does provide a good description of its various pre-modifier elements. These
are shown in Table 4-4, including Martin’s four ‘pre-’ elements. Each of these
constitutes for Martin a type of nominal group embedding. The embedding is
illustrated in Figure 4-16 where we see the tree structure of example (46),
taken from Martin (1992:133). In this case, the nominal group has a Pre-
Deictic which has the function of ‘partitive’.
Table 4-4: Examples of the ‘pre-’ elements of the nominal group following Martin
(1992)
element of the nominal group example in bold
Pre-Deictic the top of the mountain
Pre-Numerative a pair of boots
Pre-Epithet the tallest of the mountains
Pre-Classifier that kind of gear
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(46) the top of the mountain
Figure 4-16: The structure of the pre-deictic (Martin, 1992:133)
The problem of how to deal with the problem concerning of is handled

slightly differently for Martin (1992:133) since he treats it as a “structure
marker” (this is very similar to the position taken in the Cardiff grammar, cf.
Fawcett 1980 and 2000). Therefore it is not considered as a constituent of the
nominal group. Ignoring, as it were, the of in these types of structures is
convenient as there is no conflict between the structural representation and the
intention of the speaker to refer to some object.
We can reinterpret example (29) cited above by Halliday (1977), a pair of
unoiled garden shears, using Martin’s (1992) ‘pre-’ elements. In this
framework, a pair (of) is analysed as Pre-Numerative and without taking into
account of as a constituent, the structure becomes as shown in Figure 4-17.
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Figure 4-17: Analysis of a pair of unoiled garden shears following Martin (1992)
There is one problem with this view and that is that it does not seem to be
the case that Martin (1992) allows for Determiners to intervene between
Numerative and Epithet as would be needed if we consider an invented but
similar example as in (47) and (48).
(47) a bunch of those garden shears
(48) a pair of those nice walking boots
In these examples we would be forced to consider a Deictic intervening

between Numerative and Epithet and it would seem that neither Halliday’s nor
Martin’s framework can account for this. This could be resolved by modifying
the labels of the Deictic and Numerative elements in relation to the remaining
elements of the nominal group. However in all fairness, no publication to date
has really explored the nominal group in any detail within the SFL framework.
It is possible that the framework does account for these cases but that the
explanation has so far been unavailable. The Cardiff Grammar, as we will see
in the next chapter, has developed a solution to this problem (also cf. Fawcett,
1980, 2000 and 2007). For the moment, it suffices to acknowledge that this is
a very challenging area.
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4.4 Summary
This chapter has outlined the description of the nominal group in SFL in
terms of the system networks representing the systemic options available to
the speaker in its expression and in terms of its structural description. It has
also pointed out some of the challenging areas to be aware of when analysing
this group. The earlier descriptions of the nominal group are informative as
they assist in the understanding of later developments, as well as offering a
contribution to ‘filling in the blanks’ in the current state of the theory. It is
important to present these descriptions here as they are not adequately
presented elsewhere. The nominal group, both in terms of structure and
function, has been largely overlooked.
Although this presentation has been relatively brief, we can nevertheless
draw some inferences. The first perhaps is the parallel between the nominal
group and the clause. Halliday is clear on the multifunctional nature of the
nominal group, which he has paralleled with the clause such that the nominal
group expresses ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning. However the
experiential meaning is more obviously present, if not inherent to the nominal
group, and it is this metafunction more so than the other two that suggests
parallels with the clause. Secondly, the three-strand analysis would seem to
call into question the interpretation in the logical component. It is very difficult
to see how elements that have a textual function such as Deictic can be
labelled as having a modifier function in the logical structure.
Martin’s view of the nominal group as ‘participant’ points out an area that is
identified as a need in this thesis; there is insufficient terminology to discuss,
functionally, the expressions we are interested in. Calling them nominal
groups forces a focus on structure and in fact as Martin makes clear, it is not
an adequate term to cover the reference to ‘things’ since not all nominal
groups are ‘participants’. The term ‘participant’ is still problematic as it is the
same term as is used for the participants in the situation (associated to
processes). The use of ‘referring expression’, as used here, is not without
difficulties, especially since it carries with it considerable history and diversity
in meaning. Nevertheless, we do need a term, as Lyons argued (1977:23),
that will allow us to classify and refer to these expressions. The problem is
95
clearly that there are different levels of referring and therefore naming the term
appropriately and placing this term within the model is problematic. As is often
the case, we inherit terminological problems from other fields. This problem
has largely been ignored. Typically the focus is given to the structural
realisation of these expressions without identifying any status to the semantics
of the expressions. The position taken in this thesis is that it seems a
potentially backwards approach, especially for semantically- and systemically-
minded functional linguists.
In the next chapter, the Cardiff model of language is presented in order to
situate the work developed here within this model. Important terminology is
explained in Chapter 5 including the basic relations in functional syntax such
as conflation, componence, filling and exponence. More detail is given here
on the role of the system networks in the Cardiff Grammar. The Cardiff
Grammar offers important contributions to the study of referring expressions
and is therefore essential to the development of this thesis.
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Chapter 5: The Cardiff Grammar
5. The Cardiff Grammar
In the last chapter we traced the development of Halliday’s model of

language in functional terms from the system networks relevant to ‘things’ (cf.
Halliday’s nominal group and Martin’s participant in the previous chapter)
through to the realization in formal terms in the structure of the nominal group.
This chapter will follow a similar course but this time focussing on the Cardiff
Grammar.
The reason for choosing the Cardiff grammar for this study is quite
straightforward: it is the only systemic functional framework with an explicit
theory of syntax. In addition, it is a generative grammar and this is important
as it attempts to model language production while providing a framework within
which to analyse language. The importance of balancing these two aspects to
a linguistic framework will be discussed below. As Fawcett explains
(2007:35n), the Cardiff grammar “has passed the additional test of being
implemented in the computer, as part of the COMMUNAL Project. This does
not ‘prove’ that it is ‘right’, of course, but it does at least demonstrate that the
principles on which it operates have been thought through sufficiently - and
made sufficiently clear - for them to be implemented in a computer program”.
The framework has been laid out in various works, including: Fawcett
(1980 and 2000), Tucker (1998), Butler (2003a and 2003b) and numerous
articles (e.g. Fawcett, 1993, Fawcett, Tucker and Lin, 1993). Halliday’s model
of language has also been developed into a computational generation model,
but this is not being considered here for the following two reasons: the first is
that the computational aspects of the model are not directly relevant to this
study and the second is that Halliday’s work does not include an explicit
description of syntax. There is insufficient space here for any detailed
comparison of the two approaches, although interested readers may wish to
consult Butler (2003a and 2003b).
The work cited above does not focus specifically on the nature of the
referring expression. While this chapter will provide a general overview of the
Cardiff grammar, Chapter 6 will consider the approach to referring expressions
in the Cardiff grammar.
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As it would have been impossible in this work to present a complete

description of Halliday’s framework, so too is it impossible to offer a full
presentation of the Cardiff grammar. Therefore this presentation of the Cardiff
model will necessarily be selective. This chapter is organised as follows. First
a general overview of the Cardiff model of language will be presented,
explaining the cognitive nature of the model. Then the role of language
production in the model in comparison to language comprehension is
explained. Following this, the main components of the overall model are
explained, including some detail concerning how they function. Finally, the
Cardiff theory of functional syntax is presented.
5.1 Overview of the Cardiff Grammar
The Cardiff Grammar is the result of a very ambitious and impressive

language modelling and language description project. The theoretical
framework was developed under the direction of Professor Robin Fawcett at
Cardiff University. It is described in Fawcett (1980), Tucker (1998), Fawcett
(2000), Neale (2002), Ball (2002), and Fawcett (2008a), in addition to various
unpublished manuscripts printed as technical reports at Cardiff University. The
list of shorter publications, journal articles and book chapters is far too
numerous to list here but of note in particular are: Fawcett (1993) and Fawcett,
Tucker and Lin (1993).
As we saw in the previous chapter, the basic concepts in SFL are
concerned with language function, system and choice. This is also true in the
Cardiff Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The similarities between Cardiff
SFG and Halliday’s SFL (henceforth Sydney SFL) are considerable and as
Fawcett states (2008a:13), they both share “the same historical roots and they
still share essentially the same basic concepts”. One of the main differences is
in the distinction between meaning and form and the place of each in the
theory. For Fawcett (2000:34), the basic relationship between meaning and
form in any sign system is dynamic and can be described in terms of
realization (i.e. meaning is realized by a form). In systemic functional
grammar, there is a distinction to be made between potential and instance.
Like Sydney SFL, Cardiff SFG also sees language production as a selection
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process, where speakers make choices among options in meaning. However

Cardiff SFG has developed the semantic options within the system networks.
This is represented in Figure 5-1 where we can see that the system networks
are a component of the grammar and they represent the semantic options
available to speakers as potential. The output of the networks is a set of
selection expressions which then becomes the input to the realization rules
(realization statements in the Sydney grammar); the realization rules and the
potential structures are another component of the grammar, also expressed as
potential. The output from this component is a layer of richly labelled tree
structure. As shown in the diagram there is a loop enabling this process to
continue, where it is possible for a realization rule to state a re-entry rule, for
example when an element of a unit is ‘filled’ by another unit (this will be made
clear below).
Figure 5-1: The main components of a systemic functional grammar (from Fawcett,
2000:36 and Fawcett, Tucker and Lin, 1993:121)
5.1.1 Cognitive and social aspects of the Cardiff Model
One rather significant area in which Cardiff SFG differs from Sydney SFL is
in the overall framework in terms of how language, or the theory of language,
is viewed. For Halliday, language is very much a social semiotic system;
speakers use language to interact with others in culturally determined ways. In
the Cardiff grammar, although this view is shared, it is developed within a
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cognitive approach to language. Fawcett (2005:6n) makes this difference

explicit in the following.
While the Sydney model of language is very strongly oriented to

the SOCIAL rather than the COGNITIVE, the overall model of
which the Cardiff Grammar is a part is COGNITIVE -
INTERACTIVE - that is, it brings ‘social interaction’ within a
cognitive model of a communicating mind. It is therefore both
‘cognitive’ and ‘interactive’ (and it is also ‘social’ in the broader
sense, in which social and cultural beliefs are seen as important
influences on choices in language).
An important point of distinction must be made at this point in case it has

not become clear thus far. There is a distinction to be made between the
perspective of ‘choice’ when considering the full potential of the grammar and
the perspective of ‘analysis’ when considering the actual instance of the
grammar (from which speaker choices are inferred). In this work, the focus is
on human language production even though it also presents and discusses the
results of analysis. In the Cardiff grammar the system networks inform both
the theoretical model (irrespective of computational implementation) and the
human-analyst framework. Throughout this thesis, referring expressions have
been discussed from the perspective of speakers who produce them. In both
Sydney SFL and Cardiff SFG, a model of analysis has been developed which
is based on the theory of the respective framework. For example, in the
previous chapter we considered how the nominal group is analysed in Sydney
SFL. The results of any analysis will then, in turn, inform the theoretical model.
These two very different strands have been referred to as “theoretical-
generative” and “text-descriptive” respectively (Fawcett, 2000:78). Ideally they
work together in balance in what Halliday and Fawcett (1987, cited in
Matthiessen and Bateman, 1991:xvi) refer to as the “theory-description-use-
theory cycle”.
5.1.2 Primacy of production over understanding
The full cognitive-interactive model of language has been developed to

account for both language generation and language understanding, as well as
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offering a model of text description or analysis. The two types of language

process are different, one is not the inverse of the other. According to Fawcett
(2000:172), the tasks involved are different:
If we want a theory that can be used for modelling both the

understanding and the generation of language texts, we need to
recognize that we require a different set of concepts when faced
with the task of analysing an incoming string of words (i.e.
parsing) from those needed when we are trying to model the
grammar in use for generation. In the process of generation
there is no equivalent of the problematical task of parsing.
If we take as given then that language production and comprehension are

not simple reverse processes, models of language almost necessarily will tend
to consider one process as leading the other. Fawcett insists on the primacy
of language generation, deriving, in a sense, language understanding from
generation. Consequently, in this model, generation is given the prime
importance; the model focuses then primarily on the speaker. Fawcett
(1993:630) argues that
language is not, as it has traditionally been taken to be,

directionally neutral, but that the meanings that it is organized to
express are those of the performer rather than those of the
addressee. ... the ‘theme’ of the clause is the ‘point of departure’
of the performer, deixis in language reflects the standpoint of the
Performer; modality expresses the confidence level of the
Perfomer, etc. That is, the basic model of language is that of
production.
The role of the system networks in the Cardiff grammar also support the
primacy of production over comprehension as they reflect, as we will see, the
semantic options available to the performer (in the broadened sense of
speaker).
Although Lamb’s work on stratificational grammar greatly influenced the
early development of SFL, Lamb himself argues the reverse and claims that
language understanding (‘recognition’) is the primary process from which
language generation is derived. Lamb offers four main reasons for this position
(1999:131):
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in language learning, reception generally precedes production,

not only for word forms but also for lexical items and syntactic
constructions. People generally have larger vocabularies for
understanding than production. Articulatory production is
monitored by and thus in part controlled by auditory perception.
This factor (accounts) for the difficulty experienced by deaf
people in learning how to speak. The receptive side controls
production, as when a person recognizes that a sentence being
produced is ambiguous and starts over.
This raises some very important questions as one of the central concepts
in SFL is the notion of choice. The notion of choice drives the theory and
because of this, the theoretical framework of SFL is oriented towards language
production. Cardiff SFG explicitly takes the position that language production is
of prime importance, although it must be acknowledged that Lamb makes
some strong arguments for the contrary. Even though the concept of choice
plays an integral and important role in language production in systemic
linguistics (i.e. systemic options in Sydney SFL and semantic options in Cardiff
SFG), the same cannot be said for its role in language understanding.
Although the Cardiff grammar is developing its model of language
understanding, we will not pursue it here.
5.2 The main components of the model
Our discussion here of Cardiff’s full model of a communicating mind will be

necessarily brief and selective. We will only describe the components relevant
to language production since this is the area that we are concerned with. It
should be noted that while this model also serves the computational language
model, it is not making any claims about its psychological reality. There is an
implicit assumption that is nevertheless being made here. It is that since the
model can be tested computationally, it is somehow reasonable to postulate
the model as a model of linguistic theory, which in turn informs and interacts
with a descriptive model of language analysis. The computational model has
been crucially important in testing the language model and although it is in
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some way attempting to model human cognition, it does not claim to provide
an accurate description of cognitive behaviour.
The model we see in Figure 5-2 has been described in differing degrees of
detail in the following publications: Fawcett (1980, 1993, and 2000) and
Fawcett, Tucker and Lin (1993). The diagram contains a slightly simplified
view of the main components, leaving out any detail concerning the language
understanding components. What we see here is the relationship among the
various components for language production; inputs and outputs and the flow
of information. Although we are mostly concerned with the lexicogrammar, we
will present an overview of the full model in as brief a manner as possible.
The topmost components of the model concern the cognitive and
sociolinguistic processes: the processes required to plan what to say and to
guide the selection of lexical and grammatical units so that the output (e.g.
sentence or clause) matches the speaker’s goals and intentions. The lower
components, specifically the sentence planner, relate most directly to
traditional linguistics (e.g. syntax and morphology). With input from the higher
components, the sentence planner produces the best formal and semantic
representation. We will now look at each component in more detail.
5.2.1 The overall planner
The overall planner, which is the first and highest component, is a kind of
‘overseer’ which directs discourse planning and guides the system as a whole.
This is the component that plans the propositional content in consultation with
the belief system, in other words, this is where the earliest decisions are made
in terms of what is going to be said or what is going to be talked about for a
given proposition. As we can see from the diagram, there is a two-way flow of
information between the two. There is a kind of consultancy relationship
between the overall planner and the belief system. The main difference
between a planning component and the belief system is that the latter as we
will see shortly is static (even though the items in it will change); it contains
objects. Planning components have a role to play in the entire process of
language generation; in a sense, they have jobs to do. The planners consult
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the belief system for various reasons to assist in the planning process, a kind
of decision making.
Figure 5-2: Partial view of the main generative components of the COMMUNAL
computer model
The belief system is, in a sense, at the heart of both language generation
and understanding. Although this is not shown here, various components of
language understanding also need to consult the belief system. We get a
sense of its importance from the number of components that need to have
access to it at different stages of the process. The belief system itself is object
oriented “in the sense that it consists of a vast number of specific objects and
generic objects” (Fawcett, 1994:78). It is not a system in the dynamic sense of
something that is operational. However, it is assumed that the objects it
contains are organised systemically. As Fawcett explains (1990:164), the
belief system includes “general and specific beliefs about (‘knowledge of)
situations and things in some domain; specific beliefs about the content of
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the preceding discourse, about various aspects of the current social

situation, about the addressee and his beliefs of all types, his attitudes,
his goals and plans”. Without going into further discussion about this
component, we will simply accept that such a component must exist and that it
contains the types of knowledge, information, and beliefs necessary for the
language process to take place (e.g. the lexicon) and for all the various
components to complete their tasks. No theoretical distinction is being made
here between knowledge, belief and information. It is in this component that
we find all types of beliefs held by the speaker/performer. This includes both
general and specific beliefs about social situations, about the addressee, about
the performer-addressee relationship. It also contains beliefs about register
(Field, Tenor, Mode) and the content of any relevant prior discourse. Finally it
holds ontological relations (e.g. knowledge about lexical relations).
The output from the first stages of planning is a basic logical form (Lin,
1993), which would specify, for example, the type of process involved, how
many objects are involved, and the participant roles involved (we will see an
example of this below in Section 5.2.3). This basic logical form is then the
input into the next stage of planning, which is called the microplanner. The
microplanner is a component that handles various algorithms that guide the
choices (the selection of options) in the system networks. The system
networks, contrary to what many have believed, are not decision trees. They
are a representation of the networks of systems of semantic options. This is a
very important component, yet very little attention has been given to this area
in SFL. It is broadly accepted in natural language generation that such a
component is necessary. However there are still many unanswered questions
as to how it should work and what parts of the generation process belong in
the microplanner and what parts belong elsewhere. We will discuss this in
slightly more detail further on in the next section, but suffice for now to say that
the content of the microplanner is a set of algorithms that determine the
selection of options in the system networks; for example, the selection of
Theme, verb tense, and generating referring expressions.
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5.2.2 The discourse planner
Depending on the algorithms activated in the microplanner, the output from

the microplanner feeds into the component called the Discourse Planner and
in the form of enriched logical form, it feeds into the component for
predetermination rules, which in turn is input to the system networks in the
lexicogrammar.
The discourse planner is similar to the higher planning component in the
sense that it concerns the discourse level rather than the clause level. With
the output of the algorithms in the microplanner, it modifies planning from a
higher level into plans that fit the more local discourse constraints of genre and
exchange structure grammars. In a sense, it is this component that ensures
the clause being generated will make sense or fit in with the ongoing discourse
(Lin, Fawcett, and Davies, 1993). The output from this component is a
discourse structure representation. It is this representation and the enriched
logical form that serve as the input into the system networks. At this point
then, this system of language production has already made a good number of
selections: for example, Theme, time/tense, the semantic requirements of any
referring expressions, etc.
5.2.3 The sentence planner
The final component we will consider is the sentence planner. It contains a

component for the lexicogrammar, which in turn contains two further
components: the semantic system networks component and the realization
component. At this point we are very close to the discussion we had above
concerning the relationship between semantics and form (see Figure 5-1 and
Figure 5-2). The semantic system networks are first traversed and the output
from this is a semantic representation. The semantic representation is a
collection of the semantic features selected from the system networks, which is
called a selection expression. This in turn results in a set of relevant
realization rules. The output of the realization component is a rich formal
representation: a fully labelled tree diagram representing semantic and formal
elements. We will ignore for our purposes the actual process of realization as
speech. The lexicogrammar is therefore the component that generates the
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clause and produces the formal representation. The role of the system
networks is to integrate the various decisions or selections made in the various
higher components, for example the microplanner. It is not a decision making
component but rather an integration and production mechanism.
There are two stages in this component. The first is the ‘traversal’ of the
system networks, i.e. a complete pass through the networks. This may in fact
involve more than one pass. Since the system networks represent a potential,
their traversal leads to the identification of the realization rules which will then
apply to the realization of the instance at hand. The second stage is then to
apply the realization rules thereby producing the formal representation. An
example of how this works is given below.
5.2.3.1 The system networks
The system networks in the Cardiff Grammar have a great deal in common
with those discussed in Chapter 3. Both the Sydney and Cardiff system
networks rely on the same basic notation and presentation. Therefore in this
section, there is no need to review what a system or a system network looks
like. Nevertheless, there are some important differences and these will be
discussed here. In the Cardiff Grammar, the system networks represent the full
potential of the semantic options available to an individual speaker. The
systemic features are completely semantic in nature (Fawcett, 2005:7n). The
concepts of choice and dependency are central as Fawcett explains (1980:19):
the key notions are those of choice and dependency: a system

makes available a choice between two or more features, but the
availability of such a choice is always dependent on the selection
of a logically prior feature.
Similar to Halliday’s system networks, the Cardiff systems also require an

entry condition (cf. Chapter 3). However another major distinction between the
Sydney and Cardiff system networks lies in the explicit role of the realization
rules in the Cardiff Grammar. In fact, Fawcett (2008b) goes so far as to state
that without realization rules, no systemic functional theory of language can
107
work as a model of language. He adds that without these rules or statements,

there can be no model of language production.
The realization rules are integral to the system network as they determine
the relationship between the semantic options selected by the speaker and the
formal representation realized (as speech or text, etc.). They are an essential
part of the lexicogrammar even if they are rarely made explicit in most SFL
writing (cf. Chapter 3 and 4). These rules or statements are basically
instructions on how to realise a particular meaning (expressed as a selection
expression or a set of semantic options), then you must do ‘this’. Following
Tucker (1998:47), there are basically four components to the realization rules:
1. rule number
2. network feature(s)
3. any conditions on the rules
4. rule operations.
For example, in the small system network presented in Figure 5-3 below, if the
feature [situation] is selected (as it would need to be in order to generate a
clause), then as Fawcett (2008a:100) explains, the corresponding realization
rule is to insert a clause and within the clause to insert a main verb (see
Section 5.3 below for a description of the Cardiff theory of functional syntax). If
the feature [information giver] is selected then the realization rule specifies that
the Subject must be positioned before the Operator.
Realization rules may be very simple or very complex. For example, the
realization rule for the feature [thing] in the system network for thing (Fawcett,
1998) states:
60 : thing:
if congruent_thing then ngp,
if minor_relationship_with_thing then pgp.
This example shows the rule number (60), the system feature ([thing]), and
the operation (insert unit, i.e. ‘unit insertion rule’). This rule handles the
difference between examples such as the woman and to the man as in the
woman gave the ticket to the man. In the first case, the woman, rule 60 would
insert a nominal group. In the second case, it would insert a prepositional
group for to the man. A more complex rule will have conditions such as in the
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following example which covers the realization of the system feature of

[prediction] and [future time reference point] (Fawcett, 2008b).
5: prediction or future-trp (time reference point) :

if not negative then O < “will”,
if negative then O < “wo”.
As stated in rule (5) above, the rule applies when either [prediction] or
[future time reference point] has been selected. It also describes the
conditions of realization dependent on whether or not the system feature
[negative] has also been selected. If it has not been selected, the Operator
will be expounded by will and if it has, the Operator will be expounded by wo.
This will be combined with the realization rule for [negative], which is as follows
(and also applies when the feature [confirmation seeker] is selected:
21: negative or confirmation-seeker :

O <+ “n’t”.
The final realization then for [prediction] and [negative] will be that the
Operator will be expounded by won’t, as in He won’t phone. It is therefore the
features of the system network and the realization rules which create the
formal representation. As Fawcett explains (2000:149),
the first stage is the selection of the features in the system

network (i.e., the creation of a selection expression). The
realization rules then integrate the various partial ‘strands of
meaning’ that are represented by these features into a single
functional structure.
As the examples above show, the realization component has the function
of integrating the selected semantic features and they control the realization of
the form. There is no need to consider more complex rules as an explanation
of their application would be beyond the boundaries of this thesis.
It is also possible for a realization rule to specify another semantic feature
that must be selected on a future pass or on the same pass through the
network. In the former, a preference is given for a particular feature on a future
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pass. This is one way in which preselection occurs, where a realization rule
preselects other features. According to Tucker (1998:46), “the preselection of
one feature from a system is equivalent to stating that in the relevant context
there is no systemic choice, and consequently no choice in meaning or in
structural realization”.
The first pass through the networks deals with the clause ([situation]),
whereas the second pass typically will serve to fill an element of the clause
such as Subject. Subject is most commonly filled by a nominal group ([thing])
and the selection of [thing] would have been preselected from a realization rule
determined by the selection of certain semantic features on the first pass.
Preselection may also occur if the planner has passed down an instruction to
select a particular feature (e.g. validity assessment). Same pass rules cover
relationships between features which can be thought of as a kind of co-
dependency. For example certain process types are far more likely to prefer
progressive aspect and others are far more likely to disprefer progressive
aspect. In other words, action type processes in the present tense are more
likely to be progressive than are mental type processes (cf. John is bouncing
the ball versus John bounces the ball and John sees the bird versus John is
seeing the bird).
SEMANTICS REALIZATION RULES

(MEANINGS) (FORMS)
information giver . . . . . S O or S M or if [being] S O/M
polarity seeker . . . . . . OS or if [being] O/M S

being . . . . . . . . . S, M < form of "be", C
one participant S, M < form of "simmer", "die", etc

action
situation two participants S, M < form of "simmer", "visit", etc, C
Cl
validity assessed O < "may", "might", etc
M validity unassessed
no circumstance
manner . . A
circumstance
time position A
Key:
= enter all systems to the right = choose between the features to the right
= is realized as < = is expounded by
Figure 5-3: A very small systemic functional grammar for the English clause
(Fawcett, 2008a:93)
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5.2.3.2 Probabilities
In addition to the system features in the system networks and the

realizations rules, another important component to the sentence planner is the
inclusion of probabilities. The probabilities have an important role in modelling
language production. They refer to relative frequencies. The notion of more or
less probable replaces that of grammatical versus ungrammatical in the Cardiff
Grammar (Fawcett, 2008a:18). The role of the probabilities in the system
networks is basically two-fold. One is that they reflect tendencies or the
frequency distribution of the features in a given system. The other is that they
can be set (for example by a realization rule) to preselect (effectively remove
the ‘choice’ from the system) or exclude a particular systemic feature. In the
generation of a referring expression, for example, the selection of the feature
[thing] is preset to 100%. Figure 5-4 below illustrates a simplified system
network for the ‘information’ sub-network of the Mood system network, where
the semantic features are shown together with their associated probabilities
and examples of the realization for each feature. As explained by Fawcett
(2008b), “probabilities … change from one context of situation to another, and
furthermore … they are often overridden by the requirements of the
performer’s current communicative purposes”. Therefore the probability
associated to a given semantic feature is not fixed but will change depending
on many other variables. The probabilities included in the Cardiff Grammar
have been derived primarily from corpus linguistics research.
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Figure 5-4: A simplified system network for the ‘information’ sub-network of MOOD
(Fawcett, 2008a:157)
5.2.3.3 Traversing the system network
Presenting the full system networks for generating a clause is far beyond
the limits of space afforded here. However from the very limited examples
shown above in Figure 5-3 and Figure 5-4, the concept of the system network
should be clear. The selection of a given feature may lead to another system
or to a set of systems, or it may lead to a realization rule. Systems may be
entered in parallel, as is the case shown in Figure 5-3 where there are four
systems in parallel (shown by ‘{‘ ). In theory, parallel systems are meant to be
entered simultaneously.
The short examples of system networks shown in Figure 5-3 and Figure
5-3 are not detailed enough to illustrate the process of traversing the network.
The full system network is far too large to present here. Instead, as a brief
example, we will consider some of the semantic features selected in order to
generate a simple clause such as I drove the car (invented example), using the
system networks in the computational implementation of the Cardiff Grammar
as presented in Fawcett, Tucker and Lin, 1993. The first selection (which is in
fact preselected) is the feature [situation] (other features are possible, such as
[thing], but [situation] is the semantic feature for the clause). This then leads to
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eight parallel systems: TRANSITIVITY, TIME SPECIFICATION, SITUATION CO
ORDINATION, SUBORDINATION TYPE, MOOD, POLARITY, LOGICAL CIRCUMSTANCE, and

INFORMATION FOCUS. Each of these systems presents the semantic options
available within that system and each will lead to further systems. Selections
must be made for each system and this process is continued until a terminal
feature is reached for all relevant systems.
Then in the transitivity system, a process type must be selected and in our
case it would be an action process type, specified as driving. In addition to this
and as part of the transitivity system subject-theme is selected (this has to be
considered here in order to identify subject-verb agreement). This selects
which participant is meant to be conflated with Subject (i.e. I drove the car
versus the car was driven by me). Further selections are made here in terms of
voice and the number of participants expressed. The time_specification
system represents circumstances of time. In our example there are none. The
situation_co_ordination system identifies whether the clause will be simplex or
complex. Our example is a simplex. The subordination_type is preset to main
given this is the first pass of the system networks and what is being generated
is the matrix clause. In the mood system, a selection is made between
[information] or [directive]. In this example, [information] would have been
selected as this clause is an information giver. In the polarity system, [positive]
would have been selected, (cf. I didn’t drive the car.). In the
logical_circumstance system, since there are no circumstance roles involved in
the generation of this clause, the feature that would have been selected would
be [no logical circumstance specified]. Finally the information_focus system
represents the meanings associated to contrastive newness and since no
element in the clause is to be marked as contrastively new, [no element
marked as contrastively new] would have been selected. Following the
completion of this first pass through the system network, a selection
expression is produced and this determines the realization rules that apply. At
this point, as a result of the semantic options selected what we have generated
so far can be expressed in notation as follows:
∑|Cl → S/Theme/Agent
M < “drive”
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C/Affected
This notation states that a sentence is generated and filled with a clause.
The clause has three elements: Subject (S), Main Verb (M) and Complement
(C). The Subject is conflated with Theme and Agent functions and the
complement is conflated with the role of Affected. It also states that the Main
Verb is expounded by the item ‘drive’. This terminology will be explained in the
next section. The realization rules have been omitted here to save space but
they would be similar in nature to the examples shown above. Furthermore,
there would be a realization rule associated to the verb ‘drive’ which would
ensure the correct morphology of the verb given the semantic options selected
in the system network. It should be clear from the results of the first pass that
the process is incomplete. Further passes are necessary in order to complete
the intended clause (I drove the car). This involves re-entering the system
network to generate the two participants (I and the car). This will be done
following a realization rule from the TRANSITIVITY system which would state that
the network must be re-entered preferring the [thing] feature. This preselection
leads to the generation of a referring expression.
What this short demonstration shows is that the process of traversing the
system networks is complex and very detailed. The example has barely
scratched the surface of the system network. The point here is not to describe
the traversal process in detail but to provide a sufficiently simple example in
order to give the reader an idea of the steps involved and the relationship
between the system network and realization. In the next chapter, a more
detailed account of traversal will be given in the discussion of the treatment of
referring expressions in the Cardiff Grammar. To complete this overview of the
Cardiff Grammar, the next section describes the Cardiff theory of functional
syntax.
5.3 Cardiff theory of functional syntax
Fawcett (2005:iii) states that “any framework that provides a description of

all or a part of a language must, if it is to be insightful and reliable, be based in
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a sound theory”. It has been claimed by Fawcett (2000:1) that current systemic
functional theory has no theory of syntax with the exception of his book.
The statement that SFL has no theory of syntax must be considered in
context. As Fawcett explains, Halliday’s “Categories of the theory of grammar”
(1961) was indeed a theory of syntax. However as developments in systemic
functional linguistics progressed, the focus was shifted towards meaning at the
expense of any similar developments in the theory of formal representation.
According to Butler (2002:61), the proposals presented in Fawcett (2000) are
most welcome since “(the book) not only sets out in detail the approach to the
syntactic part of the grammar taken by the Cardiff group, but also offers
detailed and explicit arguments for these views, in relation to the proposals
made by Halliday”.
In this section we will consider the syntactic framework within the Cardiff
Grammar. According to Fawcett (2007:8), there are four key concepts which
contribute to the syntax of any unit in the Cardiff grammar. These are:
1. the system network that defines the language’s meaning
potential,
2. the selection expression of features chosen from it on any
one traversal of it,
3. the realization rules that these trigger, and
4. the structure that is their output in any one instance,
consisting of syntax and items.
In the Cardiff grammar, the transition from system network to syntax or

formal presentation is seamless in the sense that the output from the system
network is a set of selection expressions together with the relevant realization
rules which determine the formal realization of the linguistic expression being
generated. This output represents specific instances of the language system
and these in turn lead to specific instances of the formal representation of
language.
The structure of the clause in the Cardiff grammar is significantly different
from the Sydney grammar as can been seen in Figure 5-5 and Figure 5-6,
illustrating each model respectively, and both using an example from Fawcett
(2008a:86), Ivy’s wealthy. In the Cardiff grammar, the clause is seen as the
central unit. The main components of the grammar are units (groups),
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elements, and items. The term item refers to “word base forms and inflectional
morphemes” (Tucker, 1998:48n). These form the basic categories of the
functional syntax in the Cardiff grammar. They are illustrated in Figure 5-7.
The relationships among the various components are shown in Figure 5-8.
The relationship amongst them is explained by Fawcett (2008a:76) as follows:
i. a unit is composed of one or more elements;

ii. some elements are directly expounded by items;
iii. other elements are filled by a unit (or units);
iv. any such unit is itself composed of one or more elements;
v. and so on, up to a maximum depth of around seven units
(plus or minus two) until finally –
vi. the lowest element is expounded by an item.
Therefore, componence is the relationship between a unit and its elements.

Filling describes the relationship between an element and the unit realizing
that element (e.g. Subject is typically filled by a nominal group). When an
element is not filled by a unit but rather expounded by an item, the relationship
is that of exponence (see Figure 5-8).
Figure 5-5: Basic syntax of the Figure 5-6: Basic grammar of the clause in the
clause in the Cardiff Sydney Grammar
grammar
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Figure 5-7: The basic categories of syntax (Fawcett, 2008a:74)
Figure 5-8: The basic relationships of syntax (Fawcett, 2008a:75)
Whereas for Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:54) the elements of the

clause are word groups and phrases such as nominal group, verbal group,
prepositional phrase and adverbial group, in the Cardiff grammar, the elements
of the clause (see below) are functional elements which are, as Fawcett stated
above (2008a:76), either filled by unit of structure or expounded by an item.
For example, Subject is most likely to be filled by a nominal group and the
Main Verb is most likely to be expounded by some lexical verb.
According to Butler (2002:75-76), it is “the relationships of filling and
exponence (that) make possible the realisation of recursion in the grammar.
Recursion is located in the systemic component of the grammar, leading to
realisation rules which specify that the system network must be re-entered”. It
is therefore the re-entry into the system network that specifies the recursion
and specifically filling captures this process.
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There is another important distinction which is inherent in the

representation of the structure of the clause. This is the role of the formal
structure of the clause. In the Sydney grammar, structural representation is
not given any prominence, and instead the focus is on the three main strands
of meaning (i.e. textual, interpersonal and ideational). In the Cardiff grammar,
the three main strands of meaning are integrated into the overall model to such
a point that they have no formal role in the grammar. For Halliday, Subject,
for example, is not an element of structure, although this was the original
proposal in earlier work (notably, Halliday, 1961). In current Sydney SFL,
Subject, Predicator, Complement and Adjunct are treated as “the ‘secondary’
structure of interpersonal meaning” (Fawcett, 2000:154).
Although the integrated nature of the functions of the clause means that
they are not as visibly present or as explicit as they may seem in Sydney SFL,
there are nevertheless present. The full list of the strands of meaning is given
in Figure 5-9 where each strand of meaning is associated to the unit which
expresses it. In considering Sydney SFL, we only considered three of these
(experiential, interpersonal, and textual). This does not mean to imply or
suggest that Sydney SFL is limited to these as this is not the case. This
overview of Cardiff SFG will similarly not cover every strand of meaning since
this is clearly beyond the limitations of space and scope for this thesis.
However since the experiential strand of meaning, as was argued in Chapter
3, is of particular relevance to the study of referring expressions, more detail
will be given concerning the types of meaning expressed within the clause with
respect to experiential meaning to the exclusion of the other strands of
meaning. In the Cardiff grammar, the main elements of the clause are given in
Table 5-1.
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strand of meaning expressed in the unit of:

Clause
experiential TRANSITIVITY
CIRCUMSTANCES
CONTROL & DISPOSITION
TIME
logical relations CO-ORDINATION
SUBORDINATION
EXTERNAL LOGICAL RELATIONS
interpersonal MOOD
negativity POLARITY
validity BASIC & AUXILIARY VALIDITY
ADJUNCTIVAL VALIDITY
affective AFFECTIVE ADJUNCTS
thematic SUBJECT THEME
NON-S PR AS MARKED THEME
ADJUNCT THEME &INTEGRATION
ENHANCED THEMES
informational RECOVERABILITY
UNMARKED NEWNESS
CONTRASTIVE NEWNESS
INFORMATION STATUS
Figure 5-9: Strands of meaning in Cardiff SFG (from Fawcett, 2005:66)
Table 5-1: The main elements of the clause in the Cardiff Grammar
Element Example
Subject (S) John, in John drove the car
Operator (O) does, in John does drive the car
Auxiliary Verb, several types (X) is, in John is driving the car
Infinitive Element (I) to, in John wants to drive the car
Main Verb (M) drove, in John drove the car
Main Verb Extension (MEx) asleep , in John fell asleep
Complement (C) the car, in John drove the car
Adjunct, many types (A) yesterday, in John drove the car yesterday
Linker (&) but, in But John drove the car
Binder (B) because, in because John drove the car
Formulaic Element (F) thanks
Let Element (L) let’s
Negator (N) not, in John did not drive the car
As we have already seen, the semantic unit under consideration here is

that of the situation. The formal representation of a situation is a clause. Both
have equivalent pivotal elements as shown in Figure 5-10. The ‘pivotal’
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element is similar to the notion of headedness in other syntactic theories. As

Fawcett explains (2000:195), “other elements in a group typically depend on
the presence of the ‘pivotal element’“. For example, the presence of Subject
depends on the presence of the Main Verb and the presence of modifier
depends on the presence of the head noun in the nominal group.
Figure 5-10: The relationship between Meaning and Form for situation and clause
(from Fawcett, 2008a:47)
In addition to the unit of the clause, the following remaining units will now
be considered in turn:
• nominal group (ngp)
• prepositional group (pgp)
• quality group (qlgp)
• quantity group (qtgp)
• genitive cluster (genclr)
5.3.1 The nominal group
The nominal group has as its components five types of element:

determiners (various types), selector, modifier, qualifier and the head. The full
list of the elements of the nominal group, with examples, is as given in Table
5-2.
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Table 5-2: Examples (Fawcett, 2007) of individual elements of the nominal group,
element being sampled is in italics, head is underscored, each example
may be composed of more than one element.
Element of the nominal group: Example:
representational determiner (rd) a recording of her voice
selector (v) (always ‘of’), in various positions a recording of her voice
partitive determiner (pd) the back of the house,
fractionative determiner (fd) half the population
quantifying determiner (qd) two cultures
superlative determiner (sd) the fastest of the runners
ordinative determiner (od) the first of the runners
qualifier-introducing determiner (qid) those of her family
typic determiner (td) a different brand of oil
deictic determiner (dd) the castle
modifier (m) the old castle
head (h) the old castle
qualifier (q) the old castle in the centre of the city
The order of occurrence of these elements is more or less fixed as follows,

where ‘&’ is a Linker and is an element of all groups (since all groups can be
conjoined):
ngp > (&) (rd) (v) (pd) (qd) (v) (sd or od) (v) (dd) (m)* h (q)*,
where elements in parenthesis indicate that the element is optional and

elements marked with an asterisk indicate that the element may be repeated
(e.g. a nominal group may have more than one modifier).
One common structure of the nominal group is shown in Figure 5-11. The
configuration here contains the most common elements, although depending
on the type of text, qualifiers are generally quite rare (see for example Quirk et
al., 1985, Biber and Clark, 2002, and results from this thesis in Chapters 9 and
10). As stated above, all elements are either filled by another unit or they are
expounded by an item. In the case of the example in Figure 5-11, the deictic
determiner and the head are both expounded by an item; the and castle
respectively. The modifier and qualifier are each filled by another unit: the
modifier is filled with a quality group and the qualifier is filled with a
prepositional group, as we can see in Figure 5-12.
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e.g. the old castle in the centre of the city
Figure 5-11: A common configuration of the nominal group in the Cardiff grammar
We will complete the syntactic representation for this example once we

have described the quality group and the prepositional group.
the old castle in the centre of the city
Figure 5-12: Filling and Exponence in the nominal group
There is a distinction to be made between determiners on the one hand

and modifiers and qualifiers on the other hand. In very general terms,
determiners function to identify the referent through a process called ‘selection’
(see Fawcett, forthcoming a) and modifiers and qualifiers function to (sub-)
classify the referent (ibid.). The treatment of determiners in the Cardiff
grammar has been worked out in great detail as can be seen from the various
types of determiners treated as elements of the nominal group. As Fawcett
explains (2007:8) “modifiers also serve one (typically) of three broad functions:
in principle, all modifiers can be used to classify the referent, but some simply
depict (cf. ‘defining’ and ‘nondefining’) and some are affective (nice, nasty)”.
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5.3.2 The prepositional group
The prepositional group is another important unit with respect to this study
as it also functions as an expression that refers to a referent (either referent
thing or referent situation).
The prepositional group (pgp) is a unit having a preposition as its head
together with two other elements: completive (cv), which is an obligatory
element, and an optional prepositional temperer (pt). The completive element
is a significant element for the study of referring expressions as it is most
frequently filled by a nominal group (cf. Chapter 9)
The completive is always filled with either a nominal group or a clause. In
the diagram above it is shown filled with a nominal group. The preposition (as
the head of the group) is typically expounded by an item (e.g. ‘of’). An
example of a fully labelled tree diagram of the prepositional group can be seen
in Figure 5-14.
Key
pgp: Prepositional Group
tp: prepositional temperer
p: preposition
cv: completive
Figure 5-13 : Diagram of the structure of the prepositional group
Figure 5-14: Example of the syntax of the prepositional group
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5.3.3 The quality group
The quality group (qlgp) is perhaps the most developed unit in the Cardiff
grammar, having been described extensively in Tucker (1998), and arguably
more developed as a unit in the Cardiff grammar than in any other account of
syntax. This group expresses the syntax and functions associated to both
adjectives and adverbs. It is called the quality group as it covers the range of
qualities used to describe referent things and referent situations.
Consequently it is most commonly found filling the modifier element in the
nominal group (for adjectives), as seen in Figure 5-15, and filling the adjunct
element in the clause (for adverbs). The pivotal element of the quality group is
the apex, which is always expounded by an adjective or an adverb depending
on whether the quality group is functioning relative to a referent thing or a
referent situation.
Figure 5-15: Full tree diagram showing a nominal group, a quality group and a
prepositional group
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The full syntax of the quality group is illustrated in Figure 5-16.
Key:
ex = extent; d = determiners (quality deictic determiner, quality quantifying determiner); t =
temperers (te = emphasizing temperer; ta = adjunctival temperer); td = degree temperer; a =
apex; sc = scope elements (may be repeated [sc1] [sc2]; f = finisher (can occur either before or
after the scope elements.
Figure 5-16: Full structure of the Quality Group
Examples of quality groups with an adjective expounding the apex are

shown in Table 5-3 and examples of an adverb expounding the apex are given
in Table 5-4.
Table 5-3: Examples of the quality group with an adjective expounding the apex
(from Tucker, 1998)
Ex td ta a td f sc
Much angrier than ever with him
so clever
politically stupid
strong enough
Table 5-4: Examples of the quality group with an adverb expounding the apex
Ex td ta A td f sc
very carefully
More carefully than ever
5.3.4 The quantity group
The quantity group expresses the quantities of things, situations, qualities

and even quantities (Fawcett, 2000:207). The pivotal element of this group is
called amount (am) and in addition to this, there are two other elements:
adjustor and quantity finisher, as shown in Figure 5-17. As with other groups,
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these elements may be filled by another unit (often a nominal group in the
case of the quantity group, as in numbers) or expounded by an item. Examples
of the realization of quantity group are illustrated Table 5-5.
Key:
ad = adjustor; am = amount; qtf = quantity finisher
Figure 5-17: The structure of the Quantity group
Table 5-5: Examples of the quantity group (from Fawcett, 2000:307)

Ad am qtf
sixty
About sixty
more than I had expected
5.3.5 The genitive cluster
The final structure described in this presentation of the Cardiff Grammar is

the genitive cluster. It does not follow the same structure as the groups
discussed above. The most common role of the genitive cluster is to fill the
element of deictic determiner in the nominal group. The generic structure of
the genitive cluster is given in Figure 5-18, with examples given in Table 5-6.
Key:
po = possessor; g = genitive element;
o = own element
Figure 5-18: Diagram showing the generic structure of the deictic determiner
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Table 5-6: Examples of the realization of the genitive cluster (from Fawcett, 2000:307)
po g o
my
the man ‘s
his own
his very own
This concludes the description of the various grammatical structures in the

Cardiff Grammar. One final area is left to be discussed and this is the view of
transitivity as it relates to Participant Roles in the clause with respect to
experiential meaning.
5.3.6 Transitivity in the Cardiff Grammar
Throughout the presentation of Systemic Functional Linguistics so far, it

has been emphasised that the experiential strand of meaning is the most
relevant for the study of referring expressions. We have been focussing on
what is called the experiential strand of meaning. Experiential meaning is the
strand of meaning which represents events and objects; it represents the
speaker’s experience of the world. One of the main types of experiential
meaning is the system of transitivity. It is this system that defines processes
and participants. An overview of the classification of processes and
participants is given in Table 5-7.
Table 5-7: Main Processes and Participant Roles in the Cardiff grammar
Process ([Pro]) Participant Roles Example
Action Agent [Ag] I [Ag] bought [Pro] a new game [Af]
Affected [Af]
relational Carrier [Ca] That [Ca] is [Pro] a great game [At]
Attribute [At] I [Ca] have [Pro] two dogs [Pos]
Possessed [Pos] My mother [Ca] is [Pro] in Canada [Loc]
Location [Loc]
mental Perceiver [Perc] John [Cog] knows [Pro] the answer [Ph]
Cognizant [Cog] John [Perc] saw [Pro] the moose [Ph]
Emoter [Em] John [Em] loves his new job [Ph]
Phenomenon [Ph]
environmental (no Participant Roles, only It rained [Pro] today
Process)
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Although the basic relationships of the syntax developed in the Cardiff

Grammar were given earlier in this section, one relationship has not yet
discussed and it is an extremely important relationship since it explains how
the various functions come together in a multifunctional view of language.
Specifically, it needs to be made clear how the functions exemplified in Table
5-7 map onto the structure of the clause as described Figure 5-8 above.
According to Fawcett (2008a:84), conflation is the technical term for the
process whereby elements are fused together. Often conflation occurs
between elements representing meanings from two different strands of
meaning (Fawcett, 2008a:84). The relationship of conflation is illustrated in
Figure 5-19 using a simplified version of the example in Figure 5-8, Ivy will
wash her hair. In this example, the Subject is conflated with Agent and the
Complement is conflated with Affected. Depending on the process type,
Subject will most often be conflated with some Participant Role (although not
always), while Complement is always conflated with a Participant Role.
Adjuncts may be conflated with a Circumstance Role. It is through conflation
that the relationship between syntax and semantics is made explicit in the
Cardiff grammar.
Figure 5-19: Example of conflation between elements
5.3.6.1 Compound participant roles
It is also possible for an element to be conflated with more than a single

Participant Role. Both Sydney SFL and Cardiff SFG include compound
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Participant Roles where a single element of structure expresses a compound

role in transitivity. An example of this is given in (49), where one referent
expresses a compound role. The key to the abbreviations are as follows:
[S]=Subject, [M]=Main Verb, [C]=Complement, [Ag]=Agent, [Af]=Affected,
[Ca]=Carrier, and [At]=Attribute. Compound roles are hyphenated.
Consequently, in (49), Ivan represents the role of Affected and Carrier
simultaneously.
(49) The war [S/Ag] made [M] Ivan [C/Af-Ca] very rich [C/At]
(from Fawcett, forthcoming a)
Conflation is an essential relationship in the approach to complex referring

expressions as will be shown in Chapter 7.
5.4 Summary
This chapter attempted to provide an overview of the Cardiff model of a

communicating mind from the perspective of language generation, as opposed
to language understanding. It must be kept in mind that this is only a very
small portion of the entire system network as it would be practically impossible
to present it in its entirety in this thesis. If we refer back to Figure 5-2, which
showed us the various components of the model, we have covered at least a
bit of all components except for the realization component. The output of the
realization component is a formal representation which is represented by fully
labelled tree diagrams. They are fully labelled in the sense that all functional
and formal roles are included.
The next chapter describes in detail the treatment of referring expressions
in the Cardiff model of language from the planning stages to the realization of
the nominal group. This includes a presentation of the relevant algorithm for
referring to ‘thing’ as part of the (micro) planning stage of referring. It also
includes a discussion and illustration of the system network for ‘thing’. Since
this network plays a critical role in this thesis, the ultimate goal of Chapter 6 is
to provide the necessary background for understanding the theoretical
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approach to referring expressions in the Cardiff model of language from

system networks to realization.
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Chapter 6: The place of referring expressions in the Cardiff model
6. The place of referring expressions in the Cardiff model
During the course of any conversation a speaker will need to refer to

‘things’ (again, ‘thing’ here means conceptual object and this could be a
physical thing, abstract thing, imagined thing, etc.). This activity is so common
that it may seem quite straightforward. We have words that denote objects
and we use them to talk about the things that we want to talk about. It is far
from being that straightforward however. We do not only use single word
expressions of denotation. Before a speaker can formulate a referring
expression, he or she must have knowledge of certain things like, for example,
whether or not the object in question has been mentioned before (including
how long ago if it has been mentioned previously) or whether or not the
addressee knows anything about it.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the answers to these questions (and
many others) are contained in the belief system. The planners serve to help
the speaker to make appropriate selections in generating the referring
expression. The role of the planners is to identify the semantic options to be
selected from the system networks. After traversing the system networks, the
selection expressions determine the realization rules to be applied which in
turn determines the final linguistic representation. How speakers refer to a
thing they want to talk about then can be seen as a process that begins in a
conceptual framework and proceeds through to the actual expression
produced.
The purpose of this chapter is to focus on the processes involved in the
production of referring expressions. This includes the relevant portion of the
microplanner (i.e. a look at part of the algorithm for generating referring
expressions); the relevant system networks and realization rules and the
formal or syntactic representation of the expressions. In considering this, a
walkthrough is used, following Fawcett (1980), to provide an overview on how
these expressions are produced and how they fit in to the overall model. As
stated throughout the past few chapters, it is beyond the limits of space in this
thesis to present a full discussion of the system networks. Therefore it is hoped
that by following a consistent scenario to walk the reader through first the main
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areas of generating a referring expression through to the syntax of the nominal

group, a general understanding of the processes involved will be gained. This
general understanding is essential to following the theoretical arguments
presented in Chapter 7, the methodology developed for this research in
Chapter 8 and the results of the analysis of referring expressions in Chapters 9
and 10.
6.1 Conceptual and formal representations of referring

expressions
As was shown in Chapter 5, the Cardiff model attempts to cover the

process of producing language from a cognitive-social perspective. The
language production process begins with cognitive components, a thought or
desire on the part of the speaker to say something for whatever reason, and it
works this through to the point of some kind of linguistic output, e.g. speech. If
we consider, as Fawcett argues (Fawcett, 1980:90), that “input to the linguistic
code is a more or less well-defined mental construct to which the performer
wishes to refer”, then the model can be seen as the process of a kind of
transformation from the conceptual (cognitive) to the formal (linguistic).
There are two strata of conceptual referents (i.e. the ‘more or less well-
defined mental constructs’). The first, called ‘referent situation’, is a term to
describe the speaker’s conceptual notion of an event to which he or she
wishes to refer. The referent situation is pre-semantic in the sense that it is the
input to the language system rather than part of it; it begins to get semantic
definition through the planning components of the language system and this is
formalized in the system networks as we will see shortly. The ‘referent
situation’ will eventually be expressed or realized as the clause in terms of
experiential meaning, i.e. a process and participants. The second is called
‘referent thing’. This term refers to conceptual objects in the speaker’s mind (a
mental construct); it will become a referring expression as the speaker wants
to say something about it or at least to mention it in some way. ‘Referent
situation’ is to the clause as ‘referent thing’ is to the nominal group. The
relationship between the two is shown in Figure 6-1 below and represents the
transformation from the cognitive or conceptual to the formal, where clause
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and nominal group are respectively the formal representations of referent

situation and referent thing after having gone through the various planning
components of the language system. We will come to this in more detail very
shortly.
Before discussing the details of how referring expressions are handled in
the Cardiff Grammar, there is an inference that is apparent in Figure 6-1 that
should be discussed at this point. The conceptual object to which the speaker
wishes to refer, at a higher planning stage of language production, constitutes
a single referent. There are three basic concepts governing this relationship
(Fawcett, 1980:205): “each nominal group has a single referent; it may be
specified in terms of a series of selections; there is no semantics of the ‘word’
separate from that for the nominal group”.
This means that regardless of the complexity of the nominal group, as a
unit it is produced by a speaker in order to refer to one single referent even if in
doing so it calls on other referents that may be embedded in the expression
(whether by selection e.g. quantification, or by qualification). The relationship
between noun and nominal group is seen as continuous in this model: “words
are generated directly from the system networks that generate groups”
(Fawcett, 1980:205). Therefore the system network for thing leads
continuously to systems that will lead to the generation of ‘words’ as part of the
realization rules associated to the system networks.
Mental Construct Referent Situation Referent Thing
pre-semantic level Event Object
semantic level Situation Thing
formal level Clause nominal group
Figure 6-1: The relationship between referent situation and referent thing (from
Fawcett, forthcoming a)
Although noun senses may seem at first as though they are classified in an
ontological taxonomy, they are represented within the relevant system
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networks. The system networks for noun lexis are system networks, with entry
conditions (often complex entry conditions) and they have realization rules
attached to them. Nouns in English denote classes of objects and relative to
the discussion in the previous chapter concerning the relationship between a
conceptual object and the actual object that is being referred to by the
speaker, the head noun of a nominal group will have the function of identifying
the class of thing for the object (Fawcett, forthcoming a). This classification
system for nouns is called the ‘cultural classification’ system, as individual
languages may have different arrangements of noun senses. As we will see
below, when the cultural classification is not deemed sufficient (for whatever
reason) for specifying the referent, it will be further sub-classified with an ad
hoc description for the purposes of the current referent. The expression may
also be further defined through systems such as particularization and
quantification for example.
6.2 Planning a referring expression
As stated earlier, it is impossible to present the full system networks or

even indeed simply the system network for [thing] due to how vast and detailed
these systems are. Instead of trying to capture all possibilities, a particular
example will be used. The example chosen comes from one of the corpora
analysed in this research (the GAE corpus, see Chapter 8). The context of this
example is an exchange by email between a mother and her adult daughter.
They are discussing a relative who has cancer. The particular clause of
interest here is given in example (50).
(50) The chemo pills she takes are working
In preparing to produce this utterance, the overall planner is activated to

guide the entire planning of the process. The first thing generated is the event.
This is the semantic entity which will eventually be realised as a clause. There
is no need to duplicate the process involved in producing the clause as this
was covered in Chapter 5. Since we are considering this example
retrospectively, we already know the end result, i.e. the clause the chemo pills
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she takes are working (see example (50) above). However in the earliest
planning stages, the basic logical form (Lin, 1993) would resemble something
similar to what is presented in (51):
(51) event(event1[agent=object1, process=work]),
where the speaker’s intention is assumed be to say something about

something working. We will not discuss the numerical notation assigned to
each object; in sum objects have numbers to identify them in the belief system.
In this example there is only one object to which the speaker wishes to refer
and it is labelled as object1. Given what the speaker would know about the
process of working (by consulting the belief system), the basic form of the
expression to be generated would be described in more familiar terms as
having an Action process ‘work’, and one participant role; which would be
Agent (cf. Material process and Actor in Sydney SFL). Note that at this point
no other information is known, such as tense, as this is to be determined in the
microplanner.
The following is a very simplified description of how the grammar works to
produce the referring expression, the chemo pills she is taking. The relevant
system networks for the clause will not be given here as our focus is on
referring expressions and an overview of the main systems was given in the
previous chapter. A full discussion of the steps in generating a clause is given
in detail in Fawcett, Tucker, and Lin (1993). Our purpose here is to
understand the production of referring expressions. In a sense, referring
expressions, in theory, are not dependent on the clause for their expression.
However as we will see in the algorithm presented below and in Chapter 9,
there are effects on referring expressions from both discourse and clause
perspectives.
We can assume that at the point of making selections concerning the way
in which the speaker will refer to the referent, selections have already been
made concerning Subject and Theme (see Fawcett, Tucker and Lin, 1993 and
also the previous chapter). Therefore, object1 (which will eventually be
realised as the chemo pills she takes) is already known to be Agent, Subject,
and Theme. In other words Agent, Subject and Theme are conflated. It is also
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already determined by this point that there is no Complement and no other

participant role.
As may have been obvious from the discussion of system networks in the
previous chapter, referring expressions are never produced in the first pass of
the system networks. The first pass generates the main components of the
clause (e.g. Main Verb, Operator, what roles are conflated with Subject, etc.).
All referring expressions are generated by preselection. In other words, the
type of element being filled is always known. In entering the system networks
in order to produce a referring expression, [referent thing] is preselected to fill
the Agent conflated with Subject/Theme. This will generate the chemo pills she
takes as object1, filling Subject/Agent/Theme.
Before entering the system networks for referent thing, the microplanning
component would have already determined the best way for the speaker to
refer to the referent in question. It is this lower planning component that
governs which semantic features will be selected from the system network. In
the Cardiff Grammar, the relevant component for planning referring
expressions is an algorithm. The output from this algorithm (i.e. considerations
and decisions about which features to select) would have been determined
before the first pass in the system networks to generate the clause. It should
be clear now that the system networks themselves are not a decision making
mechanism. They represent the system potential in semantic terms. The
reason for selecting any give feature is handled outside the networks in the
microplanner. As was discussed in Chapter 2, there is consensus in the
natural language programming field for the need for such a component in
language generation (see Section 2.3.4 in Chapter 2).
In order to gain a sense of the process involved in generating a referring
expression, the current algorithm for referring expressions will now be
considered. The full algorithm has not been published, although it exists as a
work in progress. It is very long, detailed and complex and since the purpose
here is to give a general representation of the overall model, we will not
attempt to cover the full algorithm. Instead we will consider a portion of it taken
from Cook (1991) as an example of the way the algorithm works. This is given
in Figure 6-2.
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The first thing to note in the algorithm is that a distinction is made between
the referent (R) and the referring expression (RE). The referent (R) can be
seen as the mental construct of Referent Thing (see above) while the referring
expression (RE) is the target expression that has yet to be determined. The
algorithm first names the referent X in order to identify it since it has no
linguistic expression at this point and it is simply a concept in the mind of the
speaker.
The main concepts needed here are: recoverability, distractors,
disambiguation, namability and novelty. Recoverability concerns whether or
not the speaker believes the addressee will be able to identify the referent
through some type of reference, in other words whether or not the addressee
can recover the referent’s meaning (Cook, 1991:25). This affects the selection
of the referring expression because if the speaker knows that the addressee
will easily recover what the referent is then a pronoun, for example, can be
used by the speaker to refer to the referent. The lower the ambiguity, the more
strongly recoverable the referent is. A weakly recoverable referent needs
some kind of qualifier (e.g. ‘the one who/that ...’ or ‘the Noun that ...’). If a
referent is totally unrecoverable, then it is considered novel and the referring
expression will name the referent or an expression will be produced that allows
the addressee to identify the referent, typically through the cultural
classification system.
The first question asked by the algorithm is whether or not X (the referent)
has been mentioned already in the clause (e.g. John cut himself). If yes, then
X is considered to be recoverable (it was already mentioned) but surprising,
since it is not expected. This will generate a reflexive pronoun. If no, then the
next question asks whether X is the same referent as any other referring
expression in working memory. If the answer is yes, then we can follow the
algorithm through and the output will be that X is either strongly recoverable,
recoverable by naming or weakly recoverable (which leads to another
algorithm). As an example of these, the output would produce respectively, it,
Alex, or the one called Alex (this last example taken from:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=17698163).
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Figure 6-2: the basic algorithm for generating a referring expression (Cook, 1991:34)
If the answer to the second question is no, then we move on through the
algorithm to determine whether X is the referent of a referring expression in a
subordinate clause. If it is, then the possible outputs are the same as those
above (e.g. I went home after I saw it/Alex/the one called Alex). The next
question determines whether or not X was a referent at any point earlier in the
discourse. If yes, then X is either recoverable by naming or weakly
recoverable (which leads to another algorithm).
Part of the role of the algorithm for referring expressions is to determine
whether or not there are any potential distractors. Distractors are other
referents that could potentially be mistaken for the current referent X (c.f.
Chapter 2, Section 2.3.2). For example, if there are two books on a table, a
speaker cannot simply say ‘please pass me the book on the table’. The
presence of another book may cause a distraction and so in order to be certain
that the addressee will be able to correctly identify the referent, this has to be
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considered and this is done in terms of consideration for the addressee; a kind
of assessment of whether or not the referent is identifiable from the
addressee’s perspective. If during the course of the algorithm one or more
distractors are present, then there is a loop introduced until the algorithm is
satisfied that the addressee will be able to identify X. Note that if the speaker
does not wish take into account consideration for the addressee, then this step
can be bypassed; however the risk is that this will lead either to confusion or to
a kind of collaborative exchange to determine the referent.
If we now run the algorithm for the referring expression we want to
generate (i.e. the chemo pills she takes), we find we can follow the path
through the algorithm seen above (Figure 6-2) which would give the pathway
shown in Figure 6-3, resulting in our referring expression being deemed a
‘novel referent’.
Figure 6-3: Pathway through the algorithm
As a novel referent, the speaker needs to generate an expression that will

allow the addressee to identify the referent. The algorithm for novel referents
has not yet been fully developed. By saying the chemo pills she takes, the
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speaker can be fairly confident that the addressee will be able to identify what
is being referred to even if this particular type of pills is unknown to the
addressee as the speaker will be able to believe that the addressee will be
able to adequately identify the object being referred to by the speaker. As a
result certain features will have been selected as the output of the algorithm –
a selection expression. This will determine the features selected in the system
network for referent thing. The system networks are the most important
component of the grammar and we will now discuss the selections
encountered through the network. It is however important to realise that it is
the algorithm that determines which selections are chosen. Although this
algorithm was designed for an implementation in a computational linguistics
system, it nevertheless is also attempting to model one way in which the
human language processor may process the selection process. In other
words, there must be some cognitive mechanism or procedure for deciding
how to refer to an object. Basing the model on what works computationally is
reasonable since it is impossible to test the functionality of such a mechanism
in a human. For the time being then we can only assume that there is such a
mechanism and that the above algorithm is a reasonable attempt to model it.
Whether it represents or not an actual human decision making process is not
very important for our purposes, it simply needs to be recognised that
something like this governs the way in which referring expressions are
generated whether by a human or a computer.
6.3 System network for ‘referent thing’
A complete presentation of the full network is beyond the scope of this

thesis as it is too large and complex and would simply take up far too much
space. Instead the system network for referent thing will be presented in a
selective way, discussing the features relevant to the current example (the
chemo pills she takes) as they are encountered in the network. Furthermore
some of the fine detail concerning more delicate semantic distinctions has
been left out due to space constraints. The consequence of this is that many
features will not be discussed here. However it is not necessary for the reader
140
to have access to the full and complete array of semantic features. The main
purpose here is to illustrate the process and an example will suffice.
The partial view of the system network for referent thing presented here is
shown in Figure 6-4 through to Figure 6-11. It should be noted that this
representation is a somewhat simplified version from that presented in version
5 of the thing network (Fawcett, 1998) and a more recent update (Fawcett,
2004). An earlier version is also available in Fawcett (1980) and Cook (1991).
The network and its realization rules are very complex and detailed and as a
result, the presentation here will be more of an overview, sampling the
network, rather than a comprehensive exploration of the system networks and
their realization rules.
We will assume, as a result of the generation process to this point, that the
feature [congruent thing] has been preselected as part of a realization rule
from an earlier pass (i.e. the stages of generation that we have not covered in
detail). We also know, following the algorithm for referring expressions, that
we are generating an expression for a novel referent. Therefore as we first
enter the system network for thing in Figure 6-4, the system for [congruent
thing] is selected and this leads us to Figure 6-5.
Figure 6-4: Partial and simplified view of the system for referent thing
In this system, there are only two semantic options: [stereotypical thing]
and [recoverable location]. Since the referent is novel, the next system entered
is [stereotypical thing] (see Figure 6-5). This system contains two semantic
options: [interactant] and [outsider]. The [interactant] system seen here is
simplified substantially. However the full network extends that presented here
141
in order to account for referring expressions such as myself, you who are ...,
each other, etc. The [interactant] option may in fact lead to other systems
outside the INTERACTANT system. As Fawcett explains (Fawcett, 2004:2),
“some of the dependent features lead in turn to further systems, which are also
entered from later systems entered from [outsider], e.g. those that generate
expressions such as ‘two of you’, ‘a group of us’, ‘each other’ and ‘we who
support democracy’”. The fact that our referent is novel also implies that it
cannot be an interactant (i.e. it is not the speaker/performer or the addressee);
however this would have been determined in the microplanner as we saw
above. Consequently, the [outsider] option is selected and we now enter the
[outsider] system in Figure 6-6, which is considerably more complex than
those we have just passed through. The full potential of referring is achieved
through the OUTSIDER system. Fawcett claims (Fawcett, 2004:2) that “it is the
feature [outsider] - a ‘non-interactant’ being an ‘outsider’ - that leads to the full
richness of choices in meanings that are realized in the nominal group”.
Figure 6-5: Partial and simplified view of the system for congruent thing (as
continued from Figure 6-4)
The referring expression algorithm in the microplanner helped the speaker

to know that the referent cannot be referred to by name, nor is it one that is
recoverable. Since the referent is novel, the option [cultural classification
potential] is selected and its system is entered (see Figure 6-8). However to
complete the overview of the remaining options available, we will consider
them now briefly before moving into the [cultural classification potential]
system.
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Even though we did not discuss this in the section of the algorithm that we
did discuss, it also determined that the referent is not a thing being exclaimed
at (e.g. what great chemo pills as in what great chemo pills they are!), nor is
the referent unknown ([seeking specification of thing]), as in what are
working?. Note that both the [cultural classification potential] option and the
[thing exclaimed at] option both lead to the same systems in this network as
we can see in Figure 6-8. The difference between the two would be expressed
in the realization rules where a different formal representation would result
from having the feature [thing exclaimed at] present in the selection expression
(as opposed to [cultural classification potential]), and this accounts for the
difference between what great chemo pills and great chemo pills, for example.
The last semantic option in the [outsider] system is [thing relating out], which
represents expressions like which/that are working and this is not the case for
the referent in question. Figure 6-9 represents the system networks for
[seeking specification of thing] and [thing relating out].
Figure 6-6: Partial and simplified view of the system for outsider (as continued from
Figure 6-5)
The system for [recoverable thing] is extensive and only shown here, as in
Figure 6-7, in a simplified and reduced form. Unfortunately space does not
143
permit a discussion of every semantic feature in this system network.

However, had the higher planning components determined that the referent
was recoverable, then this option would have been selected and this system
would have been entered. Since this is not the case, we will simply give a few
examples from this system and then return to the example we are generating.
Once a referent is determined to be recoverable in the microplanner, this
feature in the network would have been preselected. In other words, there is
no other option available given the output from the microplanner. This system
has two options: [particularized recoverable thing] and [unparticularized
recoverable thing]; both relating to whether the referent is definite (or
particular) or not. Particularisation in the Cardiff grammar is very similar to
definite reference. However it is seen as one type of definite reference, with
naming for example being a different type of definite reference (Fawcett,
1980:217). The main difference then between particularized and
unparticularized has to do with the identification of a unique referent. The
difference between the two in formal representation is illustrated in examples
(52) and (53).
(52) the one called Alex ([particularized recoverable thing]), cf.

weakly recoverable above
(53) something ([unparticularized recoverable thing], as in

something is working)
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Figure 6-7: Partial and simplified view of the system for recoverable thing (as
continued from Figure 6-6)
The [recoverable thing] system (Figure 6-7) will also realise expressions
such as it when the feature [by token classification recoverable thing] is
selected; that when [by location relative to performer recoverable thing] is
selected; and those that were here by the selection of [by description
recoverable thing].
Figure 6-8: Partial and simplified view of the system for cultural classification
potential and thing exclaimed at (as continued from Figure 6-6)
145
Figure 6-9: Partial and simplified view of the system for seeking specification of
thing and thing relating out (as continued from Figure 6-6)
We will now return to the [cultural classification potential] system which

leads to two systems entered in parallel as in Figure 6-8. So far, the features
that have been selected are: [thing], [congruent thing], [stereotypical thing],
[outsider], and [cultural classification potential].
Figure 6-10: Partial and simplified view of the system for cultural classification and
recoverable cultural classification (as continued from Figure 6-8)
From Figure 6-11on page 149, we can see that there are only two options
in the [cultural classification potential options] system: [ad hoc description] and
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[no ad hoc description]. The important distinction here is whether or not the
cultural classification of the referent is sufficient for unambiguous identification
by the addressee. In this case, we know that the cultural classification
selected by the speaker is pills, which is a regular count noun and therefore we
infer that the option [count cultural classification] has been selected in the
[cultural classification] system, followed by the selection of [plural cultural
classification] and [particularized plural] (see Figure 6-10). The selection of the
feature [particularized plural] reflects the meaning realized by the in the chemo
pills she takes since what is being referred to are particular pills (cf. discussion
of definite descriptions in Chapter 2).
Recall that two systems were entered in parallel, so we will now turn to the
second of the two, which contains two options: [ad hoc description] and [no ad
hoc description]. As discussed above, if as a result of the planning and
consultation processes which take place at a higher level of planning and
generation, it was determined that the cultural classification is sufficient to
specify the referent, then no further description is necessary and none will be
generated. If however this is not the case and the output from the
microplanner determined that further sub-classification is necessary then [ad
hoc description] is selected and this leads to seven parallel systems as we can
see in Figure 6-11 (we will ignore the problem in this network where no
description could be selected within the system of AD HOC DESCRIPTION as this
is discussed in Fawcett, 2004). These systems cover the range of description
possible: AGE, EPITHET, AFFECTIVE ATTITUDE, RELATIONSHIP WITH ANOTHER THING,
ROLE IN ANOTHER SITUATION, ALTERNATIVE SPECIFICATION OF THING, and DEICTIC
PLACE. Examples of the realizations of each option are given in Table 6-1.
147
Table 6-1: Examples of the various options of [ad hoc description]

Example 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
+/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/- +/-
the pills - - - - - - - -
three pills - - - - - - - -
the new pills + + - - - - - -
the tasty pills + - + - - - - -
the chemo pills + - - + - - - -
the pills on the shelf + - - - + - - -
the pills she takes + - - - - + - -
the chemo pill she takes + - - + - + - -
the pills over there + - - - - - - +
the pills, Doxorubicin + - - - - - + -
Key:
1 = ad hoc description ; 2 = age; 3 = affective attitude; 4 = general epithet;
5 = minor relationship with thing; 6 = role in other situation; 7 = alternative specification;
8 = deictic place.
Note: Quantity is not an ad hoc description
Descriptions by age, affective attitude and by general epithet represent

choices that are realized by modifiers in the grammar. The remaining features
are all realized by qualifiers in the grammar. The distinction amongst them
relate to the form each takes. Describing a referent by its role in another
situation represents relative clauses in traditional grammar (e.g. the pills that
she takes). Describing a referent through a minor relationship with another
thing relates to post nominal modification with a prepositional group (e.g. the
pills on the shelf). An alternative specification of thing covers apposition (e.g.
the pills, Doxorubicin). Finally deictic place refers to referents described
through deixis (e.g. the pills over there).
148
Figure 6-11: Partial and simplified view of the system for ad hoc description and no ad
hoc description (as continued from Figure 6-8)
There is one further system attached to each of the describing end features
in the network shown in Figure 6-11 (i.e. excluding those that are ‘not’
describing, e.g. [not by deictic place]) but as they all have the same role, they
are not included in the diagram to save space. Instead these last options for
consideration will be discussed without visual representation. Each of these
types of qualifier can be further described as being one of two types:
‘classifying’ or ‘depicting’. The classifying function serves to sub-classify the
class of thing (which is similar to the traditional label of restrictive modifiers),
whereas the depicting function (cf. non-restrictive modifiers) serves to offer
more detail in terms of description or information. As Fawcett (2004:5)
explains, the main difference with the depicting function of qualifiers is that it is
often marked: “when such a unit is ‘depicting’, there is a rich set of variants in
written language, as between (i) ‘unmarked’, realized by commas, (ii)
‘downgraded’ realized by brackets, and (iii) ‘afterthought’ (which may be simply
‘presented as if it is an afterthought’), realized by dashes”.
149
As stated above, for each of the final describing features, there is a further
distinction to be made in terms of whether or not the type of description is
classifying or depicting. In the current example, it is classifying. Therefore the
list of features selected from the AD HOC DESCRIPTION system is: [not by age],
[by general epithet], [not by affective attitude], [not by minor relationship with
thing], [by role in other situation], and [classifying description of thing by role in
situation]. As a result the full list of semantic features selected thus far is:
[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].
It should be noted that the options [not by age], [not by affective attitude],
[not by minor relationship with thing], etc. must be selected, as these are
considered as semantic options; they are included in the selection expression
to signal that these systems are not entered. Consequently they must be
included in any statement of selected features (selection expression).
As stated earlier, this network is not complete. It does not end here and
many of the branches (systems) shown are not end points but continue and
result in realization rules. These are not included here due to space
constraints but they must not be forgotten. Having selected the feature
[cultural classification], the cultural classification system would be entered in
order to generate the head of the nominal group. Since we know that the head
that was selected by the speaker is pills, the ultimate selection in the cultural
classification system would lead to the selection of pill (h < “pills”, since it is
known that the cultural classification is plural).
Two of the semantic features selected will lead to re-entry rules. These are
[by general epithet] and [by role in other situation]. The former will lead to a
modifier being introduced into the nominal group and re-entry will be to fill this
150
element with chemo. The latter will lead to a qualifier being introduced in the
nominal group. Re-entry for this condition will be to fill the qualifier with a
clause (she takes). The process will continue until all items have been
expounded and the chemo pills she takes is realized. The details of the
various passes through the system networks will not be discussed here as
they are not directly relevant to the main purpose of this chapter.
Two important components of the system networks in the Cardiff Grammar
have been left out of this presentation. The first is the realization rules and the
second is the probabilities associated to the semantic options in the individual
systems. The main purpose here is to gain a basic understanding of the place
of referring expressions in the Cardiff Grammar. There is no need to discuss
the realization rules or the probabilities. With respect to the probabilities, they
will become a relevant point of discussion in Chapters 9 and 10 where the
results of the current study are presented.
Having completed the description of the semantic options expressed in the
chemo pills she takes, the discussion will now turn to the formal representation
of referring expressions. As just stated, the realization rules themselves will not
be discussed. Instead the functional syntax of the current example will be
presented.
6.4 The formal representation of referring expressions
The previous section illustrated a sampling of the system network for thing
by following one example and retracing the semantic options expressed in the
example. Due to time and space constraints, some of the detail of the full
network has been omitted. In many cases then, the end points of the systems
shown here in Figure 6-4 through to Figure 6-11 are not the final end points of
the network; each would either be extended into further systems going into
further semantic options, lead to re-entry points to previous nodes in the
network (typically specifying a preference for selection) or lead to realization
rules. For example, it may be clear at this point that when [by role in other
situation] is selected, it will lead to a re-entry rule that will include an instruction
to enter the system networks to generate a referent situation (i.e. a clause).
The details of re-entry will not be discussed here.
151
The goal of this section is to relate the semantic features to the formal
representation as concerns referring expressions. It is useful to review the
main components of the Cardiff Grammar, which were discussed in the
previous chapter. These components are illustrated here again in Figure 6-12.
The system network of semantic features for thing has been presented as well
as the relevant higher planning component, the microplanner, which
determines many of the features selected in the network. From Figure 6-12 we
can see that the output from the semantic component (the system network) is
a selection expression of semantic features. Concerning the referring
expression in the current example, 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]}.
This selection expression then feeds into the formal component of the
lexicogrammar, the realization rules and potential structures. The potential
structures were discussed in detail in the previous chapter. Here we will only
consider those involved in the production of the chemo pills she takes, as our
current example. As already stated the realization rules will not be presented
but instead discussed informally as the tree structure for the current example is
built up.
152
Figure 6-12: The main components of a systemic functional grammar (from Fawcett,
2000:36 and Fawcett, Tucker and Lin, 1993:121)
Before the system network for thing is even considered, the basic structure
of the clause is generated from the first pass through the system networks. In
the current example, the formal representation would be as in Figure 6-13
where the main components of the clause are included and it is already
determined that the Subject is conflated with Agent and Theme. One of the
outcomes of this first pass is a rule leading to a re-entry into the system
networks in order to fill the Subject/Theme/Agent element with the feature
[thing] pre-selected.
Figure 6-13: Labelled tree diagram for the clause the chemo pills she takes are
working on the first pass of the system network
As discussed above, the pass through the network produces a selection

expression of semantic features. One realization rule as a result of the first
pass through the system network for thing is to insert a nominal group (ngp)
and to insert the head element within the nominal group. Following through the
153
cultural classification system, the head of the nominal group would be

expounded by the item ‘pills’. The realization rule associated to [particularized
plural] would lead to inserting a deictic determiner in the nominal group and
expounding it with the item the. The resultant structure from the first pass
through the network for thing is illustrated in Figure 6-14.
Figure 6-14: Output from the first pass through the first pass through system network
for THING
The system networks must be re-entered in order to complete the clause.

However recall that all the information leading to the selection of options in the
network is determined in the higher planning components, with specific
selections being identified in the microplanner. In generating the embedded
clause, the role that the referent has in the other situation would have been
determined in the microplanner and the necessary semantic options would be
selected as the relevant system networks are traversed.
154
Figure 6-15: The final labelled tree diagram for the chemo pills she takes are working
This presentation of the formal representation will end here although there
is much more to say. As this thesis is not contributing directly to the
computational model, there is no point in detailing the various traversals of the
system network or the realizations rules. Furthermore the description so far
has provided sufficient detail so that the approach in the Cardiff Grammar to
the overall process of referring should be clear in general. The probabilities
associated to each semantic option have also been omitted from this
discussion as they are not particularly relevant to understanding the process of
referring.
6.5 Summary
The aim of this chapter was to describe the place of referring expressions
in the Cardiff model of language. Much of what has been presented here is
not published material and so is not readily available to researchers. This
chapter offers a sufficiently detailed account of linguistic reference in order for
the overall process to be understood. There is insufficient space here for a full
and complete account which would ideally include a full discussion of the
system network for thing and the realization rules. What this chapter has done
155
is explain the approach taken in the Cardiff model since no other linguistic
model has attempted to provide as much detail concerning this particular area
of research. First, the conceptual and (pre)semantic representations of
referring expressions were described. This area which attempts to explain
what might be considered a pre-linguistic stage of referring. Next the relevant
parts of the micro-planner were described which illustrated some of the
considerations a speaker may go through in planning a referring expression.
Following this, the system network for ‘referent thing’ was presented in as
much detail as possible; however the full network is vast and complex and it
would be impossible to discuss each and every semantic option and the
accompanying realization rules in this thesis. Finally, the functional syntax of
the nominal group was discussed. The Cardiff Grammar has a very detailed
account of the function and structure of the nominal group. Understanding this
approach to nominal group syntax is very important to the current research as
it is this approach that is adopted as the analytical approach to the study of
referring expressions in this thesis.
The next chapter will present the theoretical contribution made by this
thesis by formulating a new approach to the linguistic study of complex
referring expressions. It will do so by drawing on the previous chapters
including the current one and also by giving consideration to the more
standard or traditional approach to postmodification in the nominal group. Most
importantly, this chapter develops the theory of transitivity for the study of
complex referring expressions. It is possibly the most important chapter in the
thesis.
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Chapter 7: Towards a functional grammar of complex referring expressions
7. Towards a functional grammar of complex referring

expressions
7.1 Introduction
Referring expressions as a linguistic entity can be viewed as a fulcrum of

analysis. Although the referring expresssion is of considerable importance in
any linguistic study, whether in discourse, pragmatics, or syntax, it has rarely
been the express object of study. Furthermore it has rarely been studied in
detail from a functional-structural perspective (cf. notably Fries, 1970). The
previous chapters have provided extensive background to the approach to
referring expressions taken here. Chapter 2 gave an account of the main
subject areas and contributions to the field of referring expressions. Chapters
3 and 4 considered the foundations of systemic functional linguistics, which is
the theoretical approach informing this research, and its treatment of the
nominal group, which is the most common realization of referring expressions
in English. Then in Chapters 5 and 6 the Cardiff Grammar was presented, first
with an overall description of its model of language and second with a focus on
the explicit place of referring expressions in that model.
This chapter takes a detailed look at a certain type of referring expression,
which we have been calling a complex referring expression (cf. Section 1.2 in
Chapter 1). A referring expression is defined in this thesis as follows.
referring expression:
a linguistic expression that is produced by a speaker in order to
transmit his or her representation of a given referent in a given
situation.
A complex referring expression is a sub-type of referring expression and is

defined as follows.
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complex referring expression:
a referring expression within which the referent is referred to by an
implicit or explicit relation to a different referent situation from the
one it is currently involved in.
This definition of complex referring expressions is written with the intent to

exclude, at least at this point, other referring expressions which refer to more
than one referent through embedding (e.g. determiners and the process of
‘selection’, cf. Section 5.3.1 in Chapter 5). In grammatical terms, a complex
referring expression is realized as a nominal group with at least the elements
of head and qualifier.
Although this thesis considers all referring expressions, the focus is on
complex referring expressions. The purpose of this chapter is to present the
arguments developed in this research for the need to revise the functional
grammatical approach to the nominal group in English. Furthermore it specifies
the need for a theory of transitivity for complex referring expressions.
This chapter is organized as follows. The next section will provide an
overview of the problems associated to viewing postmodifiers in terms of
complements and adjuncts, with particular attention given to postmodifying
prepositional groups (phrases). Following this, issues with respect to the
qualifier and head elements are discussed from the perspective of analysis in
the Cardiff Grammar. Then consideration is given to the current role of
transitivity in the nominal group, focussing on the use of transitivity in the
prepositional phrase (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) and the use of
transitivity in nominalization (Fawcett, forthcoming a). The theory of transitivity
will then be discussed and extended to referring expressions and the nominal
group, which details the theoretical contribution made in this thesis. In the
section following this, considerations will be given to how this theory can be
applied. Finally the framework developed here for analysing complex referring
expressions within a system of transitivity is given along with associated tests
for applying the analytical approach. The chapter ends with a summary of the
work presented here.
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7.2 Postmodifiers as Complement and Adjunct
This section discusses the more traditional view of postnominal

prepositional phrases (PPs, also prepositional groups in the Cardiff Grammar)
where these structures are typically classified as either complements or
adjuncts (or modifiers) with respect to the head of the nominal group. It is clear
from researchers who have worked in this area that this classification is not
obvious in any way and there are many ways in which this classification does
not work. The main views on this distinction will be summarised here briefly
and we will see how the problems with this distinction can be seen as
supporting the approach developed here in Section 7.5 below.
From the perspective of the syntax of the nominal group (or noun phrase),
there is relatively little to discuss in terms of the grammatical structure of
postmodifying structures. Most commonly, and this is confirmed in the present
study, postmodifying structures take the form of embedded clauses and
prepositional phrases. Regardless of the theoretical framework, the syntactic
treatment of this area is fairly straightforward, with the exception perhaps of
certain expressions containing ‘of’ (see for example Section 4.3.2 in Chapter 4
and Section 7.2.1 below).
However, a number of linguists have tried to work out the functional
relations between the head and postmodifier within a nominal group and this
has proven to be one of the greatest challenges facing those interested in the
nominal group, especially when the postmodifying structure is a prepositional
phrase. As Keizer states (2004:324), “the distinction between complement
and modifier PPs plays an important role in almost every linguistic theory” (see
examples of each type in (54) and (55) below). This distinction is perhaps the
best known debate on the subject (for example, Fries, 1999, Huddleston,
1984, Radford, 1988, and Keizer, 2004).
However assigning a complement or adjunct role to postmodifying
elements of the nominal group could be seen as problematic as it suggests
that every instance of posthead structures in a given nominal group will be of
one type or the other. Fries (1999) shows a number of cases where this is not
the case. The difficulty with this approach from a systemic perspective is that it
suggests that when a noun is modified by a ‘complement’ type of postmodifier,
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then the nominal complement is there to fulfil this role. This would further
suggest that the nominal complement is not related to any role it may have in
the referring expression. Furthermore it also implies that the lexical head of
the nominal group must be ‘in place’ before any modification. If this were not
true then there could be no notion of complement in the analysis of the noun
phrase. Regardless of whether we consider that head nouns are not modified
(cf. Fawcett, 2000) or whether we consider that they are, the systemic
functional view of these expressions is that the noun senses are represented
in the system networks (see Chapter 6). Therefore it is not possible in current
descriptions for the head to be selected before any other systemic features
(with the exception of preselection rules). The approach taken in the Cardiff
Grammar suggests, as was explained in the previous chapter, that the head
element of the nominal group is generated first from the realization rules
before any modifiers are but this does not suggest that the selection of any ad
hoc description is made after the selection of the cultural classification or the
item expounding the head. As has been argued in this thesis, the referent, at
the point of preparing to produce the referring expression, is a mental
construct or conceptual object, in the mind of the speaker; it is this to which the
speaker wishes to refer. We have also seen that in the Cardiff grammar, the
head noun represents the cultural classification of the referent; therefore in a
sense, it ‘stands in’ for the referent. It is itself at times a description, when
there is a choice to be made among different classifications.
7.2.1 The prepositional group as postmodifier
The challenge in the nominal group is to account for the function of

postmodifying structures. Linguists tend to think of post-head elements as
having some kind of modifier role, in some sense quite similar to that of pre-
head modifiers. The relation between the head noun and postmodifier can be
very difficult to explain. With relative clauses in English, this relation is explicit
since the referent is actually included grammatically in the embedded clause
by a relative pronoun such as who or that. In these cases, the relative clause is
seen as offering an attribute of the head (Fries, 1999:107). Thus their
interpretation seems relatively straightforward. Interestingly, of the four basic
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types of post-head structures in English, the prepositional and nominal group

structures pose the most difficulty in terms of a functional classification. Noun
phrase apposition for example, in speech at least, seems to be used as a kind
of incremental installation in the referring expression, almost an afterthought.
As Fries (1999:109) points out, however, in some cases the noun phrase
postmodifier is ‘grammatically essential’ as in the example my brother Charles
(Fries, ibid.) where Charles is considered as ‘part of the reference’ rather than
‘a separate quality of the referent’. Fries (1999) is making a distinction then
between postmodiers (or qualifiers) that refer to a property of the referent and
those that are an integral part of the reference to the referent.
Prepositional phrases have been given considerable attention as concerns
postmodification in the noun phrase as the relationship between the head of
the nominal group and the prepositional phrase is not explicit. The main
distinction made among types of postmodifying prepositional phrases is
between complement and adjunct (or modifier) post nominal functions.
Complement postmodifiers are primarily identified based on the lexical
semantics of the head noun whereas modifying prepositional phrases “attribute
a separate semantic property” (Fries, 1999:95). This difference is illustrated in
examples (54) and (55) given below (taken from Radford, 1988:193, cited in
Fries, 1999). As Keizer (2004:323) explains “it is the identification of PP
complements, in particular, which has turned out to be problematic, since,
superficially, these PPs appear in the same form and position as modifying
PPs”. In other words there is no strict linguistic basis for distinguishing
between a prepositional phrase complement and a prepositional phrase (post)
modifier. Therefore classifying instances into one category or the other has
often relied on certain tests.
(54) the attack on the Prime Minister
(55) the book on the table
There are two main researchers who have examined the tests and criteria
for the distinction between complement and adjunct postmodifiers. Fries
(1999) and Keizer (2004) both explored the main arguments for these
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categories. As Keizer (2004:324) explains, there are two main approaches to

the arguments for complement and adjunct postmodifiers. One is based on
semantic criteria and it relies on information known about the head noun (e.g.
whether the head is a relational noun). The other is based on syntactic criteria
and is concerned with the structural behaviour of the prepositional phrase.
Fries (1999) reviews in considerable detail the arguments supporting the
distinction between complement and adjunct postmodifiers by summarising the
approaches taken by Huddleston (1984) and Radford (1988). After presenting
the main arguments, both semantic and syntactic, Fries (1999:100) shows that
the distinction between the two views is not at all clear. He states further that
“the evidence concerning whether or not to differentiate between Complement
and Adjunct is far from conclusive” (1999:108). He admits that there are some
general tendencies that do seem to fit the patterns explained by complement
and adjunct postmodifiers but he points out that there are many cases that do
not. His main conclusion is that this is an area that requires considerably more
work.
Keizer (2004) also reviewed the problem of a strict dichotomy between
postnominal complements and modifiers with a focus on prepositional phrases.
Like Fries (1999) after considering the various arguments and tests for
distinguishing PP complements and modifiers, she concludes that “it is futile to
look for strict formal criteria for the classification of PPs as either complements
or modifiers” (Keizer, 2004:341). She has found that the distinction between
the two is simply not clear. She claims instead that the differences are gradual
(2004:348) and that some examples are more prototypical of one or the other
type of post nominal prepositional phrase. For Keizer (2004:341) the
difference in PP post-head structures is due to conceptual differences. She
reaches the conclusion that “the only viable approach to explaining the
differences observed is a cognitive one” (ibid.:348). It would seem then that
there is little to gain by pursuing the categorisation of postnominal structures in
terms of complements and adjuncts. However, as Keizer points out, there is
something to be gained by considering these expressions from a more
cognitive perspective. The question then is not so much one of whether the
postmodifier is an adjunct or complement but rather why the head of the
nominal group, as pronoun or as cultural classification, fails to suffice as the
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referring expression and therefore what further elements will be needed.

What is very clear is that the identification of the head of the nominal group is
critical in determining the function of any postmodifying elements. In the next
section, some issues concerning the head and qualifier elements of the
nominal group are discussed with respect to the Cardiff Grammar.
7.3 Issues concerning qualifier in the Cardiff Grammar
Fawcett (forthcoming a) takes a different perspective on the post-head

elements of the nominal group. He describes the function of qualifiers as
being one of two types: classifying or depicting. For Fawcett the role of all
modifying elements of the nominal group (both pre and post head modifiers) is
to subclassify the cultural classification of thing. While this may be true of (pre
head) modifiers, this is not always the case for qualifiers.
One difficulty is in determining what the head of the nominal group is and
then what units are qualifiers. In a sense, this means working backwards as
the analyst. Qualifiers are defined then by their position: the unit which comes
after the head and which modifies in some sense the head. As discussed in
Chapter 4, the Cardiff grammar has developed, in great detail, the various
types of determiners found as part of the nominal group (see Fawcett, 2007).
The syntactic treatment of several of these has a direct impact on determining
which element constitutes the head of the nominal group and therefore also
whether or not the expression in question includes a qualifier.
In this section a detailed example is presented which illustrates the
importance of the head element in analysing complex referring expressions.
The example used here is taken from Fawcett (forthcoming, b) and it is given
here in example (56).
(56) the angle of elevation of the top of a tree from a point P on

the ground
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For Fawcett (forthcoming, b) the head of the nominal group in example (56)
is tree and there is no qualifier postmodifying it. His analysis is illustrated in
Figure 7-1 below. In his view, the prepositional group, from a point p on the
ground, is functioning as a qualifier but it is embedded within the nominal
group filling the element of representational determiner. Therefore with this
interpretation, the referring expression would be classed as a simple referring
expression. This illustrates the need for criteria in determining the head of the
nominal group when attempting to account for the referring expression whether
from the production or analysis perspective.
The account provided by Fawcett (forthcoming, b) is not the only approach
to this nominal group. It is perfectly reasonable to consider that the head is
‘angle’ (i.e. the speaker is talking about an elevation angle that is measured
from a tree top to a ground point and he or she is not talking about a tree).
The head element of the nominal group (as the cultural classification of the
referent) can been considered as representing the referent being referred to by
the speaker. Therefore whether through its meaning as culturally classifying
the referent or through some pronominal reference, the head can be argued to
have been selected by the speaker to represent the referent. The remainder
of the elements of the nominal group then serve to further specify the referent
in some way (and there are various ways in which this can be done).
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Figure 7-1: Tree diagram for the angle of elevation of the top of a tree from a point
P on the ground, adapted from Fawcett (forthcoming, b)
It is nearly impossible to consider this nominal group without any further

context concerning the clause in which it appears. Having entered the nominal
group as a search string in the Google search engine, only two documents
were retrieved.
One of the instances found is given in example (57) below (taken from:
www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/hsc_exams/hsc2000exams/hsc00_maths/96MATIS.pdf).
(57) the angle of elevation of the top of a tree from a point P on

the ground is 30°
The referent, which is being identified as 30°, must be angle. If we

consider this using the terminology give in Chapter 6, the conceptual object (at
the pre-semantic level) is a specific type of defined space (i.e. an angle); at the
semantic level, the thing the speaker wants to refer to is an angle; and at the
formal level the nominal group represents the linguistic expressed used by the
speaker to refer to the referent (i.e. example (57) above). If we think along the
terms of producing a clause as was presented in Chapter 5, the speaker of this
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utterance would want to refer to Object1 (cf. Chapter 6 for the treatment of
referring expressions in the Cardiff model), which, in the speaker’s mind, must
be a defined space or angle since in the planning stages, the speaker would
know that they want to identify this as 30°. It is very difficult to see how tree
could express the cultural classification of the referent.
Re-assigning the head element from tree to angle offers a number of
possibilities for exploring the functions of the remaining items. Three structural
options have been identified in terms of the elements of the nominal group
where angle is expounding the head element. These are listed below in
examples where each qualifier is indicated in square brackets but the internal
structure is not marked.
Table 7-1: Options for the structure of the angle of elevation of the top of a tree
from a point P on the ground
Possible arrangement of elements Example marked for qualifier(s)
in the nominal group
1. det head [q] the angle [of elevation of the top of a tree from a point P
on the ground]
2. det head [q] [q] the angle [of elevation of the top of a tree] [from a point
P on the ground]
3. det head [q] [q] [q] the angle [of elevation] [of the top of a tree ] [from a point
P on the ground]
There would seem to be no dispute that the top of a tree and a point P on
the ground express the unit of nominal group, with tree as head element in the
first instance and point as the head in the second one. The difficulty is in
identifying the relation amongst angle, elevation, tree, and point. Option 1 in
Table 7-1 proposes that the head element is angle and that elevation modifies
angle, and that the top of the tree modifies elevation as does from a point P on
the ground. This is reasonable as the nominal group is not different from an
example such as the solar elevation angle is the elevation angle of the sun,
where it is clear that solar and elevation modify angle. The difficulty is with
from a point P on the ground. This element is somewhat different since it can
be preposed as in from a point P on the ground, the angle of elevation of the
top of a 10 m. tall building is 30°. However in this case it has a circumstance
function rather than qualifier. This suggests that it is not inherently linked to
elevation as a modifier.
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The second option includes two qualifiers, both of which expand the
referring expression by modifying angle. The main difference between options
1 and 2 is that in 2, from a point P on the ground is modifying angle whereas
the top of a tree is modifying elevation. In other words this would be
expressing something similar to this is an angle which is from a point on the
ground and it is an elevation angle and the type of elevation is that of the top of
a tree. Alternatively this could be expressed as one nominal group as follows:
a tree-top elevation angle which is from a point P on the ground. This makes
no sense, or rather it makes no mathematical sense. It should be clear that
there can be no angle for a single point and that the concept of elevation
requires two points of reference. It would be impossible to argue in favour of
option 2 therefore since it would be necessary to see both post nominal
expressions modifying either angle or elevation, which is clearly not the case in
option 2. Consequently option 2 can be dismissed without further discussion.
Option 3 includes three qualifiers, all of which are modifying angle. If we focus
solely for a moment on the relationship between the head angle and of a top of
a tree, it becomes clear that this approach is not desirable as it will
immediately feel as though something is missing for similar arguments such as
those presented against option 2. A discussion of the lexical and cognitive
constraints involved here are beyond the scope of this research but it is clear
that they play an important role. The preferred option therefore is option 1
where there is only one qualifier in the nominal group and the complexity of
this expression is maintained within the qualifier through multiple embedded
qualifiers. The tree diagram representing option 1 is given in Figure 7-2.
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Figure 7-2: Tree diagram for the angle of elevation of the top of the tree from a
point P on the ground, following option 1 for the structure of the nominal
group elements.
There may be other alternative analyses for this particular example but the
point being made here is that the head element is central to the analysis of
referring expressions. In the Cardiff Grammar, as was shown in Chapter 5, the
approach to referring expressions does not first identify the head element of
the nominal group. It is the result of the entire process of traversing the
system network for THING. The head is thus produced simultaneously as a
result of the selection of semantic options in the system network. Traditionally
when analysing the nominal group (noun phrase), analysts assume the head is
there and that all other elements are present to modify the head element.
However if we consider the nature of how referring expressions are produced
– in other words, how nominal groups are generated – the picture shifts and
we must rather ask how are these other elements contributing to the referring
expression. Why does the speaker feel that the cultural classification is in
sufficient or undesirable? Clearly these types of questions are of a more
cognitive nature. The answers are only in the mind of the speaker. Both Fries
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(1999) and Keizer (2004), after extensive consideration of the problem of post
nominal modification, have concluded that a more cognitive approach is
needed to explain why these elements are present. The position taken here is
that the nominal group must first be considered in the context of building a
referring expression.
The next section provides an overview of how transitivity has already been
applied to the nominal group even though it has never been described fully in
these terms. One could argue that transitivity is a cognitive approach. In this
thesis it will be argued that transitivity is a concept that applies primarily to
things rather than processes and as such it is a good place to begin a new
perspective on researching the nominal group.
7.4 Current applications of transitivity in the nominal group
The idea of approaching the functions represented in a nominal group from

the perspective of transitivity is not new. Halliday (1977) includes it in his
system networks for the prepositional phrases and this is extended to account
for postmodifying prepositional phrases in Halliday and Matthiessen (2004).
The Cardiff Grammar also draws on transitivity in nominal groups to explain
certain types of incongruous expressions. Transitivity itself however has not
been discussed formally as an explanation for the presence of qualifiers in the
nominal group. Before presenting the arguments in support of developing a
theory of transitivity for complex referring expressions, this section will offer an
overview of the existing applications of transitivity to the nominal group in
Systemic Functional Linguistics.
7.4.1 The transitivity of the prepositional phrase
The prepositional phrase in Halliday’s framework (1977 and Halliday and

Matthiessen, 2004) is viewed as a reduced process as was discussed in
Chapter 4. The Cardiff Grammar differs in this area since it does not view the
prepositional group as a reduced process or situation. The notion then of
applying transitivity to nominal groups began in Halliday’s earliest work
(Halliday, 1977), although presented as Circumstances. In this view, the
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preposition functions as a reduced process and the completing nominal group

has the role of Range in the process. Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) show
how a similar view of transitivity can apply to prepositional phrases functioning
as Qualifier in the nominal group as in example (58), repeated here for the
purposes of this discussion. The analysis of this nominal group is given in
Figure 7-3.
(58) the children in blue hats
nominal group
the children in blue hats
Logical structure premodifier head postmodifier
Experiential Deictic Thing Qualifier
structure
prepositional phrase
Process Range
premodifier head
Logical structure
Epithet Thing
Experiential structure
Figure 7-3: Analysis of the children in blue hats Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:324)
In this case, the prepositional phrase is analysed as Process and Range,

where the preposition, in, functions as a reduced process and the completing
nominal group, blue hats, has the role of Range. However there is no
explanation as to how this reduced process relates to the nominal group as a
whole or how blue hats relates to children. The inference we are forced to
make is that the completing nominal group will have the role of Range
regardless of the preposition present and regardless of any relation it may
have with the head element of the nominal group. It might be useful to recall
how Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004:324) described the
characterizing function of the Qualifier in Section 4.3.1 above: “(it) is in terms
of some process within which the Thing is, directly or indirectly, a participant. It
may be a major process, i.e. a relative clause; or a minor process – a
prepositional phrase”.
The problem remains that this account is given without consideration to the
processes of referring to a given referent. In other words from the functional
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view of prepositional phrases, we are not given any sense of the variety of
processes that may be expressed by ‘minor processes’ nor are we able to
understand how the Participant (cf. participating entity) included in the minor
process is related, if at all, to Thing. In Section 7.5 below a new theory is
presented which attempts to account for this relationship. Before beginning
the presentation of the new theory, we will consider the treatment of transitivity
in the nominal group as developed in the Cardiff Grammar.
7.4.2 Nominalization
In the previous section, we saw briefly one existing approach to transitivity

within the nominal group. The Cardiff Grammar has also extended transitivity
to a certain extent in order to explain a certain linguistic phenomemon
concerning the nominal group. This section will first explain the Cardiff
Grammar approach to nominalization and then it will demonstrate why it fails to
account for the presence of a qualifier from the perspective of referring
expressions.
Nominalization refers to a speaker’s use of a nominal group to refer to an
event. Since events are typically expressed as a situation at the semantic
level and realized by a clause at the formal level, the relationship between an
event and its eventual realization as a clause is labelled as congruent
(Fawcett, forthcoming a). When this is not the case and an event is ultimately
realized as a nominal group, the event is said to have been expressed
incongruently, i.e. an atypical means of referring to what the speaker holds as
an event. This type of incongruence is shown in Figure 7-4, while relating the
process to the various levels of the language model in the Cardiff Grammar.
For Fawcett (and for Halliday) nominalization includes both clauses ‘acting’
as nominal groups and nouns derived from verbs. In the case of derived
nouns (cf. relational nouns), the qualifier may express the participant roles
associated to the process expressed by the derived noun as seen in example
(59), taken from Fawcett (forthcoming, a).
(59) the descent of the ridge by Ivy (took two hours)
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Figure 7-4: Incongruence in the relations of two units of logical form to language
(Fawcett, forthcoming a)
Fawcett (forthcoming a) defines nominalization as follows: “a construction

in which the meanings of an event are compressed into the more restricted
structural resources of the nominal group”. What this means in terms of the
functions of the elements of the nominal group is that the nominalised item
expounding the head is conflated with a Process. Its related Participants may
also be represented in the nominal group through conflation with an element of
the nominal group. When this is expressed by a prepositional group, the
Participant Role is conflated with the completive (cv). In example (59) above,
Ivy is represented as Agent and the ridge has the role of Range. This is
illustrated by the tree diagram given in Figure 7-5.
Figure 7-5: the descent of the ridge by Ivy

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This analysis is very similar to the traditional approach to post nominal

structures, as discussed above in Section 7.2, where some post nominal
prepositional groups are considered as complements to the head. This is in
contrast to post nominal adjuncts such as in example (60) (source: Google). It
is unclear whether the head of the nominal group in (60) would still be
conflated with Process since the completive in the prepositional group filling
the qualifier would not be conflated with a Participant Role.
(60) a descent in the dark (is a possibility)
While there is clearly a lexical relation between descent as an object or

thing and descend as an event or process, this does not mean that they
maintain the same function when expressed as part of a referring expression.
The question, as always, concerns the choices the speaker makes in order to
refer to the object that they intend to refer to. From this perspective, it
becomes quite a challenge to be sure what is going on in the mind of the
speaker. For example, does he or she realise that the lexical item he or she
has selected for linguistically representing the referent is in fact derived from a
verb? Furthermore, as shown (even if briefly) in Chapter 6, whether or not an
ad hoc description is necessary may possibly be determined before the item
expounding the head element is known. If this is so, then it does not follow
that the function of a qualifier is to ‘complete’ the process expressed by the
head.
Taking an example from the HES corpus, we can consider the advantages
and disadvantages of ‘maintaining’ as it were the properties of the lexical verb
when the term is used in the form of a lexical noun. Example (61) a practice of
their routine follows a similar structure to (59) above. The full context of the
nominal group is as follows: Jane said the other day after a practice of their
routine Susan said to Jane you could have done 40 per cent better. If practice
is analysed as having a role of process, then their routine would have the role
of Range, as we can see in the tree diagram shown in Figure 7-6.
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(61) a practice of their routine
The analysis proposed here offers a slightly different approach in that

rather than looking at the head of the nominal group and considering the
qualifier as modifying the head, the referring expression as a whole is
considered. Since with complex referring expressions there will always be
more than one referent, the goal in the analysis is to consider how the two (or
more) referents relate to each other, irrespective of their lexical relations or the
etymology of the head noun. Thinking about it in these terms then, we can ask
why the speaker needed to refer to both practice and their routine. Why was
the expression ‘a practice’ insufficient? Would their practice have worked
equally well?
For whatever reason, the speaker has, in constructing the referring
expression, combined practice and their routine into what will be referred to
here as a temporary conceptual situation, called μ. In this case, the situation
itself is not overtly defined and so labelling the event is nearly impossible.
However we can still consider that their routine does serve to sub classify
which practice is being referred to and that in the speaker’s mind, it is
necessary for the addressee to be able to correctly identify the referent.
Figure 7-6: a practice of their routine
The qualifier is better interpreted here as a kind of Participant which has a

relation with the referent (which is represented by the head element of the
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nominal group), rather than as Range, i.e. what was being practised. The
speaker, if desired, has available the option of referring to the process of
practising and alternatively, she could have said practising their routine. This
is not the case and the speaker seems to have chosen to refer to a thing, i.e.
practice as an object.
Figure 7-7: a practice of their routine with Participant functions
If we continue with this line of thinking, it becomes difficult to apply

Fawcett’s analysis to an example such as (62) (invented), where clearly, the
qualifier cannot have the function of range, nor could the head be reasonably
seen as process. However it is certainly true that inherent to these types of
nouns is the semantic notion of the process of practicing. Instead, practice
would seem here to be used by reference to its role in the process of watching
in order to complete the referring expression, as shown in Figure 7-8 below.
This is a typical example of the semantic option of [description by role in other
situation] in the system for AD HOC DESCRIPTION in the system network for THING
(see Chapter 6 and Section 7.5 below), which leads to a relative clause filling
the qualifier.
(62) a practice we watched last week
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The problem here is that with the nominalization analysis, practice is seen
as having a role of Process. The analysis of example (62) where practice is
seen as a nominalization is given in Figure 7-9. If lexical items such as practice
are consistently viewed within this approach, without consideration of the type
of qualifier, then this would have implications for the overall model in terms of
how these types of words are processed. If we go back to the simplified view
of the model, the speaker has a conceptual object in mind and through several
planning stages, he or she generates an expression to refer to the object in
question. In order for practice to be seen as a process, the speaker would
have in mind a situation rather than an object. Since we do not know how
these types of lexical items are treated (stored or processed) in the brain, it is
very difficult to argue for one representation over another. However, in keeping
with what we feel we do know about the process of generating referring
expressions and the concepts of object and thing, then practice is, at least for
this speaker, a thing (referent) that he or she wants to refer to. In the Cardiff
Grammar, a decision is made in the planning stages to describe the referent
on an ad hoc basis and this is how the qualifier is generated as part of the
referring expression. Following the ideas presented above, when this
happens, this creates an additional situation in which the item which classifies
the referent in cultural terms (i.e. the head of the nominal group) has an
additional role with respect to this additional situation.
The additional role assigned to the referent is necessarily related to the
situation represented by the qualifier (this will be explained in more detail
below). This implies that, for a practice of their routine, the speaker decided
that practice (the cultural classification of the referent thing) was insufficient for
the current purposes and an ad hoc description is generated. As a result, a
practice and their routine are two referent things that are included in some ad
hoc (temporary) situation for the purposes of referring. There is thus a relation
between the two, at least in the speaker’s mind. This is even clearer with a
practice that we watched last week as shown in Figure 7-8.
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Figure 7-8: a practice we watched last week showing role in other situation
Figure 7-9: a practice we watched last week as nominalization
7.5 A theory of transitivity for complex referring expressions
7.5.1 Transitivity
As was shown in Chapter 3, Halliday broadened the traditional notion of

transitivity, extending it as a notion to be applied to the entire clause. The goal
of this section is to develop Halliday’s theory of transitivity even further,
formalising his idea that transitivity is about relating ‘participating entities’
(Participants) in the clause. If we understand by this the entities which are
participating in a given situation as represented by the speaker, it becomes
possible to apply Halliday’s view of transitivity to complex referring expressions
due to the existence of an additional situation for the purposes of referring.
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In mathematics, the term means precisely transfer:

a relation R over a set X is transitive if it holds for all a, b, and c
in X, that if a is related to b and b is related to c, then a is related
to c.
In predicate logic, it is expressed as follows:

∀a,b,c ∈ X, aRb ∧ bRc ⇒ aRc
FOR BELONGING there AND there IMPLIES there
ALL TO X, exists a exists a exists a
a,b,c relation, relation, relation,
R, R, R,
between between between
a and b b and c a and c
If this is applied to a clause, we see quickly that the relation will not hold
(not in a strict sense at least). For example, in (63) and (64) it is possible to
argue that there is a transfer that takes place between the man and the ball,
yet it is not perfectly clear that there is a transfer between the boy and the girl.
(63) The man hit the ball
(64) The boy likes the girl
If we tried to apply the mathematical relation, we find the following for (63):
a=‘the man’ ; b=‘hit’ ; c=‘the ball’. If we are able to define a relation, R,
between a and b, it is not the same as the one between b and c and therefore
there is no transfer in the mathematical sense. However, there is no need for
us to attempt to do this since it does not invalidate the use of transitivity. It
does mean that we need to be careful and consistent in its definition and use.
Linguistically, the notion of transfer has followed along the lines of Agent –
Patient relations: i.e. with the man hit and the ball was hit, there is a transfer to
the ball, from the man. What is clear is that a is in relation with c, by some
indicator b.
In its purest sense then, with respect to transitivity, given a R b ∧ b R c ⇒
aRc, we know, as we saw above, when dealing with a clause, we cannot
obtain aRc. However given b R c implies a, in other words, the relation a ↔ b
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does not imply b ↔ c yet b ↔ c does imply a ↔ c. It is a type of retrospective

transitivity, contrary to mathematical transitivity or relational transitivity. There
is a similar scenario concerning complex referring expressions. The presence
of some ‘thing’ (nominal expression) does not imply a qualifier. However, the
presence of a qualifier implies ‘thing’. In other words, if a is the head of a
complex referring expression, and b is functioning as qualifier to the head of a,
there is, by deduction, a relation between the two. In a very strict sense,
transitivity should only apply where there is a, b, c, and where the relation, R,
between a and b, and between a and c can be defined. Since we never have
this case in language examples, there is no need to specify it for referring
expressions. Instead we assume that given a qualifier, there is an identifiable
(explicit or implicit) relation between the head, a, and the qualifier, b, and such
that the role expressed in a can be identified with respect to the relation it has
with b.
This line of argumentation leads to developing a transitivity theory to
account for the relations among participants referred to in a complex referring
expression. Transitivity, as Halliday (1969:159) explains, refers to “all those
features of the clause which contribute to the linguistic representation of the
speaker’s experience”. It is relatively straightforward to relate this description
of transitivity to complex referring expressions since they are very much part of
the speaker’s linguistic representation and we could go further and say that it
is the speaker’s linguistic representation of his or her experience of the
referent combined with what he or she anticipates is the addressee’s
experience (cf. addressee model in Chapter 2).
The difference in the case of complex referring expressions is the
complexity introduced by embedding. Due to the embedded nature of the
structure filling the qualifier element of the nominal group, the transitivity
analysis crosses the syntactic boundary between the head of the nominal
group and any nominal groups in the qualifier. In other words, the transitivity
expressed is not necessarily among sister elements. This in itself should not
pose any theoretical problems since, as we saw above, the transitivity analysis
of nominalization in the Cardiff Grammar already crosses syntactic boundaries.
However the proposed representation (see below) is not entirely without
problems because it might be seen as suggesting that the head element has
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referring potential. This is not the intention here. It was explained in Chapter 1
(cf. Rijkhoff, 2002: 28) that only nominal groups have referring potential;
elements of the nominal group do not. The challenge with complex referring
expressions is how to represent the additional role the referent has in the ad
hoc situation (μ). As will become clear in this section, the solution proposed is
to treat the head element of the nominal group as a ‘representative’ of the
referent. A full discussion of this area and potential counter proposals is
beyond the scope of the thesis. Therefore we will turn now to the presentation
of the theoretical approach to complex referring expressions as developed in
this thesis.
The theory behind this approach to complex referring expressions is based

on two axioms.
Axiom 1
In producing a complex referring expression a speaker will
construct a temporary conceptual situation, μ, for the purposes of
describing the target referent in a situation other than the one in
which the target referent is being represented.
Axiom 2
In any given complex referring expression the target referent,
represented in the nominal group as the head element, will have
a functional role in μ.
It is important here to have a sense of what is meant by the semantic

option [by role in other situation] in the THING system network (see Chapter 6).
The nature of the semantic option [by role in other situation] is to refer to
another situation within which the current referent has a role. The example
used in Chapter 6 illustrates this nicely and it is reconsidered here for
reference in Figure 7-10.
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Figure 7-10: the chemo pills she takes (are working)
As was explained in Chapter 6, the selection of [by role in other situation],

leads to a qualifier being inserted in the nominal group and in this case the
qualifier is filled by a clause. What this means is that the ‘thing’ (pills in this
example) is involved in a situation that is different from the one in which it is
being generated for. In other words, the ‘thing’, pills, is involved in two
situations. The first is the situation of working where pills, as ‘thing’, has one
Participant Role. The second is identified as taking, where pills has a different
Participant Role, but this time its representation is for the purposes of
describing the referent. In this sense, the qualifier is conflated with the
temporary conceptual situation, μ, constructed for the purposes of contributing
to the referring expression. This leads to a third axiom.
Axiom 3
In any given complex referring expression the qualifier element of
the nominal group will be conflated with temporary conceptual
situation μ.
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Figure 7-11: the chemo pills she takes are working with transitivity analysis
This approach may seem obvious when the qualifier is filled by a clause.
However the position taken here is that it should apply regardless of the
structural nature of the qualifier. The consequence of Axiom 3 is that both [by
role in other situation] and [by minor relationship with thing], as semantic
options, would lead to conflating the qualifier with μ. This may suggest that the
organisation of this section of the system network should be reconsidered but
this is beyond the scope of the current presentation.
The semantic option [by minor relationship with thing] will lead to a
realization rule that will insert a qualifier in the nominal group which will be
filled by a prepositional group. In other words, this feature describes post
nominal prepositional groups. As was shown in Section 7.2 above, this area
has proved to be very challenging for linguists. There are three main
contributing factors to Axiom 3 which includes both post nominal clauses and
post nominal prepositional groups (or phrases). The first is the theoretical
approach to complex referring expressions developed here. The second is the
semantic option [by minor relationship with thing], which is describing a
relationship between ‘thing’ (i.e. the head of the nominal group) and the
completive element in the prepositional group. The third is Halliday’s theory
that the prepositional phrase is a reduced clause. Therefore, there seems to
be no obvious objections to the view that post nominal prepositional groups,
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together with the head of the nominal group (‘thing’), constitute part of the
temporary conceptual situation, μ.
The approach developed here can be illustrated with (65) below, a little
house with a yard, taken from the GAE corpus in this study. Axiom 1 states
that the speaker will construct a temporary conceptual situation within which
the ‘thing’ (referent) has a role. In this example, the speaker has constructed a
situation involving both house and yard, but the situation is considered implicit
as there is no linguistic element identifying the relation (process). This is
illustrated in Figure 7-12.
(65) (I want) a little house with a yard
Axiom 2 states that the head of the nominal group, in this case house, will
have a role in the situation, μ. Consequently, the head will be conflated with
some Participant or Circumstance role. Finally, axiom 3 states the qualifier will
be conflated with μ.
In the speaker’s mind, during some stage of planning, there must be a
cognitively constructed (even if only symbolically) situation in which X is a
member of the situation, S. For example, with a little house with a yard, there
must be, in the speaker’s mind, a situation in which house and yard, as two
referents, co-occur, even if the situation is simply to describe the existence of
the two referents in a shared space. In order for the speaker to include other
referents in the referring expression for the purpose of referring to the desired
referent, there has to be a defined referential space, i.e. situation in which the
two (or more) referents occur and through which they are related by a relation
that is either explicitly or implicitly expressed. Since this situation is
constructed only for the purposes of referring to the referent, it is considered
here as temporary.
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Figure 7-12: model of complex referring expressions with implicit situation, μ
The only problem left is identifying the role that the head element has. The
theory asserted here simply states that the head element will always have a
functional role with respect to the situation expressed by the head and qualifier
together. Full criteria have been developed for the application of this theory.
The criteria are presented and discussed in Section 7.6.1 below. However to
conclude this section, a solution is proposed by simply rephrasing the
expression. It should be reasonably clear that the situation constructed for the
referring expression is one in which house and yard are related in some
relationship such as a house which has a yard. Therefore the role to be
conflated with the head is that of Possessor and the completive is conflated
with the role of Possessed, as shown in Figure 7-13.
Figure 7-13: a little house with a yard
In this section the theory behind the approach developed in this thesis has
been presented. An example was used to illustrate how it can be applied to
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complex referring expressions. In the next section, further detail is given

concerning how this can be expressed in terms of criteria for the analysis of
complex referring expressions.
7.6 A Functional approach to postmodification
The theory presented in the previous section attempts to establish a new

approach to post nominal modification by considering it from the perspective of
producing a complex referring expression. The theory of transitivity has been
extended to account for the functions represented in these expressions by
considering that the speaker must, at least conceptually, refer to a situation
which is common to the ‘thing’ (realised as the head element of the nominal
group) and the participants expressed in the qualifier. The assumption that
there is in fact a relation that combines the head and the qualifier in some way
was given in the previous section as Axiom 1 and 2. If these two axioms did
not hold, it would be very difficult to see both as elements of the same group.
In fact, there is no way in English to include a qualifier that is not bound to the
head by some relation. If no such relation exists then the unit in question is
not a qualifier and is therefore not part of the referring expression (cf. for
example scope in the quality group (Tucker, 1998), see Section 5.3.3 above).
The selection of the head as the element which is conflated with this
additional role is based on existing theory in the Cardiff Grammar, although
other solutions are possible. The head element can also be seen to be a
representative of the referent. According to Fawcett (2000:217), “the function
of the head of the nominal group is (assuming it is a noun) to state the ‘cultural
classification’ of the referent ... the head realizes one type of meaning that
relates to the referent, while the modifier realizes another.” Since qualifiers are
a type of modifier, then it can be assumed that the qualifier also realizes a
different type of meaning than that of the head. However we must also assume
that it realizes a different type of meaning from pre-head modifiers. It is
possible to consider that the head, as the cultural classification (cf. ‘denotatum’
Lyons, 1977:207) of the referent, is a good candidate for carrying the
additional role created in the other situation being referred to in the process of
generating the full referring expression for the referent. The reason for this is
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that it is the symbolic representation of the referent. In this sense then it is a

pivotal element which can be used to represent the role the referent has in the
‘other situation’, μ.
If this approach is accepted then the challenge is to establish what type of
relation exists between the head of the nominal group and the qualifier.
Defining the relation is relatively straightforward when the relation is made
explicit (e.g. relative clauses). It becomes very difficult when the relation is
implied or even covert. To complete the approach being presented here
concerning complex referring expressions, the criteria developed so far will be
given along with examples.
7.6.1 Criteria for analysing complex referring expressions
The criteria given here have been developed following Neale (2002). Her
criteria were developed for analysing transitivity in the clause. The criteria are
not the same but the approach taken here is very similar and adapts her
criteria.
As has already been stated, in this theory, the head of the nominal group
for a complex referring expression will always carry an additional role (see
Axioms 1 and 3). The role conflated with the head may be a Participant type
role or a Circumstance type role. In the discussion above it was made clear
that the relation may be explicit or implicit. A clearly explicit expression of the
situation and the additional role assigned to the referent is typically found when
the qualifier is filled by what is traditionally called a relative clause. An implicit
expression of the situation is found when the relation is not explicitly identified.
A common example of this is when the qualifier is filled by a prepositional
group. In this case, the relation is deduced based on the role it is deemed to
have with respect to the qualifier and the use of the criteria presented here
becomes essential. There are some cases where the relation is deemed to be
covert and the relation can only be assumed, as will be explained below.
The presentation of the set of criteria for analysing complex referring
expressions is divided into three sections. The first concerns the case where
the head is conflated with a Participant Role. The second represents cases
where the head is conflated with a Circumstance Role. The last division of the
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criteria discusses the covert relations where it is very difficult if not impossible
to feel confident about the relation between the head element and the qualifier.
All examples cited here have been taken from the corpora used in this study
unless otherwise stated.
7.6.1.1 Participant Roles
The head of a nominal group that also has a qualifier element will have an
additional role which reflects its function in the situation created by the
qualifier. When q is filled by a clause, either h will have a role within the
embedded clause, i.e. it is also a participant of the embedded clause as in ‘a
parent who is on maternity leave’, or it will be related to the qualifier through
some covert (not expressed) relational situation, as in ‘plans to come home’.
Case 1: μ is represented as a Material relation, i.e. the relation between h

and q is similar to that of a Material process type of clause. The head may
express the role of Actor, Goal, or Beneficiary.
The head is conflated with Actor when the qualifier answers the question:
“what did h do?”
example: the person going abroad
test: what did the person do? the person went abroad
The head is conflated with Goal when the qualifier answers the question “what
was done/what happened to h?”/”who did something to h?”
example: a nice long message I typed to you
test: what was done to the message? the message was typed.
The head is conflated with Beneficiary when the qualifier answers the
question “who gave something to h?”/”what was given to h?”
example: the man that John gave the ball to (invented example)
test: who gave something to the man? John.
What was given to the man? The ball.
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Case 2: μ is represented as a Mental relation, i.e. the relation between h and q

is similar to that of a Mental process type of clause. The head may express the
role of Senser or Phenomenon.
The head is conflated with Senser when the qualifier answers the question
“who perceived/etc. something?”
example: the woman who wants the apartment (invented example)
test: who wants the apartment? the woman wants the apartment.
The head is conflated with Phenomenon when the qualifier answers the
question “what was perceived/etc.?”
example: the building she wants
test: what does she want? she wants the building
Case 3: μ is represented as a Relational relation, i.e. the relation between h

and q is similar to that of a Relational process type of clause. The head may
express the role of Carrier, Attribute, Identified, Possessed, or Possessor.
Attributive relations (cf. Fries’ (1999) Attribute + Instance)

The head is conflated with Carrier when the qualifier answers the question
“what kind/type/etc. of h?”
example: our supply of clean water
test: rephrase for equivalence – what kind of supply? our clean
water supply
In this example, it is important to recall that supply is considered as ‘thing’ and
not as a nominalized process (i.e. someone supplies clean water), c.f. Section
7.4.2 above.
The head is conflated with Attribute

when the qualifier answers the question “who/what has the attribute of being
h?”
example: the accessibility of harvest areas
test: rephrase for equivalence – harvest areas have the attribute
of being accessible.
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Identifying relations
The head is conflated with Identified when the qualifier answers the question
“what is x?”/”what is the name of h?/”which x?” etc.
example: a game called Junior Trivia
test: rephrase for equivalence - what is Junior Trivia? Junior
Trivia is a game.
Possessive relations
The head is conflated with Possessor when the qualifier answers the question
“what does h possess/own/have?”
example: a little house with a yard
test: rephrase for equivalence - what does the little house have?
the little house has a yard.
The head is conflated with Possessed when the qualifier answers the
question “who/what possesses/owns/has h?”
example: the role of the Aboriginal community
test: rephrase for equivalence - who has a role? The Aboriginal
community has a role.
Case 4: μ is represented as a Verbal relation, i.e. the relation between h and q

is similar to that of a Verbal process type of clause. The head may express the
role of Sayer, Verbiage, or Recipient.
The head is conflated with Sayer when the qualifier answers the question
“what did h say?”
example: the man who said no (invented example)
test: what did the man say? the man said no.
The head is conflated with Verbiage when the qualifier answers the question
“who said h?”/”what was said?”
example: something I said
test: who said something? I said something.
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The head is conflated with Recipient when the qualifier answers the question
“what was said to h?”
example: the man to whom John told the secret (invented example)
test: what was said to the man? the secret was told to the man.
There were no examples found in the corpora which expressed any other
type of relation. In other words, Behavioural and Existential types of relation
did not occur. This does not suggest that this is not possible but rather reflects
perhaps the fundamental meaning of the participants involved in these process
types.
7.6.1.2 Circumstance Roles
The Circumstance Roles given here are based on Halliday and

Matthiessen (2004). In these cases the head of the nominal group is conflated
with a Circumstance Role with respect to the additional situation, μ. There is
no relation between this role and the role the full nominal group fills in the
clause.
Location:Time where the head expresses the role specifying a location in

time.
example: the day we got back
test: when did ‘we get back’? the day.
Location:Space where the head expresses the role specifying a location in

space.
example: a place where the best sustainable forest management
practices are developed
test: where are the best practices developed? a place.
Manner where the head expresses the role of specifying manner. (where q
answers what situation is modified by h? i.e. what situation is done in manner
h?)
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example: the way the different partners have integrated their own
interests
test: how have the partners integrated their own interests? the
way
Cause where the head expresses the role of specifying cause (q answers
what situation is modified by h? i.e. what situation is done for cause h? h
expresses a purpose or cause)
example: a commitment to work together towards a common goal

test: the commitment is for the purpose of working together
Accompaniment where the head expresses the role of specifying

accompaniment (q answers what situation is modified by h? i.e. what situation
is done with h? h expresses the accompanier)
example: someone to travel with
test: is ‘someone’ an accompanier? yes. is there a situation
being done with ‘someone’? yes. travelling with someone.
Extent where the head expresses the role of specifying extent (q answers
what situation is modified by h? i.e. what situation is done to the extent
expressed by h? h expresses an extent or duration)
example: the last day working in the old building
test: how long were you working in the old building? we were
working in the old building for the last day.
7.6.1.3 Covert Relations
The cases referred to as covert relations are difficult since the situation
created by reference to the referent’s cultural classification and the qualifier is
not overtly expressed. In other words there is nothing that categorizes the
type of process and/or participants. This is, in many ways, similar to Halliday’s
view of the prepositional phrase as a reduced clause. However covert
relations do not only exist when the qualifier is filled with a prepositional group.
191
We find covert relations when the qualifier is filled with a nominal group,
prepositional group, quality group and also in some cases when it is filled with
a clause (usually a non-finite clause). Examples of these are given in (66) to
(69) below.
(66) the skin around
(67) legislative and regulatory tools alone
(68) ways to reach consensus on sustainable forest

management
(69) the acceptance that no one single universal formula would

work in all situations
The most frequent realization of this type of relation is when the qualifier is
filled with a prepositional group as is shown in examples (70) and (71).
(70) a problem at school
(71) bad news of John
In all of these cases, the relation governing all the referents in the situation
is not expressed and therefore it cannot be readily identified. In (70) above for
example, there is no obvious way to associate problem and school. However
in the example used for the head conflated with a role of ‘Possessor’ as seen
above in a little house with a yard, it is possible to relate house and yard in a
relational situation where yard is something the house should have. With
problem and school, there is no such association possible. It might be
tempting to consider that as a ‘thing’ problem developed or took place at
school which could lead to seeing the additional situation as a material type
but a more conservative approach has been developed here for these cases.
The approach taken here is to proceed on the theoretical assumption that a
situation does exist for the speaker, as discussed above, and that the speaker
has selected not to express it. In other words, the speaker has opted for a
192
covert realization of the situation, perhaps because he or she feels it is not

necessary. In example (70) above, a problem at school, the speaker is
referring to a particular problem, and in referring to the problem in question,
she has included in the referring expression another referent, namely school.
There must be, in the speaker’s mind, a situation in which problem and school
are experienced together. However, this situation is not overtly expressed.
The referent expressed as school may have other functions but it would seem
obvious that school is not in an attributive type of relation with problem. In
other words, school is not a type of problem in this case. Instead it is more
likely that the referent school is included in the referring expression in order to
assign a location to the referent in question, thereby contributing to the
identification or description of this referent (problem).
In the case of overtly expressed situations, as discussed above, the
concept of transitivity was borrowed and expanded upon in order to analyse
the transitivity of these complex referring expressions. With covert situations,
the relation is much closer to that of the relational process where there is a
kind of statement of relation rather than a description of experience as is the
case with most of the other types of processes in systemic functional
linguistics (especially for example material and mental processes). What we
find then is that the referent, represented structurally by the head of the
nominal group, is simply in relation to another referent in the construction of its
own referring expression. In this sense, the additional role it is assigned is
close to that of Carrier or Existent. (e.g. there is a problem which is located at
school or this problem is at school). Since the parallels seem closer to
relational processes than existential processes, the terminology used here will
be drawn from relational processes. The position taken here is that the
additional role assigned to the referent (represented by the head element) in
this type of complex referring expression is Carrier.
In other words, in these cases the representation shows the head, as the
representative of the referent, conflated with Carrier and participants
represented in the qualifier may express a variety of Participant or
Circumstance Roles. Examples of complex referring expressions with covert
relations are given below in (72) to (76). Each is discussed in turn.
(72) friends across the street

193
In (72), friends is conflated with the role of Carrier and the completive in the
prepositional group, across the street, is conflated with the role of location in
space since the referent is being described in relation to a location.
(73) a partnership in all science
In (73), partnership is being referred to through a relation to all science.

One approach to describing this relation is to consider that the referent is being
described in relation to another referent describing the manner in which it
exists. In other words, the partnership exists in all science. It is how it is able
to exist and so therefore what is proposed here is that the completive is
conflated with the role of manner.
(74) a potential strategy for reducing GHG emissions in the

atmosphere
The example given in (74) appears to be expressing a relation between

strategy and emissions. We will ignore the additional qualifier postmodifying
emissions. The head, strategy, is conflated with Carrier as explained above
and the completive, reducing GHG emissions in the atmosphere, is conflated
with a role of cause since the referent is described in relation to another
referent describing the cause or purpose for the strategy (i.e. the strategy is for
the purposes of reducing GHG emissions).
(75) trouble with that nail
Example (75) is one that is perhaps most open to debate as both the
intended syntax and functional relation could be called into question. The
treatment of this nominal group here is to consider that the trouble is caused
by the nail and therefore the completive, that nail, is best described as
expressing the role of why. Therefore it follows the same analysis as in (74)
above where the completive is conflated with a role of cause.
(76) more details about the guy from London
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It would be possible in example (76) above to replace the preposition with

a verb to get a better sense of the intended relation. The mostly likely
candidate for this is concerning (i.e. more details concerning the guy from
London). Here the completive seems to be expressing some kind of
‘aboutness’ or matter. The referent is being described in relation to another
referent which is describing what the details concern. Therefore the analysis
proposed here is that the head is conflated with Carrier for the reasons given
above and the completive is conflated with a role of matter.
This presentation of criteria has not meant to be exhaustive. It has not
provided examples of every type of relation or role found in the corpora. The
goal was to offer a good basis for understanding the approach to analysing
complex referring expressions as developed in this thesis. As with all analysis,
some degree of subjectivity may play a role but by attempting to define and
apply criteria to the analysis this should be reduced if not eliminated. What I
have attempted to show is that transitivity can account for the relation between
the head element of the nominal group and the qualifier.
7.7 Summary
The goal of this chapter was to motivate and present a new theoretical
framework for the analysis of complex referring expressions. The post head
elements of the nominal group have been identified by many linguistics as
being the most challenging area of nominal group function and syntax.
However as Keizer (2004) and Fries (1999) both conclude more research
needs to be done in this area. Both suggest that the key approach to making
some progress in understanding these forms can be found in taking a more
cognitive approach to the study of the nominal group. It seems clear that this
can only be an attempt to reflect the intentions of the speaker and therefore a
reasonable starting position is from a framework that considers how speakers
refer, i.e. what intentions contribute to the production of the nominal group.
As discussed in earlier sections of this chapter, transitivity has been used
to explain some functions in the nominal group. However, it has never been
used to account for the presence of the qualifier with the exception of the
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treatment of nominalization in the Cardiff Grammar. The main problem with

the nominalization approach is that it relies on the lexical functions of the head
element rather than on the semantic options available to the speaker as
modelled by the system networks. This criticism also holds for the traditional
view of postmodification as typically either as complement or adjunct. The
criteria are based on the lexical properties of the head of the nominal group
and not based on semantic criteria for referring. From the analytical
perspective, this may provide a neat solution. However as both Fries (1999)
and Keizer (2004) have shown, the solutions offered are far from neat.
This thesis proposes extending the theory of transitivity to apply it to
complex referring expressions. The main idea is that the speaker in referring
linguistically to some referent may need to construct a temporary conceptual
situation in which the referent has a functional role. In grammatical terms, this
means that the qualifier together with the head element sets up this ad hoc
situation for the purposes of referring to the referent. The referent is
represented by the head element in the referring expression. Therefore the
referent, through its representative as the head element of the nominal group,
expresses two distinct functional roles: the role it has in the active situation
(clause) and the role it has in the temporary conceptual (or referential)
situation (qualifier).
This theory has been tested on the corpora in this study, producing
substantial results. The results of this empirical work are given in Chapters 9
and 10. Chapter 9 presents a statistical descriptive account of all referring
expressions studied in this research. Chapter 10 focuses exclusively on
complex referring expressions. It also presents empirical results of the study of
these expressions and in addition discusses some of the main theoretical
implications stemming from this work.
In the next chapter, the methodology developed for the research is
described in detail before moving on to the empirical results presented in
Chapters 9 and 10. The analytical framework given in Chapter 8 is based on
the theoretical developments presented here in the current chapter. The goal
for Chapter 8 is to provide sufficient detail concerning the analytical framework
so that a high degree of transparency is available which should lead to having
usable results (or ones that can be reconstructed or recalculated for
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comparative purposes). In other words, the statistics given in Chapters 9 and

10 should be able to be better understood and re-used based on the
information given in the next chapter. Chapter 8 also includes the analytical
scheme (O’Donnell, 1995) used for tagging the corpora studied here.
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Chapter 8: A methodology for the analysis of referring expressions
8. A methodology for the analysis of referring expressions
The previous six chapters provided the background necessary for

understanding the research and approach taken in this thesis. Chapter 2
focussed on a literature review of the various relevant fields studying referring
expressions. Chapter 3 gave an overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics
while Chapter 4 provided a detailed look at the nominal group in Systemic
Functional Linguistics. Chapter 5 offered an overview to the model of language
developed in the Cardiff Grammar. In Chapter 6, considerable detail was given
concerning the current treatment of referring expressions in the Cardiff
Grammar. Then in Chapter 7, a new theoretical approach to complex referring
expressions was developed. All of these chapters have contributed to the view
of referring expressions taken here. This chapter explains the methodology
undertaken in this research and in doing so it describes how the corpora were
constructed, analysed and tagged.
The foundation of any research is its method of construction and
consultation. The means of collecting and analysing the data is of prime
importance in reaching any reliable results. Often very little attention is given to
this important area of research. A discussion of the challenges faced with
respect to methodology is beyond the time and space constraints faced in this
thesis. However, it should be noted that developing the analytical approach
was very challenging and it was important to allow the methodological
approach to evolve, as it were, while it informed the theoretical approach to
referring expressions developed in this thesis. As Martin (1997:80) explains:
It is also important to avoid becoming trapped in a rigid

framework based on the original research hypothesis. It is a
matter of maintaining, to the extent that this is possible, a
research dialectic between the posited and the given, between
the hypothesis and its verification. (my translation)
This describes quite accurately the development of the framework used in

this thesis since it was developed continuously throughout the research. It
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would have been impossible to develop the ideas presented here to the extent
that they have been had the original framework been held rigidly.
The research presented here has its primary focus on referring
expressions. The main goal is to reach a better understanding of their
production within a systemic functional framework. Specifically, the
multifunctional nature of referring expressions will be investigated, with
emphasis on the expression of experiential meaning as realised in referring
expressions. This involves looking specifically at the options selected by
speakers and attempting to account for this theoretically.
In the remainder of this chapter, the method of data collection and analysis
will be explained. The texts selected for the three corpora involved in this
study will then be described. Finally, a large section will be devoted to the
development of the methodological approach to the analysis. This includes
the software used to code or ‘tag’ the texts for the specific features being
analysed and the theoretical issues involved. The major contribution here is in
the development of a methodology that attempts to adapt and apply the
theoretical system networks in a coding scheme that enables the researcher to
recover the choices made in producing referring expressions.
The output of the analytical coding of the texts is in the form of XML. This
output is included in electronic form in the Appendix of this thesis on a CD-
ROM. Two XML databases have been constructed from the codings: REx.xml
and CREx.xml. The first, REx.xml, includes all referring expressions analysed
in this research and this totals 3 411 referents (see Table 8-2 below). It
represents each referring expression in a tagged format. The statistical
representation of the analysis is given in Chapter 9. The second database,
CREx.xml, includes all complex referring expressions and each one is tagged
in detail using XML in a similar way as the database with the analysis of the
individual referring expressions. However the amount of detail and the tags for
CREx.xml are different to REx.xml and for space saving reasons and for
reduced complexity, the databases have not been fused into one single
database. This would ideally be a project for further research. The databases
will not be discussed further as time and space does not permit. It is perhaps
useful for the reader to know that all the expressions analysed are included
here and that they are available for consultation if desired.
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8.1 Data Collection
In this research, what is under investigation are specific features of the

lexicogrammar. There are many ways to approach such a focused analysis.
One possible way to gather appropriate data would be to look for, identify and
select those expressions satisfying the criteria (e.g. complex referring
expressions or postmodified nominal expressions). This would be a
reasonable approach if we were only concerned with the structural elements of
these expressions. However, as stated in Chapter 1, we are interested
approaching their study from a more functional (and cognitive) perspective and
as a result we want to know about the context in which they occur.
In a study that seeks to contribute to a richer description of a particular part
of the grammar, we can identify several possible approaches for this particular
type of research. Before describing the approach taken here, we will briefly
consider the alternatives.
Experimental design is an approach which elicits referring expressions in
an experimental setting where subjects know that they are participating in a
research project (whether or not they are aware of the ultimate goals of the
experiment). This may include any type of language production (i.e. written,
spoken, or electronic) in any type of communicative task. For example, a
description task, problem solving task, recount, etc.
Extracting examples from corpora typically involves compiling clauses or
sections of clauses which contain the target expressions from an existing
corpus (for example one such as the British National Corpus, BNC) or from a
variety of texts (searching for a string involving a noun followed by a
prepositional phrase or a clause)
Recorded spoken data include the recording of spoken language (casual
conversation, interviews, etc.). The difference between this approach and
experimental design described above is that in this case, there is no
experiment involved and no attempts to elicit specific target utterances.
Nevertheless ethical approaches to this type of data collection mean that the
participants are aware that they are being recorded and therefore it is possible
that an observer effect is felt by the participants.
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A collection of written texts involves collecting and preparing an archive of

written texts and constructing a corpus from them. Producing an electronic
corpus then would involve scanning the texts or entering them in some other
way to a computer system.
Finally, a collection of electronic texts is a text archive which consists of
texts originally produced in electronic form. This refers primarily to what is
called computer-mediated texts where the medium of text production is the
computer, as opposed to speech or other written forms.
No one research design will be perfect and without problems. Each of the
possibilities above has its own positive and negative aspects for any research
problem. However since in this particular study what is of interest is the
choices speakers make in referring, there is no particular reason to choose
one type of text over another. Although there is certainly good reason to
assume that the frequency of use of complex referring expressions will vary
with text types (Biber et al, 1999, Biber et al, 1998, Quirk et al, 1985), any text
type, of sufficient size, will give insight into the particular part of the grammar
we are interested in. The challenge is to find texts that allow the researcher to
focus on linguistic choices so that it is the language system that is being
studied rather than another communicative system, or combination thereof.
The nature of this study requires human parsing of the data and this in turn
places a restriction on the amount of language that can be handled. What is
most desirable is a sufficiently large amount of text that will give enough
frequency on the area under study, while at the same time having some
consistency in terms of context. Experimental design is an excellent means of
‘zooming in’ on a particular phenomenon; however, in exchange, the research
often loses what could be considered the ‘naturalness’ of language use. It
would allow for controlled variables. This is an effective means of targeting
certain influences on language production, as, for example, in the case of
syntactic priming (Cleland & Pickering, 2003).
A large corpus such as the BNC is a valuable source for linguistic data and
it could have been used in this study since it would contain many examples of
the type of features we are interested in studying. Although it would be
relatively easy to extract the types of grammatical instances we are looking for,
they would remain in isolation unless the larger context was extracted with the
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instance and the larger extract would then have to be analysed by hand in any
case. It would seem then that there is little to no advantage to using it at this
early stage in the research. Once a fuller description of this part of the
grammar is available, we can then make good use of large corpora to verify
patterns and probabilities (for example Neale, 2002).
The most appropriate option for source of data then is for the researcher to
construct a corpus from written, spoken or electronic language. There is no
particular advantage of one mode over another with the exception that with
spoken language some additional variables are introduced and it may be
desirable to avoid these. Spoken language is often face to face (requiring co-
presence of participants) and this often introduces additional modes such as
non-verbal communication (gesture for example). Working with spoken
language also requires an enormous investment on the part of the researcher
since it must be first transcribed before the analysis can begin. Although this
is not a scientific problem, it would more than double the time and work
invested in the study. Since this research requires human parsing, it would
inevitably lead to a reduction in the amount of text that could be analysed over
a reasonable period. The only real disadvantage to using written (published)
texts is not having sufficient information about the speaker or speakers,
including important information about the editing process and any restrictions
on word count for example which may lead to a higher clause density.
Electronically produced texts (namely email texts, webpages, blogs, or chat
transcripts for example) are not without problems but they seem to be a very
appropriate choice for investigating language choice in the lexicogrammar for a
variety of reasons. The use of electronic texts eliminates the occurrence of
gestural reference since speaker and addressee do not share a physical co-
presence. In addition, these texts are produced with no observer effects and
this leads to texts which are as naturally produced as possible.
8.2 Construction of the Corpora
The texts used in this study come from a large archive of personal email
messages. Messages were selected from two speakers, forming two relatively
small corpora. They were chosen as they were the only ones to have the
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following two text variables (see Fontaine 2004b for a discussion of text
variables in email texts). Firstly, they were composed online using HTTP-
based email software. This is important as it gives less opportunity for editing
as compared to POP-based email software. Secondly, both authors
composed linear texts, in other words their texts did not include any reported
or embedded text from previous messages. This is also important as it often
becomes difficult to readily separate speakers in recursively constructed (or
non-linear) email texts (Fontaine, 2004b). The advantage to using these types
of texts (i.e. personal emails) is that they are as close as possible to casual
conversation without imposing an artificial nature to the discourse, without any
observer effects, and without third-party editing or revision.
A third text was included, forming a third small corpus, in an attempt to
control for text type variables. As was explained above, the type of text is
nearly irrelevant for this study and therefore any distinctive type of text could
have been used. In light of this, a completely unrelated text, having a relatively
comparable word count was analysed so that we could come to some
understanding of what influences could be attributed to speaker differences,
text type differences and most importantly differences related uniquely to the
internal structure and function of the nominal group.
The corpora used in this study were constructed as follows. First the
archive of personal email texts was consulted to find speakers who would be
suitable for the study. The texts chosen were single speaker texts with no
reported or embedded texts from previous messages. Two speakers were
chosen to create two relatively small corpora of 4824 and 4391 words
respectively (see Table 8-1). The third text selected was intended to be
completely different from the personal email texts so that the results for the
analysis could be compared in several dimensions: texts written by one single
speaker; texts written by different speakers within a similar text type (personal
email texts); texts written by different speakers in different text types (personal
email texts and another type of text). The only restriction on this third small
corpus then was that it should be of a clearly different, unrelated type of text.
The text chosen was taken from an online educational brochure on the Model
Forest Network.
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Table 8-1: Description of data

Text N Words N Referent† N Thing‡
GAE (personal email texts) 4 824 1 692 1 510
HES (personal email texts) 4 391 1 169 981
MFN (text from the model forest network 4 692 552 466
educational brochure)
total: 13 907 3 411 2 957
† ‘referent’ refers to all Participants and Circumstances (i.e. all Subjects, Complements and
Adjuncts.
‡ ‘thing’ refers to all Participants and Circumstances realized as nominal groups.
Ratios were calculated in order to gain a sense of the relative distribution of

referring expressions in each corpus. The results are given in Table 8-2.
Ratios were considered between the number of ‘thing’ (all Participants and
Circumstances realized as nominal groups) and the number of ‘referent’ (all
Participants and Circumstances); between the number of ‘thing’ and the
number of words; and between the number of ‘referent’ and the number of
words. Clearly the MFN corpus differs considerable in terms of the density of
the number of referring expressions with respect to the number of words.
However the ratio that is constant for all texts is the rate of referring
expressions realized as nominal groups. This is shown in the first column of
Table 8-2.
Table 8-2: Distribution of Referring Expressions in Text

Text ratio ratio ratio
thing:referent thing:words referent:words
email text – speaker 1 1:1.2 1:3.2 1:2.9
email text – speaker 2 1:1.9 1:4.5 1:3.8
MFN (model forest network) 1:1.9 1:10.1 1:8.5
Having now described how the corpora were constructed, the next section
will focus on how they were consulted for analysis.
8.3 Coding the data: converting theory to application
This section focuses on the way in which the theory, which was presented
in the previous chapters, has been converted to application in a computer-
assisted analysis. It describes the software used to tag the data and how the
analysis was conducted. The amount of detail in the analysis makes coding
large amounts of data challenging.
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As we have already seen, one of the most difficult challenges to a study of

nominal group structure is the various possible ‘locations’ for embedded
structures, in terms of what ‘fills’ the functional elements of the nominal group.
The ngp will, at clause level, tend to fill Participant or Circumstance roles. This
is necessarily so since in terms of the structure of the clause, there are only
processes, participants and circumstances (or Subjects, Complements,
Adjuncts and verbal elements). Since by nature, processes must be events
expressed in terms of some finite verbal operator, the nominal group is not a
structure that can be used to express the process of a situation (clause). The
treatment of the nominal group in the Cardiff grammar is very detailed both in
terms of structure and function (see Chapter 5).
From the perspective of this study, we are approaching the nominal group
from the perspective of its function as a Participant or a Circumstance in a
situation (realized as clause). Participants will conflate with either Subject or
Complement and Adjuncts will conflate with Circumstance. As shown in Figure
5-18, the roles are represented as being attached to the situation (although
conflation with Participants and Circumstances is not shown in this example);
in other words, a referring expression is not in isolation since it is part of a
functional expression (which is realized structurally as a clause).
Figure 8-1: Tree diagram showing the functional roles filled by nominal group
(invented example)
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Each element of the nominal group may be filled with an item or

expounded by an item as was explained in Chapter 5. When the nominal
group contains a qualifier, this qualifier will be filled by one of various possible
structures (e.g. nominal groups, clauses, prepositional groups, etc.). However
it is often the case that this is done by embedding nominal groups to varying
degrees of recursivity. This can be seen in example (77).
(77) the kind woman in the house on the next street (invented
example)
There is a relatively linear structure at the first level of analysis as is shown

in Figure 8-2, however if we look at the internal structure, we see various
levels of embedded nominal groups as in Figure 8-3.
Figure 8-2: the woman in the house on the next street
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Figure 8-3: the woman in the house on the next street
The embedded nominal groups within the qualifier, the house on the next
street and the next street have not been analysed internally for the purposes of
the overall description of the nominal group. The main reason for this is, as we
will see below in the presentation of the software used to code the data, that
successfully analysing, coding and tracking multiple levels of recursivity in the
nominal group is especially challenging. It seems more important at this stage
to attempt an accurate description of these expressions at the first level of
reference, i.e. the expression referring to the conceptual object (i.e. the object
that the speaker has in mind). Complex referring expressions like (77) above
are analysed analogously to transitivity as we will see in Section 8.3.3 below
and as was described in Chapter 7.
Since the particular point of study here is referring expressions, any items
filling determiners and modifiers were not considered and only the structures
filling the role of qualifier were analysed in great detail. In other words,
determiners and modifiers were included without regard to the units filling
these elements. Future research should go beyond this first level of analysis
in order to detail multiple levels of referring and consider whether such use of
nominal groups can be seen as referring or not.
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8.3.1 Coding the data
This section will describe, as briefly as possible, the software used to code
the data analysed.
The data were analysed by hand and coded using the Systemic Coder
(O’Donnell, 1995; and available online: www.wagsoft.com/Coder/). This
software is excellent for coding data and it helps contribute to maintaining a
high degree of consistency in the analysis due to both the nature of the
software and the features it offers the user. The Coder has five main
interfaces or modes: Text; Scheme; Coding; Review; and Statistics.
8.3.1.1 Text Mode
The input to the software is the text to be analysed in plain text format (.txt
or unformatted text). In this mode the user determines the boundaries for the
units under analysis by inserting markers into the text. Figure 8-4 shows a
section of text being analysed with the boundaries in place around nominal
groups. The system then interprets these markers as boundaries and in
Coding mode, the system will prompt the user to identify the features found in
the unit. In this study, the unit of analysis is the nominal group. Identifying the
boundaries was labour intensive as it needs to be done carefully by hand and
for large texts, this is even more so. Sections of text that are not of interest to
the current analysis can simply be left as one unit as they can be left out of the
coding by using the ‘ignore’ function. Therefore, in fact, boundaries will also be
marking sections of text that are not of interest. As an example of this,
consider the first line of text in Figure 8-4: | I | ‘ll try to get | the book |. Clearly
‘ll try to get is not meaningful in the sense that this stretch of text is ignored in
the analysis. The boundaries are not suggesting that this is a unit.
8.3.1.2 Scheme Mode
Scheme mode enables the user to create a new scheme or modify an

existing scheme. The scheme provides a means of representing the features
being analysed using system network notation. Following a system network
framework, the features are organised as a network of systems. The system
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does not necessarily have to be related to linguistic analysis, it could be almost

anything (intonational features for example), but since in this case it is being
used to code a functional grammatical analysis, we will only refer to this use
here. (see www.wagsoft.com for more information)
Figure 8-4: Unit segmentation in Text Mode (personal names have been blocked)
Figure 8-5 shows the Scheme mode, but the scheme developed for this
study is very large and cannot fit in one window (see Sections 8.3.2 below and
8.3.3 below). Building the scheme was possibly the most challenging part of
the research. There were two main challenges. The first was in terms of
dealing with the affordances and constraints of the software. The Coder is not
able to handle embedded structures. This was a particular challenge given the
complexity of the nominal group and the relatively great number of
permutations and combinations of its elements. The second challenge was in
trying to build a scheme that would model, to a certain degree, the networks
for generating referring expressions, while still offering a way to make
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comparisons with other approaches. One of the greatest difficulties in this

area is the lack of consistency in terms of the units analysed, differing
theoretical frameworks and how the statistics or results are calculated.
Figure 8-5: Scheme Management Mode
Before going into detail on the actual scheme used, we will complete the
overview of the Systemic Coder.
8.3.1.3 Coding Mode
Once the scheme has been finalised, the text is ready for coding. In
Coding mode, the system simply prompts the user with one unit at a time
together with the features available from the Scheme. We can see this in
Figure 8-6 where the unit, the book is prompted and the features are made
available to the user on the right. The top window displays the text and partial
context. The window on the left lists the selected features. In Figure 8-6 the
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user must select from the available features for the system (the use of SMALL
FULL CAPS will be reserved for the names of features): POSITION (SUBJECT,
COMPLEMENT, CIRCUMSTANCE), REF-EX TYPE (THING, EVENT, DESCRIPTION) and
ROLE (PARTICIPANT, CIRCUMSTANCE), before the system can present any further
features in the scheme. Once the user has made a selection for all systems in
the network, the system will move on to the next unit and prompt the user and
the cycle begins again. The analysis is complete once all units (sections of
text surrounded by boundary markers) have been either coded with a selection
of features or ignored (see Figure 8-7).
Figure 8-6: Coding Mode
8.3.1.4 Review Mode
The fourth mode allows the user to check the status of all units through a
Review interface, which can be seen in Figure 8-7. This is simply a means of
verifying that all units meant to be analysed were indeed analysed. It also
provides a shortcut to either ignoring individual units that are not desired in the
analysis or alternatively making ignored units available for whatever reason.
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Figure 8-7: Review Mode
8.3.1.5 Statistics Mode
Finally, once all coding is complete, the Statistics interface enables the
user to take advantage of the statistical tools that come packaged with the
system. The Coder has a very attractive statistical tool that allows for a variety
of comparisons and ways to view results. For example, results can be viewed
and analysed according to one particular system. In the above example, we
mentioned the POSITION system where each unit is analysed for the features
SUBJECT, COMPLEMENT, ADJUNCT and in Statistics mode, results can be made
comparatively among these features. The user may find it interesting to see if
his or her results are significantly different when the unit is in SUBJECT position
or not, for example. Comparative statistics can be obtained with the built in
statistics package where T-scores are calculated as a measure of statistical
significance. However, basic calculations such as the descriptive statistics
shown in Figure 8-8 can also be easily extracted. A full description of the
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Systemic Coder is available in O’Donnell (1995) and online

(www.wagsoft.com).
Figure 8-8: Statistics Mode
In the next section, the coding scheme will be described. It must be

remembered that despite similarities to a system network, the coding scheme
is the user’s analytical application, whether related to a system network or not.
The scheme presented in the next section is based on the system network for
referring expressions but it is not itself in any way representative of the system,
nor does it attempt to recreate it in any theoretically accurate sense. Several
adjustments have had to be made in order to apply it to the data being
analysed as is explained in the next section.
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8.3.2 The coding scheme
As stated above, the greatest challenge in developing the coding scheme

was to maintain a reasonable balance among the theoretical framework of
analysis, the existing network for generating referring expressions in the
computational model, and the constraints imposed by the software. This
section will present the coding scheme developed for this research in order,
section by section. The scheme itself is too large to fit on a single page and by
describing it in sections, the feature descriptions can be annotated with
examples.
As is the case with system networks in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the
Coder Scheme attempts to represent the relationships among features through
the use of system notation. This is the same notation as used for system
networks but they are not necessarily used in the same way.
Figure 8-9: System notation illustrating AND and OR selections
Figure 8-9 illustrates basic system notation. The simple system shown
here can be explained in words as follows. SYSTEM A contains two systems:
SYSTEM B and SYSTEM C. Upon entering the network, the user must enter
SYSTEM B AND SYSTEM C simultaneously, or in parallel (in practice this is of
course impossible but this means that the systems can be independent,
although related). For each system entered, one feature must be selected.
For example, upon entering SYSTEM A, the user will have to select from SYSTEM
B either FEATURE A OR FEATURE B AND from SYSTEM C either FEATURE C OR
FEATURE D. This is illustrated more specifically in Figure 8-10 which shows how
this notation is used in the coding scheme.
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Figure 8-10: Partial view of the coding scheme using system notation
Figure 8-10 is an example of the general description in Figure 8-9 and is

only partially accurate with respect to the scheme developed in this study
(compare with the actual system network presented in Chapter 6). It can be
interpreted as follows. For every REFERRING_EXPRESSION being analysed,
select a feature for the POSITION system (feature options are SUBJECT,
COMPLEMENT OR ADJUNCT) AND select a feature for the

REFERRING_EXPRESSION_TYPE system (feature options are THING, EVENT OR
DESCRIPTION). The curly left bracket is the notation for a simultaneous
relationship (i.e. AND) while the square left bracket is the notation for an
alternative relationship (i.e. OR). Therefore, in the analysis developed here, a
referring expression will be coded for POSITION AND
REFERRING_EXPRESSION_TYPE, but it will only be coded for one feature for
POSITION; in other words one expression cannot be simultaneously SUBJECT
and COMPLEMENT for example, it must be SUBJECT OR COMPLEMENT OR

ADJUNCT. It should be noted that the terminology within the scheme is user-
dependent. It is also meant to be application and theory neutral. Any user
wishing to adapt the coding scheme developed here should choose
terminology that will be significant to the research being carried out so that
when prompted for features (in coding mode), it is very clear exactly what the
term refers to.
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The Coder Scheme has the constraint that no two nodes in the scheme
can share the same name, which is both useful and very important for obvious
reasons. For example, once the term SUBJECT has been used for one node in
the scheme, it cannot be used elsewhere in the same scheme, hence the need
for some creativity in designing the scheme.
We will now begin the full description of the scheme. The scheme begins
with a system network for REFERRING_EXPRESSION. Upon entering the scheme
network, three systems are encountered which are entered in parallel as we
can see in Figure 8-11. Each system will be discussed in the following order:
POSITION, ROLE and REFERRING_EXPRESSION_TYPE. REFERRING_EXPRESSION-
TYPE is given last as it will require the most explanation and the first two will
only be described briefly.
The features in the POSITION system are in fact as were described above:
SUBJECT, COMPLEMENT, OR ADJUNCT. These features describe the position of
the referring expression. The features in the ROLE system relate to the role the
referring expression has in the transitivity analysis for the Experiential meaning
it has in its context of the clause. With these two feature coding systems, then,
the referring expression is being analysed within the context of the clause in
which it was used.
Figure 8-11: First stage of the scheme for analysing a referring expression
We can now consider the system for analysing REFERRING EXPRESSION
TYPE.
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The features available in this system are THING, EVENT, and DESCRIPTION.
This distinction is very similar to the three-way distinction made by Fawcett

(1980:93) in his system network for congruent referent generation: ‘referent
regarded as thing’, ‘referent regarded as situation’ and ‘referent regarded as
quality’. His distinction accounts for how a referent can be realised as ‘thing’
(for example, John, he, him, the man etc.), as ‘situation’ (for example in the
case of nominalization, as in his insisting on an early curfew), or as ‘quality’
(strict or strictly). However, in this study, the features THING, EVENT, and
DESCRIPTION are used in a slightly different sense. Generally speaking, a
speaker may refer to things and relationships to things. Referent thing is the
term for the conceptual object or thing; the referent thing may be part of a
situation, and hence this situation must be able to be referred to and finally, the
referent thing may be described by its qualities or attributes. We have already
said that we are not considering situations (the clause); however it is important
to make a distinction between those Participants and Circumstances which are
referring to a thing, a situation or a quality. Participants and Circumstances
tend to be realised grammatically as nominal groups (including those realised
within a prepositional group), clauses, and quality groups (see Tucker, 1998).
This is where we find a matching between concepts as shown in Table 8-3,
and this can be compared to the representation of the different levels of
semantic concepts given in Chapter 6.
Table 8-3: relation between type of referent and structural representation

thing – nominal group
description – quality group
event – clause
This may be seen as somewhat problematic when we consider specifically

the treatment of Attributes (Participants in Relational processes) and
Circumstances as both tend to be seen as descriptive. Attributes filled by
reference to a ‘thing’ (e.g. a lovely man) were considered as REFERENT_THING
whereas Attributes referring to a ‘quality’ (e.g. lovely) were viewed as

DESCRIPTION. Similarly, Circumstance roles filled by reference to a conceptual
object (‘thing’) were treated as REFERENT_THING and those filled by reference to
a ‘quality’ were treated as DESCRIPTION. For example, in the case of a unit
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having the function at clause level of Circumstance, five weeks is treated as

REFERENT_THING and quickly is treated as DESCRIPTION. Further those
Participants and Circumstances realized by clauses were coded as having the
feature EVENT. The coding scheme for this is shown in Figure 8-12. If an
expression was coded as THING, then further features would then be coded, as
we will see shortly. No further features were made available for EVENT and
DESCRIPTION since the functional constituency of these units was not of interest
in this study. They were included in order to consider the overall distribution of
Figure 8-12: features coded for each referring expression
The examples shown in (78) to (83) illustrate the distinction among THING,
EVENT, and DESCRIPTION using examples from the corpora in this study.
(78) when you’re here (coded as EVENT)
(79) really impressed (coded as DESCRIPTION)
(80) you (coded as THING)
(81) this (coded as THING)
(82) any young ladies (coded as THING)
(83) the girls who I used to work with at the company (coded
as THING)
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Essentially, a referent is coded as EVENT if it is realized as a clause

(embedded clause) and as DESCRIPTION if it is realized as a quality group
(typically an Attribute or Circumstance).
The scheme is basically devoted to coding features relevant to those
referring expressions which are realised as a nominal group (i.e. THING), where
what is expressed is in fact some conceptual object (i.e. the object or referent
which the speaker has in mind). This does introduce a structural distinction
among the various types of referring expressions.
The next coding system entered contains the features INTERACTANT,
OUTSIDER and SOUGHT. SOUGHT is the name for the feature that refers to
referents that are not known (for example: who phoned? what did he see?).
Figure 8-13: coded features for THING
The distinction between INTERACTANT and OUTSIDER represents a

fundamental distinction in referring in terms of whether the referent is a
participant in the speech act (i.e. speaker and/or addressee) or some other
referent outside the participants in the speech act. This section of the coding
scheme is a good example of the difference between the theoretical system
network modelling the choices available to the speaker in referring to an
interactant role and the application of an analytical framework in terms of
coding features. This difference is clear if we compare the coded features for
interactant reference in Figure 8-13 with the system network for interactant
reference in Figure 8-14, reproduced here from Chapter 6.
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Figure 8-14: Reproduction of the system network for interactant reference (cf.
Chapter 6)
The options available within INTERACTANT are straightforward: the referent

can either be the speaker or the addressee and in each case the referent can
involve the speaker plus n others (including the addressee or not) or it can
involve the addressee plus n others. As we are not modelling choice in this
analysis but rather trying to capture the options selected by analysing the
realisation of the expressions, we have no need to replicate the theoretical
system network identically, provided that we can account for the different
selections.
Moving now to the next set of features, an initial distinction is made
between OUTSIDER referents expressed with only one lexical item (i.e. the head
of the nominal group: pronouns, singular nouns and plural nouns) and those
expressed with some kind of modification, quantification or particularization.
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Figure 8-15: Partial view of the features coded for OUTSIDER
There is an implicit assumption made here that in language production,

seeking out a lexical entry as solely expounding the nominal group (i.e.
expounding the head element of the nominal group and the nominal group has
no other elements), is separate from the process of ‘generating’ the
expression, that is to say in determining how to build it up through the
grammar. This is not to say that in the case where a speaker has used a
lexical item to expound this unit that they have not run some kind of algorithm
to select the most appropriate or most convenient expression, but clearly the
grammatical program is not the same (cf. Fawcett, 1993). If there is a division
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to be made between lexis and grammar (and this is not to say that there is), it
may very well be in this area.
Up to this point, the process of developing the scheme is relatively
straightforward since the elements of the nominal group can be identified as
being present or not in the expression being analysed. The detail for
HEAD_ONLY cases is desirable in order to make a distinction between those
expressions that are referring by naming, although this forces an unnatural
split between referring expressions with only a lexical head, as in flour, and
those with a determiner or modifier of some kind, as in organic flour. This
division is not really problematic in terms of coding as this information can be
retrieved very easily by grouping the results differently depending on what
information is being sought. For example, one could easily add the statistics
for LEXICAL_ITEM to any of the HEAD_PLUS statistics if that were desirable.
As we can see from the view of the coding scheme in Figure 8-15, there
are only three remaining features that lead on to further codings. These are
DETERMINER, PRE_HEAD and POST_HEAD. The determiner coding scheme
shown in Figure 8-16 illustrates the features analysed in the determiner-type
system. Here we attempt to code to a minimal degree of detail certain types of
determiner. This is one area in which the amount of detail present in the
theoretical system networks for generating referring expressions is significantly
reduced. The feature being targeted for the purposes of this study is
particularisation which refers to whether or not the referring expression refers
to a particular object or not.
Figure 8-16: Features coded for DETERMINER_TYPE
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The treatment of modification within the nominal group is more complex.

This area provides a good example of how it is very difficult to work with the
great deal of range and variation in terms of the combinations and
permutations of the elements of the nominal group, especially when recursivity
is so prevalent. Figure 8-17 illustrates a partial view of the coding scheme
concerning the treatment of the features analysed for modification in the
nominal group. There were alternate ways of developing the scheme, for
example, once post-head is selected, there would be no need to consider pre-
head modifiers and the pathway through the pre-head feature would have the
burden of identifying whether there was additionally a post-head modifier. This
was seen as unsuitable as it would mean that for any given expression, some
cases would only be coded (or tagged) for partial features. With the complex
entry condition, every expression is coded for the presence or absence of pre-
head modifiers AND the presence or absence of post-head modifiers.
Figure 8-17: Coding scheme illustrating the features analysed relevant to

MODIFICATION
As an example of how certain cases would be handled by the scheme to

this point, we will consider some example cases given the basic structure of
the nominal group as described in Chapter 5, i.e. ngp → (d)* (m)* h (q)*.
The absence of any modifier or qualifier is straightforward as the feature
NO_MODIFIER is selected. For example an expression such as good friends
(from HES) has the following elements in the nominal group: ngp → m h. In
the coding process, the following set of features would be selected:
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{pre-head(quality(quality_1)), post-head(qualifier(no_qualifier))}.
As a second example, bad news of jimmy (from GAE), has the following
elements in the nominal group: ngp → m h q. The coding features selected for
this expression consist of:
{pre-head(quality(quality_1)), post-head(qualifier(qualifier...))}.
The details for the features for qualifier are given below in Section 8.3.3.
This completes the presentation of the analytical methodology for the first
round of analysis. In order to research the relationship between the head of
the nominal group and the qualifier, detailed codings were developed based on
the hypothesis that this relationship can be explained in terms of experiential
transitivity, in an approach that is analogous to transitivity in the clause (as a
system of experiential meaning). The method of coding these expressions will
be explained in the next section.
8.3.3 Coding complex referring expressions
The coding scheme presented in this section covers the method of coding
all complex referring expressions. This scheme is significantly different from
the original scheme first designed for the task of analysing these expressions.
The final version was developed during the analysis and forms part of the
research developed in this thesis. It was not applied in a deductive manner,
but rather inductively where the goal was to develop a coding model that
worked with the data. It would be very informative to explore the changes that
shaped the current scheme but this is beyond the scope of the current work.
The theoretical motivation and argumentation concerning the development
of the coding scheme presented in this section is given in detail in Chapter 7.
Here we will simply explain this section of the coding in terms of how the
analytical methodology was carried out.
The scheme is shown in Figure 8-18 and represents the last section of the
coding analysis. It illustrates the main features that were developed for coding
complex referring expressions, in other words, all nominal groups with a
qualifier element.
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For each complex expression, two feature systems must be given values,
as can be seen in Figure 8-18: type of AD_HOC_DESCRIPTION and type of ROLE.
This is to say that each complex expression will be coded for having a role as
either a participant or a circumstance in the additional (or ad hoc) situation
(see discussion of μ in Chapter 7) and that each qualifier represents one of
three types of ad hoc description.
The types of description are as follows:

AD_HOC_SITUATION, where the qualifier is filled with either a finite clause
or a non-finite clause;
AD_HOC_RELATIONSHIP_WITH_OTHER_THING, where the qualifier is filled
with either a nominal group or a prepositional group;
POST_MODIFIER, where the qualifier is filled with a quality group or a
preposition.
Examples of each of these are given in (84) to (93), where in each
example the head of the nominal group is underscored, the qualifier is in italics
and the subtype of description is given in parenthesis (see Figure 8-18).
ad_hoc_situation
(84) GAE: the chemo pills she takes (FINITE)
(85) GAE: a nutritionist talking on tv (NON_FINITE, ING)
(86) MFN: a valuable tool to monitor stand level and landscape

level change (NON_FINITE, INF)
(87) HES: a company named acme (NON_FINITE, EN)
ad_hoc_relationship_with_other_thing
(88) GAE: a gift something like that (NP_APPOSITION)
(89) HES: a friend from john’s lacrosse team (PGP)
(90) MFN: their own ideas on forest management (PGP)
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post_modifier
(91) GAE: something wrong (QUALITY)
(92) MFN: an annual harvest equal to 21 percent of the

national yield of commercial timber (QUALITY)
(93) GAE: the skin around (PREPOSITION)
Figure 8-18: Scheme illustrating the features analysed relevant to QUALIFIER
Concerning the type of role being expressed, it is the relationship between

the head of the nominal group and the qualifier that is being considered. Here,
the role refers to the role assigned to the head of the nominal group in relation
to the qualifier (in fact, the additional role concerns the referent but we do not
226
currently have a means of representing this grammatically). As argued in

Chapter 7, the head and the qualifier are seen as constituting an ad hoc
situation constructed (temporarily) for the purposes of referring. This
additional situation has been labelled as μ in the discussions in Chapter 7.
With this view then, the head is seen as having an additional role within this
situation. It is this role that is being coded in this scheme. There are two roles
possible for the head; PARTICIPANT and CIRCUMSTANCE. Clearly the coding
scheme here is modelled on the transitivity system for the clause. Interestingly
however, not all roles appeared in the corpora analysed and consequently they
have not been built in to the scheme. There is one role that differs
substantially from the standard roles identified in general systemic functional
linguistics. This is the role of COVERT_RELATIONAL, which will be discussed
briefly below. The terminology for the coding scheme is meant to be theory
neutral and should demonstrate that this type of analytical approach to
complex expressions could be adopted by any systemic functional framework
with a similar view to postmodification. Here, the more commonly known terms
for process types and participants have been used to reduce any potential
ambiguity in the relationships being encoded. Tests for each type of coding
have been developed following Neale (2002) who developed Participant Role
tests for the transitivity analysis of the clause in the Cardiff Grammar. These
tests were explained in detail in Chapter 7. Examples of Participant and
Circumstance Roles are given in (94) to (103), where the head is underscored,
the qualifier is in italics and the role of the head is given in parenthesis.
Head as Participant
(94) GAE: an extra thing I got for her (GOAL)
(95) MFN: the wetlands they create (GOAL)
(96) HES: john the neighbour from across the street

(IDENTIFIED)
(97) HES: the building she wants (PHENOMENON)
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(98) GAE: the thing I mentioned about John at school

(VERBIAGE)
(99) GAE: one of the guys that found him (ACTOR)
(100) MFN: forest technicians and biologists working in private

forests in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region (ACTOR)
Head as Circumstance
(101) HES: the girls who I used to work with at Acme

(ACCOMPANIMENT)
(102) MFN: a living laboratory where people who had a direct

interest in the forest, supported by the latest science and
technology, would become partners in sustainable forest
management decisions (LOCATION:SPACE)
(103) HES: the day we got back (LOCATION:TIME)
The feature COVERT_RELATIONAL is meant to cover instances where the

relationship between the head and the qualifier is deemed to be covert in the
sense that it is not readily identifiable. As will be discussed in Chapter 10, this
happens most frequently in cases where the qualifier is filled with a
prepositional group (i.e. AD_HOC_RELATIONSHIP_WITH_OTHER_THING → PGP),
such as in examples (104) to (106), where the head is underscored, the

qualifier is in italics and the role of the completive is given in parenthesis (the
role of the head is given as CARRIER_HEAD, see below).
(104) GAE: a big box on the livingroom floor (DESC-LOC-SPACE)
(105) HES: more details about the guy from London (DESC-
MATTER)
(106) GAE: trouble with that nail (DESC-CAUSE)
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For the analyst then this is problematic in the sense that any objective
classification is nearly impossible. These cases have been treated as covert; in
other words, it is accepted that a relationship exists, that it exists in the mind of
the speaker, but that it has not been expressed in a clearly identifiable way
such that the analyst can feel confident in offering a distinct coding. The way
around this problem is to accept that the relationship is covert and consider it
to be a covert relational, where the head has the role of carrier (CARRIER_HEAD)
and the completive (i.e. the ‘other thing’) has a role as well. This is done
without specifying what process would be involved, although it is assumed to
be covertly relational.
Although this section has not given any detail concerning the theoretical
motivation behind the coding scheme (see Chapter 7), the coding scheme
itself has been presented in detail. It should be clear at this point how the data
was approached, how the methodology was carried out, and how the data
were coded for the features developed in the coding scheme.
8.4 Summary
The goal of this chapter was to give as much information as possible

concerning the methodology undertaken in this thesis. It has detailed the
construction of the corpus and its composition. The actual data is available for
consultation in the form of two XML databases which can be found on the CD-
ROM in the Appendix. This database is a product of this research project and
can be used by other researchers or in future research that continues on from
what is presented here.
This chapter also described the coding scheme used to code the corpora.
The scheme does not represent a system network but it does try to capture the
semantic features and use them in the analytical framework. Developing the
framework was extremely challenging since the system network for THING is
meant to generate a nominal group, whereas the coding scheme is meant to
analyse an existing instance. There is no reason to assume that the system
networks are a good tool for analysing language.
In the next chapter, considerable detail is presented concerning the
frequencies of referring expressions. Statistical analyses show the relation
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amongst the various components of the nominal group. Given the importance
of probabilities to the Cardiff Grammar, Chapter 9 describes the frequency of
occurrence and interaction of the various functional components in referring
expressions and considers variation over individuals and text type. Chapter 9
will also discuss the relevant descriptive implications from this study.
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Chapter 9: A functional analysis of simple referring expressions
9. A functional analysis of simple referring expressions
The previous chapters have provided the background and theoretical

framework, including the methodological approach, for the results presented in
this chapter. As has been argued throughout, referring expressions must first
and foremost be considered from the perspective of the speaker; i.e. from the
perspective of the production of referring expressions. Clearly we cannot be
certain that we are accurately modelling or representing what speakers do
when they produce language because we cannot observe the process.
However, using a generative linguistic framework like Systemic Functional
Linguistics where the focus is on the choices speakers make in systemic terms
and using naturally occurring text as evidence of the output of the process,
there is every reason to assume that the process is being modelled whether it
is cognitively accurate or not.
It is perhaps useful at this point to insist on a particular point in the
difference between a model for language generation and the analysis of
language as data (or the output of such a system). The model of language
generation includes system networks that are meant to represent, in graph
form, the semantic options available to speakers. In analysing language data,
the linguist is dealing with the output of the process. There is a sense of
inverse analysis. Since the data is an object, we first attempt to render it
tangible and then manipulate it into what is believed to be reasonable units of
analysis. This is then converted into a mapping onto what is supposed is the
formal representation of the language generation process; however we can
never be certain that this is in fact accurate. In any case, as analysts what we
have to work with is form; function is deduced, inferred, or induced within a
particular analytical framework.
This chapter presents the empirical results of the analysis undertaken in
this research from the methodology laid out in the previous chapter. The
coding scheme used represents the features analysed for each referring
expression (nominal group). As mentioned in Chapter 8, the referring
expressions discussed in this chapter are available in an XML database called
REx.xml which can be found on the CD-ROM in the Appendix. Here we will
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consider the frequency and distribution of all referring expressions found in the
corpora, as analysed in this research. The main goal in this chapter is to
answer questions such as how much variation is there with respect to referring
expressions for a single speaker, how do two different speakers compare for
the same text type, and what are the main differences and similarities between
two very different text types. Basically, the goal is to describe, to the extent
possible, a detailed account of the functional syntax of referring expressions.
The organisation of this chapter is as follows. Before presenting the results
of the research on referring expression, we will consider some issues
concerning grammatical categories and how this relates to the work presented
here. In the presentation of the results, we will first consider the relationship
between referring expression, referent thing and nominal group. Next the
results for each referring expression realised as a nominal group are given in
detail. We will focus on the various components of these expressions, with
emphasis on ad hoc descriptions. In each case of presenting the relevant
results, the results from the three corpora analysed will be given in turn. First,
the results from the GAE corpus are given; representing one speaker’s use of
referring expressions at three time intervals over a five year period. Then we
will compare the results from this corpus to the other two corpora analysed in
this study. The chapter ends with a summary.
9.1 Grammatical Categories
This section could be considered as a kind of disclaimer. Linguists are in

the very odd position of creating the categories which they will then use to
identify and analyse language. Many of the categories we use are of such a
long tradition that we dare not challenge them or rename them. Consequently,
the work of a linguist is sometimes more difficult than necessary.
Imagine ... that a linguist is not committed to a theoretical set and

to terms of analysis like those currently familiar but is prepared to
derive the appropriate terms of analysis from the materials under
investigation. What understanding of the English language might
result if not only the analyses but also the very terms of analysis
were formed on the basis of such materials? (Schegloff, 1979)
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What different view might a linguist have if they were not bound to a
predetermined theoretical set or to its terminology. Admittedly, the research
conducted in this thesis is still very much dependent on structural categories
(e.g. nominal groups and clauses and other such grammatical units) despite
the fact that it argues for pushing towards a different perspective – that of the
choices made in producing referring expressions – and re-used terminology in
its use of referring expression as a linguistic unit.
Linguists have a definition ‘in intension’ (Fontaine and Kodratoff, 2002:7,
for the original use of the term see Arnauld and Nicole, 1662/1965) of each
grammatical category; in other words, they have defined each with specific
criteria, giving them the ability to classify and use terms in the fullest range
possible under the right conditions. For example, linguists define what a noun
is and what a nominal group is and how to recognise it. This is a definition in
intension as it is based on a priori criteria. Speakers also have some kind of
definition for the categories of linguistic items they use, although it may be
unconscious or implicit knowledge; this allows them to use language
appropriately. Functional linguists may benefit from applying a definition in
extension in order to account for all possible instances (in our case, instances
of referring). This would lead to a characterisation based on the instances
encountered.
In the case under study here, the instances we are considering are those
expressions that refer to a thing. Do we know its characteristic properties?
Can we identify the individuals that satisfy these properties? The answers are
not obvious. For the current purposes, a referring expression is recognised by
the ability to identify the referent by some mechanism, e.g. pointing or pronoun
reference.
Speakers are not only interested in representing physical objects.
Language allows speakers a very full range of expression. In addition to
abstract or conceptual objects (perhaps it is something imagined), speakers
may want to represent an activity. In principle, this is an abstract (conceptual)
object. However, in Hallidayan terms, the difference between representing an
object or an activity (event) lies in whether the speaker intends to represent his
or her experience of the concept involved in terms of a process or a
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participant. Language lets us do that through our knowledge of lexis, syntax,

and morphology.
In SFL, linguists often refer to a relationship of congruency between
nominal expressions (having a noun as the head of the group) and ‘thing’ (see
Section 7.4.2 on nominalization in Chapter 7). Alternate expressions used
(such as a verb) to refer to ‘thing’ are seen as incongruent and the term used
is grammatical metaphor. The implication is that when a non-noun based
group is used by a speaker to refer to a ‘thing’, the use of the non-noun is
metaphoric in a grammatical sense. Scientifically this is not sound because,
we, as linguists, have set up the categories that we wish to analyse (for
example nouns and verbs), we determine their characteristics and behaviour
and then develop extra meta-theory to explain the cases when they do not
behave as we think they ought to.
The notion of congruence stems from the idea that nouns are nouns and
verbs are verbs. When a speaker ‘uses’ a noun ‘as a verb’ or vice versa, then
the use is incongruent. The argument presented here is that by looking at it
rather from the perspective of referring expressions (i.e. the expressions
speakers use to refer to some conceptual object) then we can begin to look at
the problem in a different way - namely that the speaker may wish, for
whatever reason, to refer to a process as a conceptual object rather than as
some event that can take place. The language system provides ways to
realise this through the grammar. It is not a question of congruence because
the notion of congruence implies: (1) a pre-determined nature, and (2) that this
has somehow been changed or distorted, i.e. the natural pattern has been
altered. The pre-determined nature of so-called nouns and verbs is one
defined by linguists and grammarians. It seems counter intuitive at the very
least to claim that an instance of language use can be incongruent when the
definition is completely artificial.
The framework developed in SFL provides for participants and processes,
in a sense, as though they were slots to be filled. It seems rather that this is
the key to referring expressions rather than congruence or metaphor. Let us
now consider examples (107) to (108) below, even though they are invented
examples, for the purposes of illustration.
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In (107), I and the mountain are participants involved in the representation

of an event of climbing. However in (108), the speaker assigns this morning’s
climb a role of participant in her or her representation (in the relational process
of something having an attribute).
(107) I climbed the mountain this morning (invented)
(108) this morning’s climb was excellent (invented)
These are clearly invented examples and we know (intuitively) that our
language will let us get away with these expressions. We do not know whether
any speaker would really use these patterns or not or under what conditions or
for what purposes. The examples given in (109) to (111), found through a
Google search, show a similar pattern but the inverse relation, i.e. verb derived
from a noun.
(109) Do a Google search on the word (Google)
(110) Google is interviewing candidates (Google)
(111) I googled him (Google)
Google is a search engine. It was first a proper name, but its use has
broadened and as a term, it has become very flexible. However it is
impossible to be certain about the process involved in its use. Does google
(noun) imply google (verb)? Is it an analogous use? Or is it, as many would
claim, a grammatical metaphor (i.e. a noun behaving like a verb: the verb
google is (metaphorically) like the noun google.
The position taken here is from that of the referring expression where
although the qualifier may include lexical relations to the head element, it is not
the motivating reason for the qualifier. In other words, we have not been
primarily concerned with the lexical semantics of the individual contents of
referring expressions but rather with the referring expression itself as a whole.
We will now turn to the results of their analysis.
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9.2 Distribution of Referring Expressions
In Chapter 8, referring expressions in this study were identified as those

expressions having a Participant or Circumstance role in the transitivity of the
clause. Each referring expression was coded for the following features:
POSITION, REFERRING_EXPRESSION-TYPE and ROLE. This allows the expression
in question to be coded for both its formal and functional role as well as for the
type of referring expression. This is shown in system notation in Figure 9-1
below, where we can see that for coding purposes three systems are entered
in parallel for each identified referring expression. Therefore each referring
expression has a value for each of these options in the analysis. It is important
to recall that what we are considering here is the methodological framework
developed for the analysis and not the theoretical system networks.
Figure 9-1: Features coded for each referring expression
Each of the above features will be considered in turn. The next section
describes the frequency of referring expressions, focussing specifically on
referent thing and the nominal group. In each case we will consider the
frequency and distribution of the coded feature(s) for one speaker (GAE) and
then compare that to the results from the other texts (HES and MFN).
Following this, the results for the features of position and role will be
presented.
9.2.1 Thing and Nominal Group
There is, in English at least, a strong relationship of realisation between

referring to a thing and the nominal group, although as was demonstrated in
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Chapter 1, this is not true for all languages. In coding each referring
expression for type of referent (i.e. referent thing, referent situation, referent
description), we can measure to what extent this relationship is stable.
The relationship between referent thing and nominal group is represented
statistically in Table 9-1 and Table 9-2. Recall that the means of identifying a
referring expression initially was any unit having a role in transitivity as
Participant or Circumstance. Therefore the only possibilities for the type of
referring expression are a thing (nominal group), a situation (embedded
clause) or a description (quality group). Examples of each can be found in
examples (112) to (114).
(112) I bought John a bottle of wine [thing]
(113) It was good that you weren’t going too fast [situation]
(114) He’s so cute [description]
The difference is quite pronounced for the GAE corpus. The frequency of
occurrence for a referring expression to refer to a referent thing is stable at
89.2 per cent as an average. Where there is some variation, albeit very small,
it is with respect to situation and description. This variation is not statistically
significant and in fact the overall frequency of referent situation in this context
is so low that very little can be determined about its statistical value.
Table 9-1: Frequency of referring expressions by type for GAE

period 1 (GAE) period 2 (GAE) period 3 (GAE)
Frequency (%) N Frequency (%) N Frequency (%) N
THING 89.3% 583 89.0% 438 89.2% 471
SITUATION 3.7% 24 3.0% 15 2.5% 13
DESCRIPTION 7.0% 46 7.9% 39 8.3% 44
A very similar pattern is found when we consider all three corpora, as

shown in Table 9-2. As the two tables show, even though it seems an
237
individual speaker is consistent in this distribution, there is some difference

between speakers and text types. One interesting result here is the
consistency between HES and MFN with respect to expressions referring to
thing. This may indicate an idiosyncratic use of certain expressions for
speaker GAE. It should be noted that the difference between GAE and HES is
in the use of thing and not the number of occurrences of situation or
description which is quite close.
Table 9-2: Frequency of referring expressions by type for GAE, HES and MFN
GAE (set) HES MFN
total N 1673 1169 552
frequency (%) N frequency (%) N frequency (%) N
THING 89.2%• 1492 83.9% 981 84.4% 466
SITUATION 3.1%• 52 5.1%• 60 11.6%• 64
DESCRIPTION 7.7%• 129 10.9%• 128 4.0%• 22
Key for levels of statistical significance:
• 98% degree of confidence
† 95% degree of confidence
‡ 90% degree of confidence
9.2.2 Three main categories of thing
The coded features for THING are shown in Figure 9-2. We will now
consider the results for these features. Note that the feature SOUGHT is not
considered any further. Also the only detail for INTERACTANT is as given in
Figure 9-2. There is considerable detail in the coding scheme for OUTSIDER
and the results for its features will be given following the general results for
THING.
238
Figure 9-2: Coded features for THING
The features for THING make a distinction between referents having a role
in the exchange (i.e. an interactant role or a role outside the exchange) and
the expression itself being sought (e.g. ‘what (SOUGHT) did she give you?’).
The distribution of the three features for the GAE corpus is shown in Table 9-3
below. The occurrence of SOUGHT is negligible in this corpus, as well as in the
other two.
The data displayed in Table 9-3 is the frequency distribution for one
speaker over three time periods where 1 673 nominal groups were analysed in
total. The distribution of the referents is consistent in the first two periods with
outsider referents representing 71.4 per cent of the data in period one and
69.9 per cent in period two. We find a significantly different distribution in
period three where this figure rises to 80.9 per cent. Since we are not
attempting to account for this variation, we will not discuss any potential
reasons for this. However it would seem that there is room for more detailed
research here in order to establish whether a single speaker will vary in this
way or whether there will normally be a stable distribution in which case there
would be something aberrant in period three.
239
Table 9-3: Frequency of referring expressions for THING by type

Frequency (%) N Frequency (%) N Frequency (%) N
OUTSIDER 71.4% 416 69.9% 306 80.9%• 381
INTERACTANT 28.5% 166 30.1% 132 18.5%• 87
SOUGHT 0.2% 1 0.0% 0 0.6% 3
If we now compare these frequencies with those found in Table 9-4, we

can see how two different speakers of the same text type compare with the
control corpus. At this point there is no need to include the MFN corpus since
there is only one feature observed and this is OUTSIDER. In other words, in the
MFN corpus, there are no instances of reference to either the speaker or the
addressee, nor are there any questions concerning a referent.
We might expect to find very similar distributions between the GAE and
HES corpora since they are both classed as belonging to the same text type
and they differ only with respect to the speaker (for discussion of this see Biber
et al.,1998:118 and Biber et al., 1999:235-237; however neither makes a
distinction between interactant and outsider person reference). With a sample
number here of well over 1 000 in each case, we can be fairly confident that
the distribution is statistically sound.
The most immediate observation to be made concerns the overall
frequency average for OUTSIDER in the HES corpus as it is almost identical to
the results from period three in the GAE corpus. When comparing the two
based on overall frequency, the differences are statistically significant to the 98
per cent degree of confidence. As most studies do not consider interactant
reference separately from outsider reference, it is very difficult to get a sense
of how much variation can be considered normal for a given text type (cf.
Halliday and Hasan, 1976, where this distinction is discussed in detail but
without any statistical frequency). Further, this calls into question the criteria
for determining text type; in other words, whether syntactic variability or
register variability is the main consideration for classification.
240
Table 9-4: Frequency of THING features across text types (GAE, HES, and MFN)
GAEset HES MFN
total N 1673 1169 552
frequency (%) N frequency (%) N frequency (%) N
OUTSIDER 73.9%• 1103 81.7%• 801 100.0% 466
INTERACTANT 25.8%• 385 17.9%• 176 0.0% 0
SOUGHT 0.3% 4 0.4% 4 0.0% 0
Each occurrence of the feature INTERACTANT was further coded in order to

determine the frequency of the actual intended referent. Table 9-5 shows the
distribution for each possible referent for the GAE corpus. Clearly for this
speaker, plural referents (we and you plural) are rare and therefore they will
not be discussed any further. The distribution of the frequency of occurrence
for PERFORMER (I, we) and for ADDRESSEE (‘you’) is stable across the three time
periods. This is interesting since as we saw above, period three displays a
significantly different distribution in terms of the frequency of the INTERACTANT
feature. If we convert the frequency distribution as percentage to an estimate

of a probability distribution, then the probability that this speaker will refer to
herself is more than three times as likely as the probability she will refer to the
addressee (recall that the addressee is the same in all instances).
Table 9-5: Distribution of INTERACTANT type referring expressions for GAE

frequency frequency frequency
(%) N (%) N (%) N
PERFORMER 77.1% 128 78.00% 103 78.20% 68
ADDRESSEE 18.7% 31 18.90% 25 12.60% 11
BOTH (P AND A) 1.8% 3 0.00% 0 1.20% 1
EXCLUSIVE 2.4% 4 3.00% 4 5.80% 5
YOU-PLURAL 0.0% 0 0.00% 0 2.30% 2
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These results seem to indicate that self-reference is a stable frequency for

this speaker and further research would be required in order to determine to
what extent this holds for all speakers. We will now compare the same results
for different speakers of the same text type (GAE and HES). Results for the
MFN corpus are not considered here as it did not contain any instances of any
type of interactant referring expression.
Table 9-6 presents two calculations for frequency distribution. The first is
using what is called ‘local counting’. This means that the frequency of
occurrence is calculated from the total number of instances possible for the
relevant feature. In this case, for example, the frequency of PERFORMER
(N=299 for GAE) is calculated based on the total number of expressions found
having the feature INTERACTANT (N=385 for GAE), rather than considering the
rate of occurrence out of the total number of expressions analysed. The
second, called global counting, calculates the frequency as a percentage of
the total number available overall, i.e. all referring expressions analysed
(N=1 673 for GAE). In this case, it is perhaps more reasonable to focus on the
global counting as it considers the frequency of occurrence of performer and
addressee reference from the total of all referring expressions. Local counting
will always result in a sum of 100 per cent for a set of features whereas global
counting will not since the complete list of features is not given.
Regardless of which counting method we use, the differences found
between GAE and HES in terms of the frequency of occurrence of PERFORMER
(i.e. I, we) are statistically significant. The results of ADDRESSEE when

considered locally do not show any statistically significant differences. In other
words, the differences between the uses of addressee are not statistically
significant when considering the choices available within the interactant
system. When considered as a measure of frequency for all referring
expressions, the differences are statistically significant. The difference lies
really in the representation. At the centre of SFL is the notion of choice, in
deciding which counting to use, it is helpful to have an understanding of what
each methodology reveals. In this case it is difficult to work with ADDRESSEE as
a feature as the number of instances are quite low (only 25 in the 1 169
expressions analysed). This might readily be explained by looking more
closely at the interpersonal features of the HES corpus; however we are not
242
attempting here to account for why this is so. We simply accept the
differences at this point and note that there are issues here for related types of
research, (register studies for example). However since it seems clear that the
speaker of the GAE corpus does not vary in her use of speaker reference, we
might be able to assume a similar stability for the speaker of the HES corpus.
If this assumption were tested and it held to be true, then the variation found in
Table 9-4 would be due to the differences in speaker. It might further suggest
that ten per cent variation is an indication of a threshold for text type with
respect to reference to speaker role. Clearly this is a figure which would need
to be tested in further research.
Table 9-6: Frequency of occurrence of PERFORMER and ADDRESSEE features in GAE

and HES
Local Counting Global Counting
GAEset HES GAEset HES
total N 385 176 1673 1169
(%) N (%) N (%) N (%) N
PERFORMER 77.7 %• 299 69.9%• 123 17.9 %• 299 10.5%• 123
ADDRESSEE 17.4 % 67 14.2% 25 4.0% 67 2.1% 25
BOTH 1.0% 4 0.6% 1 0.2% 4 0.1% 1
EXCLUSIVE 3.4% 13 15.3% 27 0.8% 13 2.3% 27
YOU-PLURAL 0.5% 2 0.0% 0 0.1% 2 0.0% 0
PERFORMER
PLURAL 82.1% 316 85.8% 151 18.9% 316 12.9% 151
For the remaining features coded, the numbers are too small to determine
any degree of difference between the two speakers except for the Performer
Addressee features. However, the occurrence of EXCLUSIVE (‘exclusive we’)
seems to indicate some differences in use. The meaning of exclusive we is an
equivalent to the performer plural with the exclusion of the addressee and the
meaning of BOTH, ‘inclusive we’, is performer plural with the inclusion of the
addressee. If we combine these results, and consider ‘performer plural’, as
shown in Table 9-6, we find that the gap closes considerably.
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9.2.3 Outsider Features
The final feature for this portion of the coding scheme is OUTSIDER. As
explained in Chapter 8, in order to capture certain features using the coding
software, an initial split was made between those nominal groups coded as
OUTSIDER and not having any other elements in the group other than the head
(HEAD-ONLY) and those having other elements (HEAD-PLUS). In a moment we
will consider each one in detail, examining the features coded for both. First
though we will simply look at the division between these two features. Recall
once again that this division does not represent a division that exists in the
system network for referent thing. This is a classification developed in the
methodology of the analysis. It is important to note that although HEAD-ONLY is
a feature that includes pronouns (she, it, they, etc., it does not include
interactant reference (e.g. I, me, you, etc.), as this category refers only to
outsider reference.
The GAE corpus exhibits a fairly consistent distribution for local counting
as we can see in Table 9-7. However there is a slight amount of variation in
period one in comparison to periods two and three. However periods two and
three are not statistically different when their results are compared. When
global counting is used for the statistical analysis, there is considerable
variation across all three periods to greater or lesser degrees. Local counting
is the more reliable measure for this feature since it gives the distribution for all
outsider referents. The local statistics give a more accurate picture in the
sense that many other variables are held constant and only those expressions
that are known to have the feature OUTSIDER are included.
In Table 9-8, we find the same frequency distribution but this time
comparing the results from GAE with HES and MFN. Here we find that there is
considerable variation among all corpora and no particular patterns emerge. It
is clear that GAE and HES are most similar in this distribution. The difference
between the two is not quite ten per cent, which is a similar degree of variation
to the results found earlier in Table 9-4. The distinction being made concerns
the composition of the nominal group. Expressions coded as HEAD-PLUS
indicate that the referent is described or modified in some way, whether by

description, qualification, quantity, etc. As shown in Table 9-8, the vast
majority of all nominal groups in the MFN corpus have more than one element
244
in addition to the head. We will gain a better picture of where the variation is
precisely by looking at the features for each of HEAD-PLUS and HEAD-ONLY in the
next sections.
Table 9-7: Frequency distribution for HEAD-PLUS and HEAD-ONLY for the GAE corpus
local counting N=257 N=306 N=381
(%) N (%) N (%) N
HEAD-PLUS 42.3%‡ 176 35.9% 110 36.2% 138
‡
HEAD-ONLY 57.7% 240 64.1% 196 63.8% 243
global counting N=653 N=492 N=528

HEAD-PLUS 27.0%‡ 176 22.4%‡ 110 26.1% 138
† †
HEAD-ONLY 36.8%• 240 39.8% 196 46.0% 243
Table 9-8: Comparative frequency distribution for HEAD-PLUS and HEAD-ONLY for GAE, HES
and MFN
GAEset HES MFN
Global
Counting N=1673 N= 1169 N= 552
(%) N (%) N (%) N
HEAD-PLUS 25.3%• 424 33.8%• 395 74.5%• 411
HEAD-ONLY 40.6%• 679 34.7%• 406 10.0%• 55
Local
Counting N=1103 N=801 N=466
HEAD-PLUS 38.4%• 424 49.3%• 395 88.2%• 411
HEAD-ONLY 61.6%• 679 50.7%• 406 11.8%• 55
9.3 Head-only codings
The HEAD-ONLY feature is designed to enable the coding of what features

and functions are found in these types of nominal groups. Although this
distinction is not motivated theoretically, it is motivated by the need to extract
245
from the data certain results that lead to a better understanding of the choices
made by speakers.
Figure 9-3 recalls the features which were included in the analysis for
HEAD-ONLY nominal groups. If we compare this to Figure 9-4, which illustrates
the related parts of the system network for referent thing, we can see that the
coding scheme is a simplification in an array that is not meant to represent the
system networks. However, if the goal is to identify and count semantic
options (choices) such as [name of thing], [clock time], [recoverable thing],
etc., then the arbitrary relationship in the coding scheme is not entirely
relevant. Given the complexity of the system networks, mapping the relevant
features into a coding scheme in the software was a great challenge.
Figure 9-3: Coded features for nominal groups with feature HEAD-ONLY
246
Figure 9-4: Partial view of the system network for referent thing, illustrating semantic
options relevant to the HEAD-ONLY coding feature (seen in Figure 9-3)
The number of occurrences for the features DATE and TIME were so low (N
< 5) that they will not be included in the presentation of results below. Instead
the focus will be on the instances of nominal groups coded as having the
features PRONOUN, LEXICAL-ITEM or NAME. The results for the GAE corpus are
given in Table 9-9 where we can see the cross section of results over the three
periods. Given that the coded features here are grouped only by their single
element nature, the global counting method gives the most representative
picture of their frequency.
Irrespective of the counting method used, period one exhibits a statistically
significant difference in the distribution of HEAD-ONLY coded features. As
shown in Table 9-9, the frequency of pronoun use in period one is significantly
lower than the other two periods by nearly ten per cent. It is clear that the
large majority of these types of nominal groups have the head expounded by a
pronoun. Despite the low numbers of nominal groups having only a lexical
item expounding the head, there does seem to be a higher frequency in period
one as compared to the other two time periods (12.5 per cent as compared to
7.1 and 7.8 per cent respectively). The frequency of nominal groups coded for
NAME is reasonably constant for this speaker regardless of which counting
methodology is used. The slight differences in frequency are not statistically
247
significant. This result suggests that further research is required which may be
of particular relevance to language generation studies and the problems of
anaphor resolution.
We can now compare the results for GAE with HES and MFN as shown in
Table 9-10. Using local counting, GAE and HES show no statistically different
results, with pronouns representing nearly 60 per cent of the frequency and
NAME being the feature with the next highest frequency at nearly 30 per cent.
MFN however has a completely different distribution; here we find a much
lower frequency of pronoun use (41.8 per cent) and a much higher frequency
of the category LEXICAL-ITEM (36.4 per cent). The relative low frequency for
nominal groups with a name expounding head in the MFN corpus is
unsurprising given the nature of the text. However, it should be recognized that
there are some problems with identifying with certainty what a ‘name’ is in the
case of multi-word strings.
The frequency representation is slightly different when the global counting
method is used. As stated above, there is no particular reason why these
features should be seen to group together, except perhaps in terms of their
realization as a nominal group having only a head element and that this head
is expounded by a single lexical item.
Table 9-9: Distribution of head-only coded expressions

Local
Counting period 1 (GAE) period 2 (GAE) period 3 (GAE)
(%) N (%) N (%) N
PRONOUN 52.9%• 127 66.8% 131 61.3% 149
LEXICAL-
ITEM 12.5% 30 7.1% 14 7.8% 19
NAME 34.2% 82 25.5% 50 29.2% 71
Global
counting 653 492 528
PRONOUN 19.4%• 127 26.6% 131 28.2% 149
LEXICAL-
ITEM 4.6% 30 2.8% 14 3.6% 19
NAME 12.6% 82 10.2% 50 13.4% 71
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Even though the differences between GAE and HES for pronoun frequency
are statistically significant, it is much less of a difference than that found in
comparison with the MFN corpus. GAE has a relative frequency of 24.3 per
cent while the frequency for HES is close at 20.4 per cent. The frequency for
the same feature in the MFN corpus is very low comparatively at only 4.2 per
cent (although the number of occurrences is very low, N < 30). Since MFN
has no interactant references, this means that the frequency of all pronouns as
a percentage of all nominal groups in the corpus is just over four per cent.
Names were grouped within the [head only] category; however they are
distinguished much earlier in the system network which was discussed in
Chapter 6. Table 9-10 compares the frequency of the use of names as
referring expressions across all three corpora. The probability of selecting the
semantic option of [name of thing] in the system network for thing is 5 per cent
(Fawcett, 2004). The frequency for [name] in the corpora studied here varies
from 1.3 per cent to 12.1 per cent, with the MFN corpus exhibiting the least
frequent use of naming. A more detailed discussion of this result is beyond the
scope of this thesis but clearly more research is needed in the area of naming
(cf. Vandelanotte and Willemse, 2002; Wray, 2002).
Table 9-10: Comparative distribution of head-only coded expressions for GAE, HES and MFN
GAEset HES MFN
(%) N (%) N (%) N
Local Counting
PRONOUN 59.9% 407 58.9% 239 41.8%• 23
LEXICAL-ITEM 9.3% 63 11.6% 47 36.4%• 20
†
NAME 29.9% 203 27.1% 110 12.7% 7
DATE 0.4% 3 1.0% 4 9.1% 5
TIME 0.4% 3 1.2% 5 0.0% 0
ADDRESS 0.0% 0 0.2% 1 0.0% 0
Global
N=1673 N=1169 N=552
Counting
PRONOUN 24.3% 407 20.4% 239 4.2%• 23
LEXICAL-ITEM 3.8% 63 4.0% 47 3.6% 20
†
NAME 12.1% 203 9.4% 110 1.3% 7
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It is interesting to note that while the frequencies for PRONOUN and NAME
are variable, that of LEXICAL-ITEM remains constant. This points to an important

place for further research as given the great differences between MFN and the
other two corpora, it is entirely surprising to find such a constant with the global
counting method. However caution is needed as the MFN corpus has too few
nominal groups realised by a single item to consider these differences to be
statistically significant in comparison with the other two corpora. Nevertheless,
it is clear that as a percentage of all nominal groups, very few (3.6 per cent)
are realized as a head expounded by a single lexical item.
9.3.1 Pronouns as referring expressions
The category of pronoun is very broad and we gain a better picture of

these types of referring expressions by looking more closely at the various
types of pronoun in terms of their referents. Anaphoric pronouns refer to a
previously mentioned referent in the text and as such constitute an endophoric
reference, such as he or it. Empty pronouns are ones that do not have any
referent, typically it as in it rained. Deictic pronouns are exophoric references
and have the function of pointing out their reference. General pronouns do not
refer to a particular entity as is the case with you for example. Instead they
refer to a class of entity as in the use of you in you just can’t find good bread
anymore.
Clearly each of these types of pronoun use differs in functional terms. As
we can see clearly from Table 9-11, the most frequent type of pronoun use in
the GAE corpus is for anaphoric reference. The numbers for the other types
are too low for any comment. With the local counting method, the frequency
across the three periods is stable. When we use the global counting method,
and consider the frequency of all anaphoric pronouns as a percentage of all
expressions analysed in the sample, we find that there is only variation in
frequency for period one.
The relative lack of instances of these types of referring expressions in the
MFN corpus makes a three-way comparison difficult. However as shown in
Table 9-12, there is a general pattern. The speakers of GAE and HES do not
differ in their frequency of use of the various types of pronouns. The frequency
250
of anaphoric pronouns for example is relatively steady, between 71 per cent

and 72 per cent with local counting and between 14.5 per cent and 17.5 per
cent of all referring expressions in the corpus. The MFN corpus, although
having a much lower frequency of occurrence, also demonstrates a
significantly greater use of anaphoric reference as compared to other pronoun
uses, regardless of counting method used.
Table 9-11: Frequency of types of pronoun in the GAE corpus
Local
Counting
ANAPHORIC 69.3% 88 77.9% 102 69.1 103
EMPTY 7.1% 9 8.4% 11 14.1 21
DEICTIC 17.3% 22 12.2% 16 12.1% 18
GENERAL 6.3% 8 1.5% 2 4.7% 7
Global
N=653 N=492 N=528
Counting
ANAPHORIC 13.5%• 88 20.7% 102 19.5% 103
EMPTY 1.4% 9 2.2% 11 4.0% 21
DEICTIC 3.4% 22 3.3% 16 3.4% 22
GENERAL 1.2% 8 0.4% 2 1.3% 7
Table 9-12: Comparative frequency of types of pronoun for GAE, HES and MFN
Local
GAEset HES MFN
Counting
anaphoric 72.0% 293 71.1% 170 52.2%‡ 12
empty 10.1% 41 10.0% 24 39.1%• 9
deictic 13.8% 56 16.7% 40 8.7% 2
general 4.2% 17 2.1% 5 0.0% 0
Global
N=1673 N=1169 N=552
Counting
anaphoric 17.5% 293 14.5% 170 2.2%† 12
•
empty 2.5% 41 2.1% 24 1.6% 9
deictic 3.3% 56 3.4% 40 0.4% 2
general 1.0% 17 0.4% 5 0.0% 0
251
9.4 The [head-plus] feature
It would be very difficult to relate the coded features for the HEAD-PLUS
category to the relevant system network for thing since they involve quite a
number of different areas which are not confined to one particular portion of
the network. If we were to try to identify the main systems involved in what
has been grouped in the coding feature HEAD-PLUS, then the main system
options would be recoverable_thing, cultural-classification_potential, and
thing_exclaimed_at, as shown in Figure 9-5 which is an excerpt from the
overview of the system network for thing seen in Chapter 6.
Figure 9-5: Partial view of the system network for referent thing
Without presenting the network again at this point, let us simply recall that
deeper into each of these systems, we find that what this coding feature
(shown in Figure 9-6) is trying to capture is the instances of any type of
‘addition’ to the cultural classification of a referent. This includes
particularizing, modifying or quantifying the referent.
252
Figure 9-6: Coding features for the HEAD-PLUS category
Coding for modification, both pre-head and post-head modification, was

especially challenging as it is not simply a case of a referring expression
having one or the other. One single referring expression could in fact have
several modifiers and one or more qualifiers; the combinations are, in reality
(in terms of realisation), a small finite number (theoretically infinite) but
nevertheless this is difficult to represent in a single level of analysis. The
means of doing so is shown again here in Figure 9-7, where any instance of a
pre-head modifier will lead to both the QUALITY and QUALIFIER coding systems.
This research did not intend to offer an analysis of qualities (see Tucker,
1998), except to include the number of modifiers within a referring expression.
As this chapter is concerned with simple referring expressions only, the results
for expressions coded as having a QUALIFIER feature are given in the next
chapter.
253
Figure 9-7: Coded features for the MODIFICATION category
9.4.1 Determiners
The determiner system (or determination for Halliday and Matthiessen,

2004) is very complex. It is the boundary between determiners and head that
has generated perhaps the greatest debate and difficulties in the syntax of the
nominal group, whether from a functional perspective or not. According to
Morley (2000:50), “the area of language spanned by ... independent headword
and determinative forms is a fairly ‘difficult’ area for grammarians, with respect
to the terminology used”. There are often considerable differences in what
types of words are classed as determiners and further differences with respect
to the number and names of sub-types of determiners. Our use here of the
feature name, for coding purposes, determination, is similar in a sense to
Morley’s term determinative as it is seen as a general term for a category that
groups structural elements or items that fill a determiner role.
The process of identification for the elements of the nominal group present
in the referring expressions analysed has been based, generally, on a
functional syntax of the nominal group (Fawcett, 2000). One departure from
this is with respect to items which are traditionally referred to as the definite
and indefinite article, the and a respectively. For Fawcett (2000), the indefinite
article is classed as a quantifying determiner and treated differently than the,
which in turn is classed as a deictic determiner. Halliday and Matthiessen
(2004) consider both as determiners, where the is classed as a specific
254
determiner and a is classed as an unspecific determiner. Halliday has a

separate category for Numerative as seen in Chapter 4. For Fawcett, quantity
is expressed through the quantifying determiner (see Chapter 5). For the
purposes of coding in this study, it was felt that for quantitative purposes it was
best to code a as a determiner rather than coding it as a quantifying
determiner. The distinction between these two items was handled through
sub-types of determiner (see Figure 9-8) where the was coded as
PARTICULARIZED and a was coded as NOT-PARTICULARIZED (similar to Halliday’s
specific and non-specific). Once again, this is a methodological decision which
does not accurately reflect any theoretical motivation. However there is no
inherent problem with doing so as the frequency distribution of the item is
accessible. The real motivation for classifying a in this way comes from an
attempt to keep the analysis as transparent as possible and as comparative as
possible, thereby enabling rather than disabling comparison with other studies.
No study on the nominal group or noun phrase has grouped a separately from
the, at least at a general level of analysis.
Determiners were identified and counted in the analysis but only at a very
general level of analysis. They need to be seen in conjunction with the coded
features of SELECTION and QUANTIFICATION (both related to types of
determiners) which attempt to capture the main areas of the determiner
system in the Cardiff grammar. There was no attempt to classify or identify in
any detailed way the many types of determiner (see Chapter 5). As a result,
only a very general, broad analysis was carried out on the determiner
elements of the nominal group. For example, as we see in Figure 9-8, the only
distinction made in the coded feature DETERMINER is among GENITIVE,
PARTICULARIZED (deictic determiners) and NON-PARTICULARIZED determiners

(non-deictic or non-specific determiners). Genitive determiners relate to the
genitive cluster in the Cardiff grammar. The way in which other types of
determiner are accounted for in this analysis is by separating quantifying
determiners from the other types. If any other type of determiner is present,
then the selector element is also necessarily present in the nominal group.
Therefore only SELECTION was coded for in these cases. A problem would
have arisen in the coding system if there had been multiple types of non-
deictic determiner present as the coding scheme as designed could not have
255
accounted for this degree of detail. However this was not the case as no such
instances were encountered. In fact as we shall see below, the occurrence of
any type of determiner with selector is extremely rare in the corpora analysed
here.
Figure 9-8: Features coded for the DETERMINER-TYPE category
Using the figures gained from the local counting method on the GAE
corpus, we find that period one differs only with respect to period three and it is
not statistically different from the frequency distribution in period two. However
with the global counting method, the degree of confidence is less and it is
again period one that differs but this time only with respect to period two.
What seems to be consistent in period one is a different pattern to those found
in later periods. This is an area that requires further exploration for individual
speaker variation.
It is important to note that since the nominal groups counted here have the
feature HEAD-PLUS, there is at least one other element in addition to the head.
For the cases where there is no determiner (NO-DETERMINER), there must be
some other element. The only cases where there is no determiner and no
other elements in addition to the head are included under the feature HEAD-
ONLY, as seen above.
256
Table 9-13: Frequency of DETERMINER for GAE

Local
176 110 138
Counting
(%) N (%) N (%) N
DETERMINER 80.1%• 141 74.5% 82 69.6% 96
NO-DETERMINER 19.9% 35 25.5% 28 30.4% 42
Global
653 492 528
Counting
† †
DETERMINER 21.6% 141 16.7% 82 18.2% 96
NO-DETERMINER 5.4% 35 5.7% 28 8.0% 42
One of the main differences between MFN and the other two corpora is the
relative high frequency of nominal groups coded as having the feature [head-
plus]. This is a good example of why it is useful to consider both sets of
statistics; in doing so, we gain a much fuller and more accurate picture of the
data. It is clear that regardless of the text or speaker, if a nominal group has
elements other than head, it is far more probable (frequency probability of
between 0.65 and 0.75) that it will also have the element of determiner as we
can see from Table 9-14. The distribution of determiners within HEAD_PLUS
expressions is the same for GAE and HES but MFN differs significantly (98 per
cent level) from both of the other corpora. The frequency probability covers a
greater range when considered as a frequency of all referring expressions (P =
0.19 to 0.48, with global counting). Although further research is required, there
is evidence to suggest that individual speakers do not vary greatly in the use of
determiner. Furthermore, speakers of the same text type do not seem to differ
greatly.
257
Table 9-14: Comparative frequency of DETERMINER for GAE, HES and MFN
Local
GAEset HES MFN
Counting
Total N N=424 N=395 N=411
DETERMINER 75.2% 319 70.4% 278 64.5%• 265
24.8% 105 29.6% 117 35.5%• 146
NO-DETERMINER
Global
N=1673 N=1169 N=552
Counting
DETERMINER 19.1%• 319 23.8%• 278 48.0%• 265
NO-DETERMINER 6.3%• 105 10.0%• 117 26.4%• 146
The instances of DETERMINER as a feature coded has been further divided

into type of determiner. The first is genitive and the second is whether or not
the determiner is particularized or not. Since PARTICULARIZATION here is a
feature name for all determiners that are not genitive determiners, the results
for this feature will be given in more detail below. For now we will only
comment on the results for the genitive determiners. The number of instances
of genitive determiners is relatively low in the three GAE sub-corpora, however
it is clear that there is no statistically significant variation in the frequency of
these types of determiner. The results for period one of the GAE corpus do
seem to be exhibiting different frequencies and distributions than the other two
periods (see Table 9-15) with respect to global counting. The differences for
this period are significant to the 95 per cent level. This suggests that it may be
more reasonable when considering the results to rely more heavily on the
results from the second and third period. Further research would certainly
attempt to account for the variation found in the first period.
Table 9-15: Type of DETERMINER for GAE

Local Counting
Total N 141 82 96
GENITIVE 20.6% 29 24.4% 20 28.1% 27
PARTICULARIZATION 79.4% 112 75.6% 62 71.9% 69
Global Counting
Total N 653 492 528
GENITIVE 4.4% 29 4.1% 20 5.1% 27
†
PARTICULARIZATION 17.2% 112† 12.6% 62 13.1% 69
258
Some very interesting results are discovered when the results for
determination are compared amongst the three main corpora (see Table 9-16).
We must keep in mind that the frequency of genitive determiners is very low in
the MFN corpus and so the statistical analysis for this feature is not reliable.
However there is clearly a trend. There are no statistical differences for the
GAE and HES corpora and the results for the MFN corpus are significantly
different from both GAE and HES when considered as a percentage of all
determiners in this category (i.e. using local counting). However, as a
percentage of all the expressions analysed in each corpus, there are no
differences and the frequency occurrence of genitive determiners seems
stable regardless of speaker or text type. This result is very difficult to explain
as one would expect there to be differences at least in the MFN corpus.
Table 9-16: Comparative results for determiner for GAE, HES and MFN
GAEset HES MFN
Local Counting
Total N 319 278 265
GENITIVE 23.8% 76 20.9% 58 9.8%• 26
PARTICULARIZATION 76.2% 243 79.1% 220 90.2%• 239
Global Counting
Total N 1673 1169 552
GENITIVE 4.5% 76 5.0% 58 4.7% 26
PARTICULARIZATION 14.5%• 243 18.8%• 220 43.3%• 239
9.4.2 Particularization
The feature in the coding scheme labelled PARTICULARIZED considers the

differences between nominal groups such as the game PARTICULARIZED and a
game NOT-PARTICULARIZED for example. As discussed in the previous section,
this is different from the treatment of the indefinite article in the Cardiff
grammar where it is seen as a quantifying determiner and considered as
having a different function to that of the definite article. However, knowing that
the feature NOT-PARTICULARIZED is counting the instances of what is traditionally
259
called the indefinite determiners, we can use the results as we wish. In this
way, it makes it easy to compare with other frameworks which do not make the
same division and at the same time, the results here can be grouped if desired
with the quantifying determiners. In Table 9-17, we find again the results using
both counting methods and what we find is that regardless of counting method,
there are no statistical differences for any period in the GAE corpus. This
suggests an area of realization that is stable for a single speaker. We must
keep in mind that these figures relate only to deictic determiners and that there
are other realizations of particularized referring expressions; for example,
deictic determiners could be arguably classified as having a particularizing
function in the referring expression.
Table 9-17: Distribution of PARTICULARIZED and NOT-PARTICULARISED for GAE

Local Counting
Total N 111 61 67
PARTICULARIZED 62.2% 69 55.7% 34 58.2% 39
NOT-PARTICULARIZED 37.8% 42 44.3% 27 41.8% 28
Global Counting
Total N 653 492 528
PARTICULARIZED 10.6% 69 6.9% 34 7.4% 39
NOT-PARTICULARIZED 6.4% 42 5.5% 27 5.3% 28
No statistically significant differences
A different perspective is seen when comparing these results among the

three corpora as shown in Table 9-18, where there is a difference in
representation depending on the counting method used. As can be seen in
Table 9-18, the frequency of deictic determiners in the MFN corpus is
significantly different from that of the GAE corpus as a set. The results for
HES show no differences from either of the other two corpora with the local
counting method. This means that given the presence of a determiner (i.e.
considering only nominal groups with a determiner), the percentage of those
determiners that are ‘particularized’ does not differ significantly for HES as
compared to the other two corpora.
However if we consider the frequency of ‘particularized’ determiners as a
percentage of all the expressions analysed in each corpus, we find that there
is much more variation. Considering that there are no statistical differences for
260
the speaker of the GAE corpus, Table 9-18 shows that the speakers of the
GAE and HES corpora differ significantly and both of these differ significantly
from the MFN corpus. This suggests then that the amount of ‘particularizing’,
at least where deictic determiners are concerned, may be a steady ratio for
one speaker and variable for different speakers and different texts. Reaching
any satisfactory conclusions on this point requires a far more detailed analysis
of particularization in general and the use of particularizing determiners for
individual speakers.
Table 9-18: Comparative results for PARTICULARIZATION for GAE, HES and MFN
GAEset HES MFN
Local Counting
Total N 239 220 239
particularized 59.4% 142 65.5% 144 68.2%• 163
not-
particularized 40.6% 97 34.5% 76 31.8%• 76
Global Counting
Total N 1673 1169 552
particularized 8.5%• 142 12.3%• 144 29.5%• 163
not-
particularized 5.8% 97 6.5% 76 13.8% 76
9.4.3 Selection
The analysis of the cases that fall into this area are perhaps the most
challenging of the nominal group. This is one of the areas where most
linguists struggle to account for the expressions encountered in the data as
they do not fit the notions of head and its relation to the other elements of the
nominal group. The Cardiff Grammar has developed an approach to
determiners called the selection principle which pushes the head element to
the far right of the nominal group in many cases (see also Chapter 7). By
introducing the notion of selection, many of the nominals encountered early in
the nominal group can be viewed as having a determiner function.
As a reminder of the type of determiner we are discussing here, let us
reconsider an example of the partitive determiner from Chapter 5, where the
261
nominal group, the back of the house (see Figure 9-9) has the following
elements: partitive determiner, selector, deictic determiner and head. The
Cardiff grammar has developed a very detailed account of determiners. The
order of determiners is as follows:
ngp > (&) (rd) (v) (pd) (qd) (v) (sd or od) (v) (dd) (m)* h (q),
where all determiners except deictic determiners can be followed by a selector,

v, which marks the selection of the referent. This description reflects the
potential of the nominal group. The use of this type of function was rare in the
three corpora studied. Of the 2 370 nominal groups analysed in total for all
three corpora (or 13 907 words), there were only 31 instance of the selector
element. This constitutes a global frequency distribution of 1.3 per cent.
The one main difference among the corpora is in the co-occurrence of the
selector element with a quantifying determiner. The two email corpora, GAE
and HES, had a combined total of 23 instances of selector, the majority of
which (a total of 13, or 56.5 per cent) were preceded by a quantifying
determiner, as in 3 days of the trip, a couple of awards, or three of the grafts.
In the MFN corpus however, there were only eight instances of selector and
only one of these was preceded by a quantifying determiner (for a relative
frequency of 12.5 per cent). The vast majority of the instances of selector in
the MFN corpus were preceded instead by a partitive determiner as in part of
the IMFN or a large part of Nova Scotia’s landbase.
Figure 9-9: Diagram of a nominal group illustrating the selector element for the
back of the house
262
Clearly the number of occurrences of the selector element is too low for
any conclusive statistical analysis. However there is one very interesting
pattern that emerges when the frequency of occurrence of this element is
viewed in its role in the clause. Where there are instances of selection, it is
always in either Complement or Adjunct position. No instances of selection
were found for Subject roles. In fact, a number of interesting results can be
found when distributions are considered as cross sections of the clause.
There are differences in nominal group composition depending on the role it
fills experientially and interpersonally, as we will see in Section 9.5 below.
9.4.4 Quantity
QUANTITY is the last feature which was coded for in relation to the
determiners in the nominal group. The only factor considered here is the
presence or absence of a quantifying determiner. Although quantifying
determiners are more frequent than selection, they have a relatively low
frequency as shown in Table 9-19 and Table 9-20. Table 9-19 presents the
results across the three time periods for the GAE corpus and we can see that
regardless of counting method, there is no statistical difference in the
frequency of these determiners. This suggests that for this single speaker at
least, there may be a stable probability for this type of determiner. In other
words, for a large enough sample, the probability of any given referring
expression including selection by quantification is approximately 0.03 for this
speaker. Further investigation would be needed in order to test whether this is
in fact an accurate probability (if we accept that it is reasonable to convert a
frequency distribution to a probability measure for this data).
If we now compare these results with the results for HES and MFN, the
results in the MFN corpus show that it has the highest occurrence of
quantifying determiners (see Table 9-20). There is nothing surprising about
finding differences in the occurrence of these elements in the nominal group.
In fact, there is no reason to expect different speakers to have the same or
similar frequency of occurrence. It would be incredibly surprising if we found no
variation at all in comparing the texts. In fact, it is quite surprising that there is
no variation in the different periods for the GAE corpus. What we might hope
263
for is some stability in terms of register so that the results here could contribute
to the probabilities in the computer model of the theory. It would seem from
these results that the quantifier element of the nominal group is a good
candidate for a relatively steady-state distribution. Despite the fact that the
MFN corpus has a greater number of HEAD-PLUS nominal groups, the
differences do not seem as great as one might have expected them to be.
Differences in frequency of 2.3 per cent, comparing GAE and MFN using local
counting, are not very large, even if calculated as statistically significant.
Table 9-19: Distribution of the QUANTITY feature (quantifying determiners) for GAE
Local Counting
Total N 176 110 138
NO-QUANTITY 88.1% 155 87.3% 96 81.9% 113
QUANTITY 11.9% 21 12.7% 14 18.1% 25
Global Counting
Total N 653 492 528
NO-QUANTITY 23.7% 155 19.5% 96 21.4% 113
QUANTITY 3.2% 21 2.8% 14 4.7% 25
No statistically significant differences
Table 9-20: Comparative results for the QUANTITY feature (quantifying determiners) for GAE,
HES and MFN
GAEset HES MFN
Local Counting
Total N 424 395 411
NO-QUANTITY 85.8% 364 80.8% 319 88.1% 362
QUANTITY 14.2% 60 19.2% 76 11.9%• 49
Global Counting
Total N 1673 1169 552
NO-QUANTITY 21.8% 364 27.3% 319 65.6% 362
QUANTITY 3.6%• 60 6.5%• 76 8.9%• 49
264
9.4.5 Modification in referring expressions
The final area we will consider with respect to the constituency of the
nominal group concerns modification, both pre-head and post-head
modification. As was explained in Chapter 6, the referent of the referring
expression is sub-classified through modification. The features coded for this
part of the grammar are related to the AD_HOC_DESCRIPTION system in the
system network for thing.
Looking at modification as a percentage of all expressions analysed, we
can see as shown in
Table 9-21 that the speaker of the GAE corpus does not vary in any
significant way in terms of her frequency of use of modifiers and qualifiers.
The coded feature no-modifier was included in the counting scheme in order to
count those nominal groups that are not head-only but have no modification at
all, e.g. determiner + head as in the game. There is some degree of variation
concerning the percentage of all nominal groups having no modification in
period one, although this is only significant with respect to period two, no
statistically significant differences were found between periods one and three
or two and three. These results show remarkable consistency in the frequency
of use of both pre- and post- head modification.
Table 9-21: Comparison of Frequency of MODIFICATION for GAE

Global Counting
Total N 653 492 528
QUALITY 6.9% 45 6.1% 30 6.8% 36
QUALIFIER 4.0% 26 5.3% 26 6.8% 36
†
NO-MODIFIER 16.5% 108 12.2% 60 13.6% 72
QUALITY + QUALIFIER 0.5%* 3 1.2%* 6 1.1%* 6
* no statistical analysis available for these figures
265
Table 9-22: Comparison of frequency of modification for GAE, HES, and MFN
GAEset HES MFN
Global Counting
Total N 1673 1169 552
QUALITY 6.6%• 111 11.4%• 133 40.8%• 225
‡
QUALIFIER 5.3% 88 6.2%‡ 73 31.7%• 175
NO-MODIFIER 14.3%† 240 17.2%† 201 14.9% 82
QUALITY + QUALIFIER 0.9%* 15 1.6%* 19 13.9%* 77
This consistency found in Table 9-21 does not hold when comparing
different speakers and text types. This is clear in Table 9-22 where we find
that although the GAE and HES corpora are quite similar in terms of frequency
and use, the differences in use of modifier (QUALITY) is significant to the 98 per
cent degree of confidence and in the use of qualifier, the differences are
significant to the 90 per cent degree of confidence. The MFN corpus shows
more striking differences, although this is unsurprising given the type of text
and the lexical density of the referring expressions in this corpus.
The distinction made in Table 9-21 and Table 9-22 reflects the distinction
made in the system network for THING concerning the selection of an ad hoc
description (see Chapter 6). The probability associated to this feature ([ad hoc
description]) is 50 per cent, which suggests that a referent is equally likely to
be described by an ad hoc description as it to not be. However what was
found in the GAE, HES and MFN corpora respectively was a frequency
distribution of 43.4 per cent (184 of 424), 49.1 per cent (194 of 395) and 80.0
per cent (329 of 411) respectively (figures calculated from Table 9-14 on page
258).
266
9.5 Relationships among elements in simple referring

expressions
Since in this chapter we are less concerned with explaining the differences
found and more focussed on establishing a description of referring expressions
we will now move on to the results in relation to modification in a
multidimensional view. So far we have simply considered the occurrence of
elements individually. A rather different perspective on the frequency
distribution is obtained if we consider the features coded as variables which we
can control for our own purposes. As stated above, the MODIFIER feature has
been used to code for expressions that include (or not) some kind of
descriptive modification of the referent, having already been identified as
nominal groups having more than one element. Isolating features such as
QUALITY and QUALIFIER, referring respectively to the presence of a modifier or
qualifier, we can gain a better understanding of the relationship that each has
with other elements of the nominal group and with respect to the role of the
nominal group in the clause.
Not all features and results are given in the tables as this would be far too
lengthy and detailed for presentation here. Instead the tables presented
highlight the more significant findings. This type of split analysis allows us to
see whether modifiers, for example, are ‘favoured’ in certain positions such as
Subject or whether certain features do not co-occur. In other words, this will
allow us to determine, at least in an initial investigatory way, whether all
elements in nominal groups are distributed equally or whether, for example,
the presence or absence of modification changes the distribution.
9.5.1 Distribution of referring expressions across the clause
The first relationship considered here concerns the overall distribution of

referring expressions across the clause. There seems to be a relatively
consistent pattern emerging for the distribution of referring expressions
irrespective of the corpus analysed. This is shown in Table 9-23. Despite the
differences in numbers of expressions and the differences in text type and
individual authors, the distribution of referring expressions across the three
main elements of the clause is strikingly similar for the three corpora. Even
267
though HES and MFN appear to be more similar in this distribution, having
nearly identical results, there seems to be evidence to suggest that the cluster
frequency of referring expressions in Complement role is relatively stable. 34.0
per cent to 36.5 per cent of all referring expressions will cluster in the
Complement position of the clause, with the majority of expressions filling a
Subject role. This is somewhat surprising since in any given clause there is
the potential for only one Subject but there may in fact be one or more
Complements and/or Adjuncts or none at all.
The effects of the position of referring expressions in the clause will
continue to be explored in the following by considering whether or not there is
a relationship between the presence or absence of modifiers and the type of
element of the clause.
Table 9-23: Frequency distribution of all referring expressions with respect to ROLE, for
GAE, HES, and MFN
GAEset HES MFN

number of
expressions 1673 1169 552
Feature Mean N Mean N Mean N
SUBJECT 45.5% 761 40.8% 477 38.4% 212
COMPLEMENT 36.5% 610 34.0% 398 35.3% 195
ADJUNCT 18.1% 302 25.1% 294 26.3% 145
9.5.2 Modifiers
In order to balance the numbers of nominal groups for comparison, the

GAE and HES corpora were combined for this analysis and compared with the
results for the MFN corpus. The comparative analysis in Table 9-24 shows
that nominal groups in Subject role are much less likely to include a modifier
than in any other role in the combined GAE and HES corpus. However,
expressions in Adjunct role are more likely to be described with some kind of
modifier than they are in any other role. The table also shows that nominal
groups in Complement role are not more or less likely to include a modifier.
268
Table 9-24: Results for MODIFIER based on ROLE for GAE and HES combined
Feature MODIFIER NO-MODIFIER
(N=243) (N=133)
mean σ mean σ Tstat level of significance
SUBJECT 0.099 0.299 0.195 0.398 2.659 98%
COMPLEMENT 0.601 0.491 0.639 0.482 0.728
ADJUNCT 0.300 0.459 0.165 0.373 2.905 98%
Interpretation
NO-MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: SUBJECT (19.50% vs. 9.90%).
MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: ADJUNCT (30.00% vs. 16.50%).
The use of COMPLEMENT is not significantly different.
The results from the MFN corpus shown in Table 9-25, however, indicate
an inverse trend where we find that modification is most likely to occur in
Subject role. Furthermore, nominal groups in Complement or Adjunct role are
less likely to include any type of modifier. It would seem then that with respect
to referring expressions, ad hoc descriptions (i.e. modifiers and qualifiers),
rather than being seen solely as a property of the expression itself, may in fact
be a property of the goals of the text itself. Consequently, it would seem that
the selection of ad hoc description(s) may be influenced by text variables as
well as by speaker intention.
Table 9-25: Results for MODIFIER based on ROLE for MFN

MODIFIER NO MODIFIER
Feature (N=226) (N=102)
Mean σ Mean σ Tstat Level of Significance
SUBJECT 0.46 0.50 0.27 0.44 3.394 98%
COMPLEMENT 0.39 0.49 0.49 0.50 1.714 90%
ADJUNCT 0.15 0.36 0.25 0.43 2.073 98%
Interpretation
MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: SUBJECT (46.00% vs. 26.50%).
NO-MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: COMPLEMENT (49.00% vs. 38.90%).
NO-MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: ADJUNCT (24.50% vs. 15.00%).
In the discussion in the previous section concerning the results of the

frequency of modification, there was strong evidence to suggest that an
individual speaker does not vary significantly with respect to their own use of
modification (see Table 9-22). However it was also shown that different
269
speakers within the same text type (GAE and HES) and across different text
types (MFN) do vary in their use of modification (see Table 9-22). It is must be
noted that with respect to the differences between speakers within the same
text type, the degree of variation is considerably less than it is for different text
types.
9.5.3 Determiners
The results presented in Table 9-26 consider a potential relationship

between the presence or absence of a determiner and the presence or
absence of a modifier in the combined GAE-HES corpus. Table 9-27 includes
the same data for the MFN corpus. The feature DETERMINER includes all items
that were coded as determiner including what is traditionally called the
indefinite article, a, although in the Cardiff Grammar this item is treated as a
quantifying determiner (see section 9.5.4 below). The relationship between
modifiers and determiners is further considered in Table 9-28 and Table 9-29
where only deictic determiners are considered (PARTICULARIZED DETERMINER in
the coding scheme). All cases, with the exception of Table 9-26, seem to
exhibit an inverse relation between determiners and modifiers.
Table 9-26: Results for MODIFER based on presence of DETERMINER for GAE and HES
combined
Feature (N=243) (N=133)
DETERMINER 0.69 0.47 0.541 0.50 2.83 98%
NO-DETERMINER 0.31 0.47 0.459 0.50 2.83 98%
Interpretation
The feature MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: DETERMINER
(68.70% vs. 54.10%).
The feature NO MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: NO-
DETERMINER (45.90% vs. 31.30%).
270
Table 9-27: Results for MODIFER based on presence of DETERMINER for MFN
Feature (N=226) (N=102)
DETERMINER 0.553 0.498 0.686 0.466 2.285 95%
NO-DETERMINER 0.447 0.498 0.314 0.466 2.285 95%
Interpretation
The feature MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: NO-
DETERMINER (44.70% vs. 31.40%).
The feature NO MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature:
DETERMINER (68.60% vs. 55.30%).
Table 9-28: Results for MODIFER based on presence of PARTICULARIZED DETERMINER for GAE
and HES combined
Feature (N=243) (N=133)
Level of
Mean σ Mean σ Tstat Significance
PARTICULARIZED 0.259 0.439 0.286 0.453 0.552 -
NOT-
PARTICULARIZED 0.325 0.469 0.195 0.398 2.697 98%
Interpretation
The feature MODIFIERexhibits significantly higher use of the feature: NOT-
PARTICULARIZED (32.50% vs. 19.50%).
The use of NO MODIFIER is not significantly different.
Table 9-29: Results for modifier based on presence of PARTICULARIZED DETERMINER for MFN
Feature (N=226) (N=102)
PARTICULARIZED 0.27 0.445 0.441 0.499 3.106 98%
NOT-
PARTICULARIZED 0.221 0.416 0.186 0.391 0.718 -
Interpretation
The feature NO MODIFIER exhibits significantly higher use of the feature:
PARTICULARIZED (44.10% vs. 27.00%).
The use of MODIFIER is not significantly different.
When all determiners are included, only the GAE-HES combined corpus
shows a direct relationship between the use of modifiers and the use of
determiners. What Table 9-26 is saying is that the nominal groups with the
feature MODIFIER have a statistically significant increase in the use of
DETERMINER (all types including the indefinite article as stated above).
271
However, the relationship is quite the opposite when only deictic determiners
(particularized) are included in the calculations as is the case in Table 9-28.
Here the nominal groups which include a modifier exhibit a higher use of
determiners that are not coded as particularized; in other words, a nominal
group with a modifier element is less likely to also have a deictic determiner.
The MFN corpus behaves slightly differently in this respect. Table 9-27
shows the opposite set of relations as found in the GAE-HES combined corpus
shown in Table 9-26. In the MFN corpus, the nominal groups with a MODIFIER
element show a higher use of the absence of a DETERMINER and those without
a MODIFIER show a higher use of the DETERMINER feature. Whereas the
relationship between the two nominal group elements was shown to be direct
in the GAE-HES corpus, the presence of a modifier in the MFN corpus
suggests a lower probability of a determiner. Considering only deictic
determiners (coded as PARTICULARIZED DETERMINERS), a similar pattern
emerges with the MFN corpus as was found in the combined GAE-HES
corpus. The results shown in Table 9-29 indicate that nominal groups without
a modifier show an increased frequency of deictic determiners. The presence
of a modifier did not show any statistically significant relationships with deictic
determiners.
This seems to suggest that although clearly not mutually exclusive, there is
evidence that there is a tendency toward an inverse relationship in the
frequency distribution of MODIFIERS and PARTICULARIZED DETERMINERS (i.e.
modifier and deictic determiner).
9.5.4 Quantifying Determiners
The final area that will be considered here is the relationship, if any, that
quantifying determiners have with elements of the clause and/or other
elements of the nominal group. The frequency of quantifying determiners is
relatively low in all three corpora in this study. It is clear from Table 9-30 and
Table 9-31 below that the use of a quantifying determiner does not show any
increase in use of Subject, Complement, or Adjunct. In other words, nominal
groups with a quantifying determiner are not more frequent in Subject role than
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nominal groups without a quantifying determiner. This suggests that reference

to quantity does not have a preferred place in the clause.
Table 9-30: Results for QUANTITY based on ROLE for GAE and HES combined
NO QUANTITY
Feature (N=684) QUANTITY (N=78)
SUBJECT 0.192 0.394 0.141 0.35 1.084 -
COMPLEMENT 0.494 0.5 0.513 0.503 0.312 -
ADJUNCT 0.313 0.464 0.346 0.479 0.598 -
Interpretation
There are no significant differences between these sets.
Table 9-31: Results for QUANTITY based on ROLE for MFN

NO QUANTITY
Feature (N=361) QUANTITY (N=49)
Mean Stddv Mean Stddv Tstat Level of Significance
SUBJECT 0.429 0.496 0.367 0.487 0.823 -
COMPLEMENT 0.385 0.487 0.367 0.487 0.239 -
ADJUNCT 0.186 0.389 0.265 0.446 1.321 -
Interpretation
There are no significant differences between these sets.
However when the relationship between quantifying determiners and other

types of determiner is considered, the results indicate some type of
preferences. The results shown in Table 9-32 and Table 9-33 seem to be
indicating a type of inverse relationship between quantifying determiners and
other types of determiners, where the presence of a quantifying determiner
seems to reduce the probability of another determiner being present. Nominal
groups with a quantifying determiner tend to exhibit a higher use of the
absence of other determiners (i.e. a decrease in frequency of determiner) and
this is statistically significant to the 98 per cent degree of confidence. Unlike in
previous cases, the opposite also holds for the relationship: nominal groups
without a quantifying determiner exhibit a significantly higher use of other
determiners. Therefore, although here again, the relationship is not mutually
exclusive, the contrast in the frequencies between quantifying determiners and
other determiners is striking.
273
Table 9-32: Results for QUANTITY based on DETERMINER for GAE and HES combined
NO QUANTITY QUANTITY
Feature (N=684) (N=78)
DETERMINER 0.842 0.365 0.103 0.305 17.222 98%
NO-DETERMINER 0.158 0.365 0.897 0.305 17.222 98%

Interpretation
The feature [NO QUANTITY] exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: DETERMINER
(84.20% vs. 10.30%).
The feature [QUANTITY] exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: NO-DETERMINER
(89.70% vs. 15.80%).
Table 9-33: Results for QUANTITY based on DETERMINER for MFN

NO QUANTITY QUANTITY
Feature (N=361) (N=49)
DETERMINER 0.715 0.452 0.143 0.354 8.503 98%
NO-DETERMINER 0.285 0.452 0.857 0.354 8.503 98%
Interpretation
The feature [NO QUANTITY] exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: DETERMINER
(71.50% vs. 14.30%).
The feature [QUANTITY] exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: NO-DETERMINER
(85.70% vs. 28.50%).
As stated above, there is insufficient space here to give the results for all
combinations of elements within the nominal group. There is certainly
sufficient evidence given here to suggest that further exploration would yield
interesting results.
9.6 Summary
This chapter has been concerned with the results of the study of referring
expressions in three separate corpora. The results highlight the frequency and
distribution of referring expressions within the clause and across three corpora.
The results were used to consider variation and stability of the functional
grammatical structure of these expressions with a three-way comparison:
variation and stability for one speaker in one corpus; variation and stability
between two speakers of similar texts; and variation and stability between
different speakers of very different text types. Furthermore, statistical tests
274
were conducted on sets of coded features which correlate to the functional

elements of the nominal group in order to determine whether or not any
relationships exist between them.
One main conclusion to be drawn from the results presented in this
chapter is that areas of stability either for an individual speaker or across
different text types are just as important as areas of variability. The areas of
stability across text types, if they held against a larger study, would seem to
indicate tendencies that are inherent to general meanings in referring.
Individual areas of stability may indicate idiosyncratic uses which may be
relevant in studies of author identification for example. Variability in nominal
groups has been shown in various studies to be a strong indicator of text type
(Quirk et al., 1985; Biber et al., 1998) but this does not explain why an
individual speaker would vary significantly. Further research should yield
interesting results when factors contributing to the production of referring
expressions are taken into account, such as for example discourse roles and
information flow.
While this chapter has focussed on the description of simple referring
expressions, the next chapter will present the results of research into complex
referring expressions following the approach developed in this thesis,
especially the theory presented in Chapter 7. It empirically explores the overt
and covert transitivity patterns of the ad hoc situations created by complex
referring expressions. As with this chapter, Chapter 10 also looks at the
frequency of occurrence and interaction of the various functional components
in complex referring expressions. Where possible, the results are compared to
the probabilities associated to the system network in the Cardiff Grammar.
Finally, the chapter offers a modified version of the relevant part of the system
network for complex referring expressions based on the work undertaken in
this thesis.
275
Chapter 10: A functional analysis of complex referring expressions
10. A functional analysis of complex referring expressions
The last chapter presented results concerning the frequency of occurrence

and the constituency of all referring expressions. The concentration in this
chapter is on complex referring expressions which were defined in Chapter 7
as a referring expression within which the referent is referred to by an implicit
or explicit relation to a different referent situation from the one it is currently
involved in. Each complex referring expression analysed in the three corpora
can be consulted in CREx.xml, an XML database, which is available on the
CD-ROM in the Appendix.
This chapter is organised as follows. First a general overview is given
concerning the frequency of postmodifiers in the nominal group. In the next
section, the relationship between modifiers and qualifiers is considered and the
results concerning their co-occurrence are presented. Then in Section 10.3
below, the results for the realization of the feature [ad hoc description] are
given in relation to complex referring expressions. In doing so, the results for
[by role in other situation] and [by relation with other thing] are considered
separately. The results presented to this point correspond to the previously
existing status of the system network for ‘thing’. In Section 10.4, results are
given for the analysis of complex referring expressions following the theoretical
position outlined in Chapter 7. Detail is given concerning the additional role
carried by the referent in terms of its grammatical representation, where here it
is assigned to the head element of the nominal group in complex referring
expressions. Once all results have been discussed, the proposed revisions to
the system network for ad hoc description are presented. Finally the chapter
ends with a summary.
10.1 Frequency of complex referring expressions
This thesis has argued that in order to better understand postmodifying

structures in the nominal group, a more functional approach is necessary. The
approach taken here is to consider these expressions from the perspective of
276
referring expressions; that is to say, from the perspective of the speaker who
wants to use a linguistic expression to refer to some object. The claim made
here is that this should lead to a better understanding of the meaning involved.
However, from the analytical perspective, the only means available to studying
the artefact of referring expressions is their formal realisation as language.
One consequence is that it may seem at times that there is confusion as to
whether the object of study is the nominal group or the referring expression.
Ideally the use of ‘referring expression’ is preferred in order to reduce the
effects of a purely structural basis for analysis. Yet the only means of
identifying a complex referring expression is by its structural representation.
This kind of double vision will often lead to a melange at times of more
functional or more structural terminology.
Despite wanting to describe complex referring expressions, a focus on
structures is necessary to some extent in order to represent the occurrence of
these expressions. The first description that will be discussed here concerns
the frequency of postmodifying structures or qualifiers. As was explained in
Chapter 8, referring expressions were identified in the texts as those
expressions representing a Participant or Circumstance role in the clause.
Complex referring expressions were identified as those referring expressions
which were realized by a nominal group that included a qualifier element.
The frequency of qualifiers in all three corpora was given in Table 9-22 in
Chapter 9 where the frequency rate for qualifiers is given as a percentage
overall based on two different calculations. This data is reproduced here in
Table 10-1 for convenient reference. The first is the frequency of qualifiers of
all referring expressions in the corpus and the second includes only those
referring expressions realised as nominal groups.
As stated above, all referring expressions were coded as either Participant
or Circumstance. Looking at Table 10-2, it is very clear that complex referring
expressions are far more likely to occur in a Participant Role as compared to a
Circumstance Roles. This distinction is explained further by considering the
distribution of complex referring expressions in terms of the interpersonal role
it fills in the clause.
The frequency of qualifiers is relatively low for the GAE and HES corpora
and considerably higher for the MFN corpus. From the results presented in
277
the previous chapter, it is clear that there are considerable differences

concerning the frequencies of certain types of referring expressions; notably in
the use of what we could refer to here as recoverable referents such as
pronoun reference, especially interactant reference. Due to the relatively low
number of occurrence of qualifiers in the GAE and HES corpora, where
appropriate, these results will be combined for comparison with the results
from the MFN corpus.
Table 10-1: Comparison of frequency of qualifiers for GAE, HES, and MFN
GAEset HES MFN
Referring Expressions
Total N 1673 1169 552
qualifier 5.3% 88 6.2% 73 31.7% 175
Nominal Groups
Total N 1510 981 466
qualifier 5.8% 88 7.4% 73 37.6% 175
As Table 10-3 illustrates, the vast majority of complex referring expressions

occur in Complement role. Despite the variation found for Subject and
Adjunct, there is a definite cluster with respect to Complement for each of the
three corpora. All referring expressions were also coded for the type of
process it was represented as being involved in and it should be noted that
there were no significant differences in terms of process type; in other words,
there was no correlation between process type and the occurrence of complex
referring expressions. In all corpora however, there is a very strong correlation
between Complement and nominal postmodification. Similar results have
been found in other studies of the noun phrase (de Haan, 1989, Aarts, 1971).
Aarts (1971:293) concludes that “noun phrase types are not randomly
distributed over the English clause … there is a marked association between
their structural make-up and their functional role”. These conclusions were
also confirmed by de Haan (1989) and he adds that “text variety does not
necessarily influence or impose restrictions on noun phrases in specific
functions that are accompanied by postmodifying clauses” (ibid.:117).
Therefore in terms of factors contributing to the production of referring
expressions, for a given referring expression, it may be more important for the
speaker to know what function it will have in the clause than it is for the
278
speaker to be aware of the nature of the text type (although this does not
suggest that register knowledge is not significant).
Table 10-2: Frequency distribution of qualifier by experiential role in the clause

Participant Circumstance
GAE set 92.0% 8.0%
HES 75.3% 24.7%
MFN 82.5% 17.5%
Table 10-3: Frequency distribution of qualifier by interpersonal role in the clause

Subject Complement Adjunct
GAE set 12.5% 79.5% 8.0%
HES 23.3% 52.1% 24.7%
MFN 28.3% 54.2% 17.5%
When the Cardiff Grammar system networks were presented in Chapter 5,

it was explained that the notion of probability was very important. This
suggests that language choices are seen as more or less probable rather than
grammatical or not. Although the actual probabilities assigned to the individual
semantic options were not presented in Chapter 5, the relevant figures will be
given here so that a comparison can be made between the results in this study
and the frequency values predicted by the probabilities in the system networks.
A partial view of the AD HOC DESCRIPTION system network is given in Figure
10-1 with probabilities identified for each relevant semantic option in the
system. Probabilities are represented as a percentage value in the system
network. The other systems within AD HOC DESCRIPTION have been omitted for
the purposes of the discussion here (see Figure 6-11 in Chapter 6 for the
complete set of options). The probabilities suggest that, for example, given the
selection of [ad hoc description], the referent is 8 per cent likely to be
described by a role in another situation (i.e. realised as a relative clause filling
the qualifier element of the nominal group).
279
Figure 10-1: Ad hoc description system for realizing qualifiers, including probabilities
(Fawcett, 2004)
The probabilities from the system network are based on the selections
already made in the network to that point entering the cultural classification
system (i.e. the probabilities are dependent). It is almost impossible to
compare with the frequencies found in this thesis as it is very difficult to
recreate these statistics without knowing precisely which options were
selected. However by converting the probabilities from the system network
into a percentage as a total of all qualifiers, the probabilities can be more
easily compared with the results from the current data.
A comparison of the results from this study with the probabilities in the
system network are presented in Table 10-4 where the number of occurrences
are presented as a percentage frequency of the total number of nominal
groups matching the features listed in the table. The probabilities given in the
system network for [by role in other situation] cover relative clauses only and
therefore do not include non-finite clauses. The system network as it stands
does not include options for these types of postmodifiers.
The probability given by the system networks for finite postmodifying
clauses seems to fit the data in the corpora. In fact when all three corpora are
combined as is the case in Table 10-4, the probability given in the system
networks matches relatively closely to the frequency of these finite
postmodifying clauses. However, as will be discussed in Section 10.3.1 below,
this does not hold when the corpora are considered separately as there is
considerable variation with respect to these frequencies (see Table 10-12).
Although this will be discussed in the relevant sections below, the remaining
280
probabilities do not match the results presented here so closely. One area
clearly seems to be overestimated from the probabilities in the system
networks. The probability associated to the option [ad hoc relation with other
thing] is 76.2 per cent. However in the corpora studied here, this type of ad hoc
description represents 67 per cent of all post head ad hoc descriptions.
Table 10-4: Comparison of results to system network probabilities

% probability from system
AD HOC DESCRIPTION N comparative1 % network
by role in other situation – finite 62 23.2% 19.0%

clauses only
179 67.0% 76.2%
ad hoc relation with other thing
alternative specification of thing 26 9.7% 4.8%
Total 267
1
these results were calculated based on the same categories in the system network
for the purposes of a comparative percentage with the probabilities given in the
system network. This excludes non-finite postmodifying clauses and the feature
identified here as postmodifier (see Section 10.3.3)
There is one further type of postmodifier which was considered in this

study, referred to simply as ‘postmodifier’ in the coding scheme. This category
will be discussed in Section 10.3 below. From the results presented so far, it
should be clear that in some texts at least, the presence of qualifiers is
relatively infrequent. However in other texts such as the MFN corpus,
qualifiers may be present in just over one third of all nominal groups.
Qualifiers are also far more likely to be found in nominal groups filling a
Complement role in the clause as compared to any other role. Before
considering the types of ad hoc description in more detail, the next section
attempts to consider the relationship between modifiers and qualifiers.
10.2 Relationship between modifiers and qualifiers
Modifiers and qualifiers are elements of the nominal group and both
contribute to the description of the referent. However, as they are
distinguished in the grammar there must be fundamental differences
concerning their functions. The position taken here is that the qualifier is the
281
result of an additional situation created by the speaker for the purposes of

referring to the referent. Implicit in this is that modifiers, while contributing to a
description of the referent, do not create an additional (embedded) situation.
The ad hoc description system covers both modifiers and qualifiers, as
shown in Figure 6-11 above. This thesis does not intend to analyse modifiers
as considerable work had been done in this area already (see for example
Tucker, 1998). However, there has often been an assumption that modifiers
are more frequent than qualifiers. This seems a sufficiently reasonable
assumption which seems to hold in the current study. If we compare the
frequency results of modifiers and qualifiers presented in Table 10-5, it is clear
that modifiers are more frequent than qualifiers in all corpora although the
frequency of each differs considerable in each corpus. The most striking
difference in frequency distribution is found in the MFN corpus where only 23.7
per cent of the nominal groups have no modification; in other words 76.3 per
cent of the nominal groups in this category (cultural classification) were
modified in some way. If this is compared to the GAE and HES corpora,
clearly there is considerable variation in the frequency of modification overall
depending on the type of text. For GAE and HES, more than half of the
nominal groups in this category were not modified in any way (although they
may have been particularized or quantified, etc.).
Table 10-5: Comparison of frequency of modifiers and qualifiers for GAE, HES, and
MFN
GAEset* HES* MFN*
Total N
(nominal groups with 487 441 431
cultural classification as
head)
MODIFIER 23.4% 114 30.2% 133 52.4% 226
QUALIFIER 18.1% 88 18.1% 80 42.0% 181
NO-MODIFIER 62.2% 303 56.2% 248 23.7% 102
1
MODIFIER + QUALIFIER 3.7% 18 4.5% 20 18.1% 78
1
the numbers for modifier + qualifier are included in the individual totals for
modifier and qualifier, so should be subtracted from the total
As the results for modification were discussed in detail in the previous

chapter, there is no need to say more about this area here. However there is
282
one further result that should be discussed briefly. This concerns the co-
presence of a modifier and a qualifier. Table 10-5 above also indicates the
frequency of a nominal group having both a modifier and a qualifier. Clearly
this is relatively infrequent in all three corpora, although it is especially rare in
the GAE and HES corpora.
These results indicate that it is unlikely that a modifier and qualifier will co-
occur in the same nominal group. This is confirmed by the results presented in
Table 10-6 and Table 10-7 where the effect of the presence or absence of a
modifier is calculated with respect to the GAE and HES combined corpus and
the MFN corpus respectively. In both cases there is an inverse relationship
between modifiers and qualifiers, where the nominal groups with a modifier are
significantly less likely to also have a qualifier. These results also suggest that
if the feature [no modifier] is selected (i.e. a nominal group does not have a
modifier), then there is a higher use of the feature [qualifier]. However this is
not quite accurate. What these results are saying is that if all nominal groups
are split between those that have a modifier and those that do not, then those
that do not have a higher frequency of a qualifier than those that do. This
should follow readily from the frequencies considered in Table 10-5 above
since we know that the co-presence of a modifier and a qualifier is rare.
Therefore it follows that qualifiers are far more likely to occur when a modifier
does not. This is not surprising for the GAE and HES corpora, although it
would not have been obvious for the MFN corpus since the frequency of
modifiers and qualifiers is very close (a difference of approximately 10 per
cent) and the frequency of both is 18.1 per cent. Therefore, statistically at
least, it could have been entirely possible for qualifiers to be more frequent in
nominal groups that have a modifier. This does suggest that in English, and
for these types of texts, there is no sort of mutual attraction between modifiers
and qualifiers. Their use is more often mutually exclusive.
283
Table 10-6: Results for modifier based on presence of qualifier for GAE and HES
combined
Feature modifier no modifier
(N=243) (N=133) Result
QUALIFIER 0.144 0.352 0.97 0.171 25.456 98%
NO-QUALIFIER 0.856 0.352 0.03 0.171 25.456 98%
Interpretation
The feature [no modifier] exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: qualifier
(97.00% vs. 14.40%).
The feature [modifier] exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: no-qualifier
(85.60% vs. 3.00%).
Table 10-7: Results for modifier based on presence of qualifier for MFN
modifier no modifier
Feature (N=226) (N=102) Result
QUALIFIER 0.341 0.475 0.99 0.099 13.665 98%
NO-QUALIFIER 0.659 0.475 0.01 0.099 13.665 98%
Interpretation
The feature [no modifier] exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: qualifier
(99.00% vs. 34.10%).
The feature [modifier] exhibits significantly higher use of the feature: no-qualifier
(65.90% vs. 1.00%).
10.3 Ad hoc descriptions in complex referring expressions
In the Cardiff grammar, as it is a generative grammar, there is a distinction

to be made between complex referring expressions that need to generate a
relationship between the head of the expression and one other thing (e.g. the
man in the car or my friend Jane) and those that need to generate a
relationship of situation with the head (e.g. the man who drove the car). For
the purposes of this study, another category was considered and it is less clear
whether these constitute complex referring expressions. These are those
cases of (typically) postmodifiers, normally single adjectives or single
prepositions (e.g. something new). Table 10-8 below shows the frequency
distribution of these types of expressions and we can see clearly that the most
284
frequent type of complex referring expression is one in which there is a relation

between the head and another thing. As we discussed above, it is entirely
reasonable to assume that even in this case, any type of ad hoc description
necessarily generates an additional situation, whether or not it is fully
expressed. In other words, the difference between for example the man in the
car and the man who is in the car is subtle at best. There is certainly a
relationship between the man and the car in both cases, but even in the first
case, there must be in the speaker’s mind some situation in which the car and
the man co-occur. The fact that these reduced expressions – reduced in the
sense that the situation is not fully described, nor does it need to be for the
purposes at hand – are twice as frequent as more fully expressed situations,
would seem to suggest that whenever possible, speakers will opt for the most
economical or efficient means of generating an expression that meets their
needs and/or those of the addressee.
Table 10-8: Frequency distribution of type of ad hoc description

Frequency % % of cultural
classification
ad hoc situation 117 34.8% 8.6%

ad hoc relation with other thing 205 61.0% 15.1%
postnominal prepositional group 179 53.3% 13.2%
nominal group apposition 26 7.7% 1.9%
postmodifier 14 4.2% 1.0%
When making the same comparison for the three text types under study
here, this notion of a reduced expression is reinforced. As Table 10-9 shows,
there is little to no variation among the three texts in terms of the frequency
distribution of type of ad hoc description. There is a very slight difference in
relative occurrence of the postmodifier type with a frequency of 2.2 per cent for
MFN and 6.7 per cent and 8.0 per cent respectively for GAE and HES. The
numbers in all cases are so low that we should not consider this as statistically
valid. It is quite striking that for the distribution of situation and minor
relationship with thing, there is no statistical difference. In other words, this
distribution seems to be constant and the ‘simplest’ type of complex referring
expression is by far and consistently the most frequent.
285
Table 10-9: Comparison of frequency distribution of type of description among GAE

HES and MFN
GAE HES MFN
Feature Mean N Mean N Mean N
ad hoc situation 40% 35 34% 25 33% 57
ad hoc relation with other
thing 55% 48 59% 43 65% 114
postmodifier 6% 5 7% 5 2% 4
Total (N) 88 73 175
There is no difference between the three corpora in the distribution

between ad hoc situation (the qualifier is realized as a clause) and ad hoc
relation with another thing (the qualifier is realized as a prepositional group or
nominal group). This is interesting as it suggests that even though text types
will tend to vary in frequency of qualifier use, the distribution of types of
qualifier may be relatively constant.
Table 10-10: Comparison of type of qualifier between GAE+HES and MFN

GAE + HES MFN
Feature Mean N Mean N
ad hoc situation 37.3% 60 31.4% 55

thing 56.5% 91 65.7%‡ 115
postmodifier 6.2% 10 2.9% 5
Total (N) 161 175

10.3.1 Results for nominal groups coded with [by role in other situation]
Finite and non-finite clauses have a very similar frequency distribution

when we look at all texts together as we see in
Table 10-11. Combining the results from the GAE and HES corpora
actually gives a similar number of occurrences with respect to postmodifying
286
clauses in the nominal group. The frequency distribution by type of clause is

given in Table 10-12 below where the combined GAE and HES corpus is
compared to the MFN corpus. The difference in terms of frequency of
occurrence of finite and non-finite clause types was determined by the Coder
software to be statistically significant to the 90 per cent level of significance but
it must be noted that the actual number of occurrences are not sufficiently high
to draw any firm conclusions from this comparison. There is one observation
that seems to indicate an interesting area for further research. This concerns
the difference between the email corpus and the MFN corpus in the frequency
of non-finite postmodifying clauses. The frequency of non-finite clauses is
higher than finite clauses in the MFN corpus (52.7 per cent versus 47.3 per
cent) and the reverse is true in the email corpus where finite clauses are more
frequent (61.7 per cent versus 38.3 per cent). Examples of non-finite
postmodifying clauses from the MFN corpus are given in (115) and (116) for
reference.
(115) an era driven by environmental awareness and social

change at the grassroots level
(116) ways to reach consensus on sustainable forest

management approaches
Table 10-11: Frequency distribution of finite and non-finite clauses as qualifier for all
texts
AD-HOC-SITUATION-TYPE Frequency Overall Local
(N=336) (N=115)
finite 63 18.8% 54.8%
non-finite 52 15.5% 45.2%
287
Table 10-12: Comparison of frequency distribution of finite and non-finite

postmodifying clauses between GAE+HES and MFN, Frequency % as
Global counting
GAE & HES MFN
AD HOC
SITUATION TYPE N=60 N=55
Global % Local % Global % Local %
finite 23.0%‡ 37 61.7% 14.9%‡ 26 47.3%
non-finite 14.3% 23 38.3% 16.6% 29 52.7%
If the frequency for finite postmodifying clauses is calculated as a total of

the nominal groups expressing cultural classification, then the results can be
compared with the probabilities associated to the feature [by role in other
situation] in the system network for THING, which as stated above is 19.0 per
cent. For the GAE+HES combined corpus, the frequency is 24.5 per cent and
for the MFN corpus, the frequency is 15.2 per cent. As Fawcett (2004)
explains, the probabilities given in the network do not reflect register variation,
and “a desirable refinement would be to add same pass rules that reflect this”.
In other words, the influence of the register would ideally be incorporated so
that certain semantic features would be preferred over others. However as
stated above, it is perhaps even more important for same pass rules to be
developed in order to take into account the functional role the expression has
in the clause (cf. Fawcett, 2008b).
What is particularly interesting in the data presented here is that although
postmodification is far more frequent in the MFN corpus, finite postmodifying
clauses are preferred over non-finite forms in the GAE+HES corpus (i.e.
casual email conversation) whereas in the MFN corpus (educational brochure),
the reverse is true. Of course in terms of postmodification overall, both text
types prefer postnominal prepositional groups. We will now consider the non-
finite postmodifying clauses in more detail.
288
10.3.1.1 Non-finite postmodifying clauses
There does not appear to be any strong preference for one particular type
of non-finite postmodifying clause when the corpora are combined. The
distribution of non-finite clauses for all three corpora combined is given in
Table 10-13. However, there are so few instances of each type that it is
impossible to predict whether this would remain true for a much larger study.
In de Haan’s (1989:64) study of postmodifying clauses, he found the non-finite
‘-en’ (‘-ed’) past participle clauses to form the largest category of non-finite
postmodifying clauses. However, the same study showed that “finite clauses
constitute by far the largest group within the corpus” (ibid.:62) and this was not
found to be true in all corpora studied here (see Table 10-12 above).
Table 10-14 compares the distribution of non-finite postmodifying clauses
in the combined GAE and HES corpus with the MFN corpus. Clearly the
frequencies are far too low for any conclusions to be drawn but as a
preliminary observation, it would seem that ‘-en’ clauses are considerably
more frequent in the MFN corpus. This seems to be the only noticeable
difference between the two sets. However even this observation seems
premature and a more extensive survey of these types of clauses would have
to be carried out in future research.
Table 10-13: Frequency distribution of finite and non-finite clauses as qualifier for all
texts
Frequency Overall Local
NON-FINITE TYPE (N=336) (N=52)
‘-ing’ participle 19 5.7% 36.5%
infinitive ‘to’ 18 5.4% 34.6%
‘-en’ participle 15 4.5% 28.9%
Table 10-14: Distribution of non-finite postmodifying clauses by type

GAE & HES MFN
NON-FINITE TYPE N=23 N=29
Global % Local %
‘-ing’participle 5.6% 9 39.1% 5.7% 10 34.5%
infinitive’to’ 5.6% 9 39.1% 5.2% 9 31.0%
‘-en’ participle 3.1% 5 21.8% 5.7% 10 34.5%
289
Relating back to the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 7, the

qualifier is conflated with a situation, μ, and the head of the nominal group is
represented as having an additional role with respect to μ. Table 10-15 below
shows the distribution of non-finite postmodifying clauses with respect to the
type of situation. In each case, the head element would be conflated with a
role which is relevant to each process type. The examples given in (117)
below to (118) illustrate material and verbal situation types respectively.
(117) an era/[goal] driven by environmental awareness and

social change at the grassroots level
(118) a nutritionist/[sayer] talking on tv saying people fill their

kids with foods full of chemicals and preservatives and
expect them to sit still at school
Despite the fact that non-finite postmodifying clauses are in fact more
frequent in the MFN corpus than finite postmodifying clauses (52.7 per cent
non-finite versus 47.3 per cent finite, see Table 10-14 above), the overall
number of these clauses is relatively low. Of all postmodifying clauses only
38.3 per cent are non-finite in the email corpus as compared to 52.7 per cent
in the model forest network corpus. It is difficult to make any claims about
trends or tendencies. However, it is clear that the dominant process types for
the temporary conceptual situation claimed in this thesis (μ) are material and
relational. There does seem to be one pattern that should be investigated
further in a larger scale study. This is the striking split in the distribution of the
infinitival postmodifying clauses. It is perhaps not surprising that the non-finite
-ing clause is most frequently expressing a material type of process since it is
often associated to the progressive aspect and this aspect is often linked to
material process types. However non-finite ‘-ing’ clauses do not always
express the progressive aspect (de Haan, 1989:63). One could even stretch
this to apply to the past participle postmodifying clauses as they tend to reflect
passive constructions and it does not seem surprising to see an association
between material processes and passive structures. However there is nothing
290
inherent to the infinitival non-finite clause that would readily associate it to

relational processes as opposed to material ones. This indicates an
interesting use of the non-finite clause, which differs from the traditional view of
the restrictive postmodifier or relative clause. In example (119) below it might
seem clear that the verb come is representing a material process; however
given the expression, the analysis of the qualifier in this case seems more
appropriately to consider that to come home specifies the type of plans.
Consequently, the head is seen as having a role of [carrier] in relation to the
situation constructed for the purposes of referring to this plan (i.e. what type of
plans are you working on? plans to come home/coming home plans cf. plans
to get a job). Therefore the type of situation is given as relational. Examples
such as (119) could be discussed in more detail since it might be suggested
that in fact some elements have been ellipted (i.e. do you have any plans for
you to come home), but this will not be considered here as there is insufficient
time for such a discussion. One thing is clear and this is that the theoretical
approach presented in this theory must be further tried and tested on a larger
number of samples in order to resolve disputable cases.
(119) any plans to come home
Table 10-15: Distribution of non-finite postmodifying clauses by process type of the

additional situation
ing inf en
additional situation
type 19 18 15
material 63.20% 12 5.60% 1 66.70% 10
relational 31.60% 6 88.90% 16 20.00% 3
mental 0.00% 0 0.00% 0 13.30% 2
verbal 5.30% 1 5.60% 1 0.00% 0
One final point should be made before moving on to discuss descriptions of

the referent by relation to another thing. While there were no instances of other
processes types not listed in Table 10-15, this does not suggest that it would
be impossible. However it would be very interesting to determine in a much
larger study whether material and relational process types continue to account
for the situations constructed for the purposes of referring.
291
10.3.2 Results for nominal groups coded with [by relation with other
thing]
The most frequent type of qualifier in the corpora studied here is the one
which describes the referent by a minor relationship with thing (see Table 10-8
above). This category accounts for 61.0 per cent of all nominal groups with a
qualifier element. As previously explained in Chapter 8, in the coding scheme
this category included both prepositional groups and nominal groups
(traditionally noun phrase apposition). However in the system networks, an
earlier distinction is made between these two (cf. [alternative specification of
thing] and [by minor relationship with thing] in Chapter 6). The relevant
network has a relative 76.2 per cent probability associated to the feature [by
minor relationship with thing] whereas it has only a 4.8 per cent probability
associated to the feature [alternative specification of thing]. These calculations
have been determined for our purposes here in order to be able to compare
figures with the statistics given in this study. This simply means ignoring those
coded features that are not considered in the system network such as non-
finite postmodifying clauses and the feature labelled postmodifier (see Section
10.3.3).
It seems clear from Table 10-16 that when all three corpora are combined,
prepositional groups filling the qualifier element of a nominal group constitute
the majority of qualifiers and furthermore within this category, they constitute
the vast majority, with nominal group apposition having a relatively low
frequency in comparison (12.6 per cent). However, the figures obtained here
do not reflect the probabilities predicted by the system networks.
292
Table 10-16: Frequency distribution of ad hoc description [by relationship with other
thing]
comparative
% % from system
Feature N Local Mean Global Mean
network
336 (all ngps with a

total (N) 206 (N=267)
qualifier)
pgp 179 87.4% 53.6% 67.0% 76.2%
np-apposition 26 12.6% 7.7% 9.7% 4.8%
The results for the combined GAE and HES corpus illustrate considerable
variation as compared to the MFN corpus with respect to the relative frequency
of postmodifying prepositional groups and nominal groups as shown in Table
10-17. The differences found in the frequency of postmodifying prepositional
groups are statistically significant to the 98 per cent degree. By calculating a
comparative frequency based on the same categories as the calculation for the
probabilities from the system network given above in Table 10-4, we can gain
a more accurate description of how the current results compare to the
probabilities in the system networks. Clearly from Table 10-18 the MFN
corpus is much closer to the frequencies predicted by the system networks.
However the results from the GAE and HES combined corpus suggest that the
frequency of both types of postmodification are overestimated in the case of
prepositional groups and underestimated for nominal group apposition.
Table 10-17: Comparison of GAE+HES and MFN for the feature [by relationship with
other thing]
AD HOC RELATION WITH GAE+HES MFN

OTHER THING TYPE N=161 N=175
% N TStat % N TStat
pgp 42.2% 68 3.97 63.4% • 111 3.97
np-apposition 14.3% 23 4.42 1.7% 3 4.42
293
Table 10-18: Comparative results for postmodifying prepositional groups and nominal
groups
System
Network
GAE+HES MFN
Comparative Comparative
Local % Local %
N % N % %
N=91 N=114
N=127 N=140
pgp 42.2% 68 53.4% 63.4% 111 79.3% 76.2%
np-
14.3% 23 18.1% 1.7% 3 2.1% 4.8%
apposition
10.3.2.1 Prepositions introducing a postmodifying prepositional group
The use of prepositions is not equal; there are clear preferences, or rather
certain prepositions are far more frequent than others (see Table 10-19). The
preposition of is by far the most frequent preposition of all, accounting for 37.2
per cent of all prepositions introducing a qualifier. Following this we find in and
for, which have frequencies 15.0 per cent and 13.3 per cent respectively.
Then with is next most frequent with a frequency of 6.7 per cent. Table 10-19
shows the frequencies for the majority of such prepositions, all others having
less than a total of ten occurrences throughout all corpora.
Table 10-19: Frequency distribution of prepositions in all texts

Preposition Frequency global % local %
1. of 67 19.9% 37.2%
2. in 27 8.0% 15.0%
3. for 24 7.1% 13.3%
4. with 12 3.6% 6.7%
5. from 8 2.4% 4.4%
6. on 7 2.1% 3.9%
7. like-as 7 2.1% 3.9%
8. at 6 1.8% 3.3%
9. to 6 1.8% 3.9%
10. across 4 1.2% 2.2%
11. about 3 0.9% 1.7%
12. between 3 0.9% 1.7%
… others ... ... ...
Σ = 180 % of 336 % of 180
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Each corpus shows a similar distribution, with some minor differences in

terms of most frequent prepositions. Comparing the three corpora, the same
top three or four prepositions are found in all cases but they appear in different
orders of frequency for each, although HES and MFN are very similar indeed
as shown in Table 10-20.
Table 10-20: Most Frequent Prepositions for GAE, HES and MFN
GAE HES MFN

1. for of of
2. with in in
3. of/in/at for/with for
The difficulty here is again due to the relatively low frequency of

occurrence of the prepositions. Although all texts seem to consistently show
the highest frequency for the prepositional phrases headed by ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘for’,
and ‘with’ or ‘on’, there is still some variation across the three texts. By
combining texts GAE and HES as is done in Table 10-21, we can obtain a
more appropriate comparison. The individual number of occurrences for each
preposition is too low for any significant statistical analysis with the exception
perhaps for the preposition of which has a frequency of 50 as a postmodifying
element in the MFN corpus. The results seem to suggest that whereas the
frequency of in and for are very similar (at least in terms of a local percentage),
of is used much more frequently in the MFN corpus as compared to the email
corpus and the inverse is true for with. The difference in the use of with is
given in examples (120) to (122) below, where with seems to be used to
replace have in the email corpus (i.e. examples (120) and (121)), whereas this
is not the case in the example from the MFN corpus (i.e. example (122)). In
other words, Jane with her long legs and that Thomas case with the little
engines are easily rephrased respectively as Jane has long legs and that
Thomas case has little engines but *collaboration has the Canadian Forest
Service will not work. Examples of the remaining most frequent prepositions
(in, of and for) are given in examples (123) to (125) below for reference.
295
Table 10-21: Frequency of prepositions in GAE+HES combined and MFN

GAE + HES MFN
Global % Local % Global % Local %

Preposition N N=161 N=68 N N=175 N=111
of 17 10.6%• 25.0%• 50 28.6%• 45.0%•
in 9 5.6% 13.0% 18 10.3% 16.0%
for 10 6.2% 15.0% 14 8.0% 13.0%
with 7 4.3% 10.0% 5 2.9% 4.0%
others ... ... ... ... ... ...
(120) Jane with her long legs (HES)
(121) that Thomas case with the little engines (GAE)
(122) collaboration with the Canadian Forest Service (MFN)
(123) the view in the mountains (in)
(124) a program of action (of)
(125) 30% of the wood supply for the province (for)
The results presented above can be compared with Biber et al. (1999). In
their study of postmodification by prepositional phrase, they found that the six
most frequent prepositions of postmodifying prepositional phrases accounted
for 90 per cent of all such prepositional phrases (ibid.:635). In this study, the
top six prepositions account for 80.5 per cent. The top three most frequent
prepositions are the same items (of, in and for), however the top six differ
slightly here in that from is among the top six here whereas it is not one of the
top six in Biber et al. (1999). Instead their results show to as one of the six
most frequent prepositions introducing a postmodifying prepositional phrase.
One rather considerable difference in the methodology of calculating these
frequencies is that Biber et al. (1999) included some phrases as postmodifiers
whereas in this study the same phrases would have be treated as quantifying
determiners (and hence no postmodification). For example, the following
296
expressions would not be considered as complex referring expressions (i.e. no

qualifier) in this study: a piece of cake or a lot of trouble (examples from Biber
et al., 1999:635). The head element in each case would be identified as cake
and trouble respectively and both nominal groups would have the following
components: qd v h. In Biber et al. (1999), the head element would be piece
and lot respectively and the prepositional phrases of cake and of trouble have
been treated as postmodifying prepositional phrases. We can infer that in their
study, postmodification would have a much higher frequency overall and also
that the frequency of the preposition of when introducing a postmodifying
prepositional phrase would be much higher than in the present study. Biber et
al. (1999:635) found that of had a frequency of 60-65 per cent when
considered as a percentage of all prepositional postmodifiers. As shown in
Table 10-19 above, the same preposition had a frequency occurrence of only
37.2 per cent in the three corpora analysed here. The difference in corpora
size between the current study and that of Biber et al. (1999) is immense.
Although the difference in the frequency of of is great, the gap may very well
close significantly if the size of the corpus increased here. However it is
possible that the results here are representative. This would have to be
explored in future research.
10.3.2.2 Apposition
It is perhaps not surprising that post head nominal group apposition is

relatively rare in referring expressions as is shown in Table 10-17 above. With
these forms, the head element of the nominal group will always have either an
identifying or attributing function with respect to the qualifier. NP-apposition
has a frequency of 26 occurrences out of a total of 336 which represents a
frequency of 7.7 per cent (but note the difference in the text types).
(126) Jane’s husband/[Identified] John
(127) Catcher in the Rye/[Carrier] boring book
297
If the results are combined for GAE and HES, as shown in Table 10-18
above, the problem of low number of occurrences is resolved and a more
accurate statistical result can be obtained. With the number of occurrences
now close to 100 in each case, the difference is clear; NP-apposition is not a
frequent type of postmodifying structure. However it is especially rare in the
MFN corpus. Those found in GAE and HES would benefit from further
research as it may be that they may fall into a category that is more of an
incremental nature to referring rather than modifying (cf. ‘turn increments’,
Ford, Fox and Thompson, 2002).
10.3.3 Results for nominal groups coded with ‘postmodifier’
The feature called ‘postmodifier’ was identified in order to code

expressions which were postmodified with a structure other than those already
covered. The most common example of this is where the qualifier is filled with
a quality group as illustrated in examples (128) to (129) below.
(128) an annual harvest [equal to 21 percent of the national

yield of commercial timber] (MFN)
(129) a virus [rampant throughout the resort] (HES)
(130) anything [wrong or more wrong than I am already] (GAE)
Although the numbers of what has been called ‘postmodifier’ here are
small, as a percentage distribution, they are considerably less frequent in the
MFN text. This may suggest it is a feature of a more casual use of language
(e.g. something small versus something that is small). However it is clear that
these types of postmodifiers have not yet been studied in great detail. Future
research which considers the boundaries between modifiers and qualifiers
without solely structural criteria would need to examine these cases. This is
especially true for the anything wrong and something good examples as in
(130) above. The examples given in (128) and (129) seem quite similar to the
use of non-finite postmodifying clauses which were discussed in Section
10.3.1 above.
298
Table 10-22: Frequency of the postmodifier type of qualifier for GAE+HES and MFN
GAE + HES MFN
Feature Mean N Mean N
ad hoc situation 37.3% 60 31.4% 55

thing 56.5% 91 65.7%‡ 115
postmodifier 6.2% 10 2.9% 5
Total (N) 161 175

10.3.4 Multiple qualifiers
This section will briefly consider instances where the complex referring
expression includes multiple qualifiers in the nominal group. In these cases
only the first qualifier was included in the functional analysis. The numbers of
multiple qualifiers are relatively low and when only those cases of conjoined
qualifiers are considered, the frequency is even lower. Of all nominal groups
with a qualifier element, only 5.9% have more than one qualifier in the GAE
and HES combined corpus whereas in the MFN corpus only 6.6 per cent
express multiple qualifiers. These figures are presented in Table 10-23.
However in terms of grammatical complexity, multiple embedded qualifiers
were also counted. These were very infrequent in the GAE and HES
combined corpus with only 4 out of a total 168 nominal groups (2.4 per cent)
expressing this type of nominal group complexity. In contrast, this is the most
frequent type of multiple qualifiers in the MFN corpus where 17.7 per cent of all
nominal groups with a qualifier express multiple embedded qualifiers (see
Table 10-23).
Examples of the types of multiple qualifiers are given in (131) to (137)
below.
299
Table 10-23: Frequency of multiple qualifiers in GAE+HES and MFN

GAEset + HES MFN
Total N
(nominal groups with at 168 181
least one qualifier)
SINGLE QUALIFIER 91.7% 154 75.7%• 137
MULTIPLE QUALIFIER 8.3% 14 24.3%• 44
EMBEDDED 2.4% 4 17.7% 32

CONJOINED 5.9% 10 6.6% 12
• statistically significant to the 98% level
Examples of multiple qualifiers
Qualifier with an embedded qualifier filled by a clause (q|pgp→q|clause)
(131) a remote sensing tool [with the capabilities [to monitor

land use changes across multiple land ownerships]]
Qualifier with an embedding qualifier filled by a nominal group (q|pgp→q|ngp)
(132) the creation [of the Waswanipi Cree Model Forest [the
only Aboriginal-led model forest]]
Qualifier with an embedded qualifier filled by a prepositional group

(q|pgp→q|pgp)
(133) a common vision [of establishing working models [of

sustainable forest management]]
300
Conjoined qualifiers: prepositional group - prepositional group (q|pgp q|pgp)
(134) the role [of the Aboriginal community] [in the Model Forest
Network]
Conjoined qualifiers: prepositional group - clause (q|pgp q|clause)
(135) a commitment [from all stakeholders] [to work together

towards a common goal]
Conjoined qualifiers: clause – clause (q|clause q|clause)
(136) two other moms [going just to go] [who again I know fairly
well]
Conjoined qualifiers: clause - nominal group (q|clause q|ngp)
(137) lots of changes [coming over the next little while] [new
people etc.]
This completes the more structural results of the analysis of complex

referring expressions. We will now turn to the results concerning the functional
analysis as was developed in Chapter 7.
10.4 Functional analysis of complex referring expressions
In this section we focus on the results obtained from applying the

theoretical approach to complex referring expressions developed in this thesis.
It has been argued throughout this thesis that a more functional approach is
needed when considering the expressions we refer to structurally as nominal
301
groups. This seems to be the one area in Systemic Functional Linguistics

where all functional terminology is left out and we become entrapped by
structural terminology. Indeed, it has been very difficult in this thesis to
maintain an appropriate balance between function and form.
The main idea explored in this thesis is that the speaker ‘uses’ the qualifier
for the purposes of referring and that in doing so, he or she sets up a
temporary conceptual situation in which the referent has a functional role. This
role is different to the one which it has in the current situation. The distinction
being made here between the so-called ‘temporary conceptual situation’ and
the ‘current situation’ is as follows. The ‘current situation’ is the expression of
the matrix clause which is being expressed to refer to a given situation. The
speaker represents the referent in that situation by some identifiable role (i.e. a
Participant or a Circumstance). The ‘temporary conceptual situation’ is called
temporary to reflect the idea that it is an ad hoc situation, created for the
purposes of referring to a referent. The goals are quite different for each of the
two situations. It is also referred to as conceptual in order to reflect the idea
that it is primarily in the mind of the speaker; a construct created by the
speaker so that he or she can refer adequately (at least in the speaker’s mind)
to the referent. This idea of a temporary conceptual situation has been defined
and described through an extension of transitivity theory. This was laid out in
Chapter 7. The results of having analysed the complex referring expressions
using this framework are given in the sections below.
As described in Chapters 7 and 8, some situations in complex referring
expressions were deemed to be covert. Consequently the presentation of
results in this section is divided into two subsections. The first presents the
results from the overt situations and the second concerns the results from
those complex referring expressions classed as having a covert situation.
Before presenting the results for each type, we will consider the distribution of
all complex referring expressions in terms of the extra role assigned to the
head of the nominal group. These results are presented in Table 10-24. There
are two main observations to be noted from this table. The first is that the
head element of the nominal group rarely has a role of Circumstance in the
temporary conceptual situation. Examples of these are given in Section
10.4.1.2 below. The second is that despite the relatively large numbers of
302
complex referring expressions in each corpus, there are no significant

differences in the frequency distribution of the type of role conflated with the
head element. This may be due to the fact that it seems rare for the head to
express a type of Circumstance role.
Table 10-24: Type of role conflated with head of the nominal group
GAE+HES MFN
ROLE of head element N=161 N=175
participant 96.90% 156 0.46 97.70% 171 0.46
circumstance 3.10% 5 0.46 2.30% 4 0.46
We will now consider the results for overt situations.
10.4.1 Overt Situations
The classification of overt situations is not in fact necessary; however it is

convenient to refer to them this way because of the need to distinguish them
from those that have been classified as expressing a covert situation. Covert
situations will be discussed in Section 10.4.2 below as a special case of a
relational type of process. Table 10-25 gives the frequency distribution for all
complex referring expressions where the head element of the nominal group
was identified as having a participant role. The results are presented by
process type. Here again there is no significant differences between the two
corpora in terms of the type of process the head element is said to be involved
in. Clearly material processes and relational processes are more frequent
than any others. This should not suggest that other types are not possible.
The most frequent type is the relational type of process. This is due to the
modifier nature of the qualifier. The most common relation between the head
element and the qualifier element was that of simply linking the concepts
rather than portraying them in a more clearly defined situation.
303
Table 10-25: Distribution of overt situation between material and relational processes
GAE+HES MFN TOTAL
PARTICIPANT
N=161 N=175 N=336
TYPE
material 13.0% 21 16.6% 29 14.9% 50
relational 75.8% 122 79.4% 139 78.0% 261
mental 6.2% 10 1.7% 3 3.9% 13
verbal 2.5% 4 0.0% 0 1.2% 4
10.4.1.1 Participant role for head element
As discussed above, there were no significant differences in the frequency

distribution of type of process. However the process type label, for example
material process type, is meant to describe primarily the most relevant process
based on the additional role assigned to the head element of the nominal
group. We will now consider this additional role in detail by looking at the
frequencies of the types of participant roles found in the data. The tables
given below will only indicate roles that were actually identified in the data.
Therefore if any role seems to be missing as compared to the transitivity
approach to the clause, it is simply because it was not found and it should not
suggest that it is not possible for these roles to occur. Having said this
however, it is interesting to consider whether certain roles simply would never
occur or would be very unlikely to occur.
The roles identified as conflated with the head element for material type
situations are given in Table 10-26. The roles of goal and range have been
combined as the distinction between the two is not necessary at this stage. It
might be useful to recall at this point that as explained in Chapter 8, the names
of the participant and circumstance roles follow Halliday and Matthiessen
(2004) rather than those of the Cardiff Grammar for the reasons outlined in
Chapter 8. Furthermore lower case letters will be used in an attempt to avoid
confusion with similar labels for the analogous roles in the clause and to
remind the reader that the relationship between the transitivity applied here to
referring expressions and the transitivity of the clause is one of analogy rather
than a complete transference.
304
The results in Table 10-26 show that, despite the relatively low
frequencies, there are no differences in the frequency distribution of actor and
goal-scope when comparing the GAE and HES combined corpus and the MFN
corpus. There seems to be a slight preference for the head element to be
conflated with the role of goal-scope rather than expressing a role of actor.
However the split is reasonably close to 50-50. There were no instances of a
beneficiary role although there easily could have been as in for example the
man who was given £50 (invented example).
Table 10-26: Participant roles related to material situations
GAE & HES MFN

21 29
actor 5.6% 9 7.4% 13
goal-scope 7.5% 12 9.1% 16
As stated above, relational type situations were by far most frequent in

explaining the situation created by the qualifier element. Consequently, the
frequency of participants should be sufficiently high to see more reliable
patterns of distribution. The relative frequency of an attributive type of role for
the head element of the nominal group seems to be relatively constant in
comparing the two corpora as is shown in Table 10-27. There is also
considerable stability in terms of the frequency of those cases where the head
element is deemed to be in a covert type of relation with the qualifier.
However, one difference which seems difficult to explain is the almost inverse
relationship between the two text types for identifying and possessive types of
relational participant roles. If we recall the differences found in the use of
nominal group apposition between the two text types (see Section 10.3.2.2
above and Table 10-8), we may find the reason for the differences in the
results presented here. The combined GAE and HES corpus, a corpus of
casual email conversation, had a frequency of 18.1% of nominal group
apposition as compared to 2.1% found in the MFN corpus and 4.8% as
predicted by the probabilities in the system network. As stated above these
forms will always have either an attributive or identifying function and therefore
305
the significantly higher frequency of nominal group apposition would account

for the higher frequency of the identifying role of the head element in the email
corpus.
Table 10-27: Participant roles related to relational situations

GAE+HES MFN
N=122 N=140
24.2% 39 17.1% 30
attributive
14.3% 23 5.1% 9
identifying
5.0% 8 21.7% 38
possessive
covert-
32.3% 52 36.0% 63
relational
Looking at the different roles of the head element for relational types of
situation in Table 10-28, we find that for both corpora, the role of carrier is
vastly preferred over the role of attribute. This makes intuitive sense.
However the use of possessed as an additional role for the head element
seems notably more frequent in the MFN corpus.
Table 10-28: Participant roles related to attributive and possessive types of relational
situations
GAE+HES MFN
attribute 4 2.5% 0 0.0%

carrier 35 21.7% 30 17.1%
possessor 4 2.5% 9 5.1%

possessed 4 2.5% 29 16.6%
Participant roles in Identifying relational processes were not included as

the only type of role found for any text was identified. Although the numbers
are really too small to reasonably reflect any degree of statistical significance,
patterns do emerge. It seems that regardless of text or text type, the preferred
role in attributive relational processes is carrier and for possessive relational
processes it is possessed.
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Although the frequency for mental and verbal process type situations is
very low, we will just briefly consider the relevant participants that appeared in
the data. The distribution of participants among mental and verbal type
situations is given in Table 10-29. The only comment that can be made with
so few instances is that the results suggest that ‘phenomenon’ is far more
likely than ‘senser’ in mental type situations and there is some indication that
the head element is more likely to be represented as ‘verbiage’ than any other
participant in verbal type situations.
Table 10-29: Frequency distribution of type of role for mental and verbal situations
System Feature Count Global Mean
MENTAL TYPE phenomenon 13 3.9%
VERBAL TYPE sayer 1 0.3%

verbiage 3 0.9%
10.4.1.2 Results head having role as Circumstance
To this point, we have only considered cases whether the head element of
the nominal group was deemed to have an additional role as a participant.
However some instances were identified where the head element is
represented as having a circumstance role. These cases are relatively rare as
we saw in Table 10-24 above (3.1 per cent in the email corpus and 2.3 per
cent in the MFN corpus). The difference between these two types of role for
the head element in complex referring expressions is illustrated in (138) and
(139) respectively. Both examples are taken from the HES corpus.
(138) the building/PR she wants
(139) the same day/CR the girls head down
In the cases where the head element has the additional role of
circumstance, in all cases but one the corresponding situation was best
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described as a material type, as in example (140). The exception to this was

one case where the situation was best described as a relational type, which is
given in example (141).
(140) someone she could do something with once in a while
(141) a living laboratory where people who had a direct interest

in the forest supported by the latest science and
technology would become partners in sustainable forest
management decisions
Although circumstance roles conflated with the head element are very
infrequent, further specification was nevertheless conducted in an attempt to
see if any patterns emerged. The results are displayed in Table 10-30 where
location is the most frequent type of role that was found. In order to gain a
better understanding of these types of expressions a much larger sample must
be studied in order to increase the frequency of instances. It remains unknown
whether this would lead to a higher frequency in terms of a percentage of all
complex referring expressions. What this type of role suggests is that the
speaker, in referring to a referent, has decided to refer to it by its location in
space. Given that the corpora analysed in this study constitute an exchange
between interactants who are not sharing the same physical space (i.e. an
asynchronous exchange), this strategy would likely be ineffective or at least
unnecessary. It would be interesting to compare similar results for face to face
casual conversation.
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Table 10-30: Frequency distribution of type of circumstance role for the head element
of the nominal group
Feature Count Local Mean Global Mean
57.1%
location 4 1.2%
space 2 28.55% 0.6%
time 2 28.55% 0.6%
manner 1 14.3% 0.3%
cause 0 0.0%
accompaniment 2 28.6% 0.6%
extent 0 0.0%
matter 0 0.0%
We will now consider the description of what has been called covert
relational situations.
10.4.2 Covert Relational Situations
In a sense, the cases covered under the heading of covert relational

situation are problematic cases. This category was needed for the
classification of certain complex referring expressions where, as the analyst, it
was difficult to identify the type of situation involved. Clearly there must be a
relation in the mind of the speaker otherwise there would be no sense or
function involved in producing the referring expression. The fact that some
cases are problematic for the researcher does not imply that they are
problematic for the speaker. This will be discussed in Section 10.5 below
when the proposed revision to the AD HOC DESCRIPTION system network is
presented. The assumption under which we proceed is that there is a relation
and it exists for the speaker. The difficulty faced by the researcher then is
categorised here by considering that the relation is covert for the analyst.
With respect to covert relational situations, the temporary conceptual
situation, μ, is not overtly expressed nor is it clearly identifiable from the
relationship between the head of the nominal group and the qualifier. In a
sense then it is left implicit by the speaker as there are no indicators that would
allow the researcher to confidently identify a non-relational situation. In all
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such cases, the head element of the nominal group is conflated with a role
similar to carrier. Thus the referent is seen as a carrier for some description.
In structural terms, the qualifiers in these cases tend to be filled by
prepositional phrases.
The covert relational situations constitute 42.6 per cent of all relational type
additional situations in the email corpus and 45.3 per cent in the MFN corpus.
The comparison between the two corpora shown in Table 10-31 represents a
frequency of the referent as carrier in a covert relational situation as a
percentage of all complex referring expressions. There are no statistically
significant differences between the frequencies of head/carrier in each corpus.
Table 10-31: Frequency of covert relational situation in GAE+HES and MFN

GAE + HES MFN
N=161 N=175
HEAD ROLE
% N TStat % N TStat
head/carrier 32.3% 52 0.83 36.0% 63 0.83
The role assigned to the head element of the nominal group is constant in
these cases; in other words the referent is always represented in the referring
expression as a covert carrier. Therefore there is little more to say about its
transitivity relations except for the role contributed by the qualifier which we will
now consider.
10.4.2.1 Role of completive in covert relational situations
The most frequent role contributed by the qualifier in covert relational

situations is shown in Table 10-32 to be that of spatial location which is
followed closely by matter.
It is difficult to draw any conclusions from a comparison between the two
corpora as the number of instances of each type of circumstance role is too
low when split between the two. Nevertheless the results have been
calculated and they are presented in Table 10-33. There are two areas that
seem to stand out in the comparative analysis and these are with respect to
the relative frequency of description (of the referent) by time and space in the
GAE and HES combined corpus and the relative frequency of description (of
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the referent) by cause and matter in the MFN corpus. However, as stated
above, the limited number of instances in each corpus makes it difficult to
obtain any firm patterns. Nevertheless there are certainly pointers for future
research in this area.
Table 10-32: Frequency distribution of roles contributed by the qualifier in covert

relational situations
thing described in relation to: N Local % Global % (N= 336)
matter 31 27.2% 9.2%
location (space) 37 32.5% 11.0%
location (time) 11 9.6% 3.3%
cause 25 21.9% 7.4%
accompaniment 8 7.0% 2.4%
manner 2 1.8% 0.6%
Table 10-33: Comparison of GAE+HES combined corpus and MFN corpus for roles
contributed by the qualifier in covert relational situations
CV ROLE GAE + HES MFN
description by time 5.6% 9 1.1% 2
description by space 13.0% 21 9.1% 16
description by manner 0.0% 0 1.1% 2
description by cause 5.6% 9 9.1% 16
description by
accompaniment 1.2% 2 3.4% 6
description by matter 6.2% 10 12.0% 21
Having completed the presentation of the analysis of complex referring

expressions, the next and final section of this chapter will focus on the
implications for the system networks for THING.
10.5 Revised system network for [ad hoc description]
In Chapter 6 the system network for THING was presented in as much detail
as possible for the purposes of understanding its role in the production of
referring expressions. It is a highly detailed and complex network. The
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relevant section of the network concerning complex referring expressions was

given in Chapter 6 and also a partial view was given above in Figure 10-1. It is
reproduced here for ease of reference in this discussion in Figure 10-2 below.
The first three systems shown are systems that would lead eventually to the
realization of (pre) modifiers in the nominal group and we will ignore them in
this discussion since our main interest here is the qualifier. The relevant
systems for complex referring expressions are the remaining four systems.
Fawcett (2004) is critical of this part of the system network because, as he
states, “it is organized around the units that may fill qualifiers, rather than
around the functions that qualifiers may serve”. This is precisely the challenge
that this thesis has attempted to take up. One of the goals of this research is
to offer a functional account of qualifiers.
Figure 10-2: Existing system network for ad hoc description
It is very difficult to change perspectives on such a familiar object as the

nominal group. It will have been obvious throughout this work that maintaining
clear boundaries between functional and structural terminology with respect to
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these expressions has been very challenging. There is one problem however
that seems to be inherent to developing a system network. The system is
meant to represent the semantic options available to speakers in producing
language. However, the system networks are usually developed by applying
an analytical framework that is in fact based on the same system network.
There is here great potential for introducing bias into the research.
The analyst, unlike the functional theoretician, is forced first and foremost
to identify structures; language must be parsed into meaningful units before
any analysis can begin. The criterion used in this thesis to identify a referring
expression was based on the function of the expression in the clause as a
Participant or a Circumstance. However once these expressions or units were
identified, structural criteria were used to determine whether or not the
referring expression referred to a ‘thing’, ‘event’ or ‘description’ (see the
discussion of this methodology in Chapter 8). This type of flip-flop between
function and structure seems unavoidable. However such an approach reflects
the integrated nature of function and structure in language. The main
distinction that must be maintained theoretically at least is the difference
between claims that are relevant to the theorist building the system networks
which model semantic options in language production and those that are
necessary, useful and/or relevant for the analyst.
Based on the analysis presented in this chapter, one might conclude, for
example, that the system networks should be revised so that they can account
for the covert relational situations identified in the corpora. Such a proposal
might lead to a system network like the one illustrated in Figure 10-3 below.
This figure represents a combination of the existing network for ad hoc
description (Fawcett, 2004) and the analytical categories developed here (see
Chapters 7 and 8 and Section 10.4.2 above). Consequently it is a hybrid
representation which mixes the semantic options available to the speaker and
the analytical categories defined by the analyst. The problem with this is that it
is based on the framework of the analyst. It is the analyst who found the
relations to be covert (not clearly identifiable). However, from the speaker’s
perspective, the additional role that he or she assigned to the referent (and
represented by the head element of the nominal group) is always known since
in terms of referring, it is the role that the referent has in the ad hoc situation. It
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is not ‘covert’ to the speaker; it is only covert to the analyst. This is a rather
large problem when trying to reconcile the differences in approaches to the
same phenomenon. It would seem then that the option available to the
speaker in these cases is between expressing this relation explicitly or not.
Figure 10-3: Proposed system network for AD HOC DESCRIPTION based on analytical
criteria
An initial proposal for revising the system network in more functional terms
is given in below in Figure 10-4. The main focus developed here is on the
additional role assigned to the referent (and hence to the head of the nominal
group in the resultant nominal group). It would seem important for the system
network to reflect the options available to the speaker in terms of selecting the
way in which this role is realized in relation to the situation created for the
purposes of referring (i.e. μ). Therefore it is reasonable to propose that the
presence of all true qualifiers results in an additional role being assigned to the
referent and that this role is represented by the head element of the nominal
group. In the production of the complex referring expression, the speaker must
feel the need to construct a secondary (ad hoc) situation, μ, for the purposes of
referring to the referent in question. As a result, the main feature needed in an
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approach to postmodification is to classify all features resulting in a qualifier as

sub features of [by role in other situation] in the system network for AD HOC
DESCRIPTION. This is shown in Figure 10-4. As all qualifiers are seen here as
creating an ad hoc situation with the referent, the initial option is whether to
describe the referent by an ad hoc situation or not. This is represented in the
network in Figure 10-4 by the simple system [by ad hoc description by
situation] which illustrates the following two options: [by role in other situation]
OR [not by role in other situation].
Figure 10-4: Revised system network for AD HOC DESCRIPTION
The revised system network for AD HOC DESCRIPTION in Figure 10-4 states
that given the selection of [ad hoc description] and [by role in other situation],
two systems are entered in parallel. The first, labelled here as ROLE, identifies
the type of role assigned to the referent in the ‘other situation’ (called μ in this
thesis). In this system two options are available and a selection must be
made between [participant] and [circumstance]. This will determine the role
that is assigned to the referent in the additional situation, μ. As a consequence
of placing this option at this point in the network, it will lead to a preselection of
the required roles and processes when the full system network is re-entered to
produce the qualifier (e.g. clause, prepositional group) (see Chapter 5 and 6).
This may seem overly complicated but it is needed here as it is part of the
options available to the speaker in referring to the referent.
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In the second system, labelled as SITUATION, two options are available:

[expressed situation] and [implied situation]. These relate to whether the
speaker wants to express a fully realised clause or not. The remaining options
serve to distinguish between qualifiers filled with finite clauses, prepositional
groups, nominal groups, etc. Examples of [expressed situation] and [implied
situation] are given in Table 10-34.
The claim made in the proposed representation of the system network is
that the feature [ad hoc description by situation] includes not only relative
clauses, as was the case in the existing version of the network (see Figure
10-2 and Fawcett, 2004), but all types of qualifier (i.e. non-finite clauses,
prepositional groups and nominal groups. In other words, a complex referring
expression results when, in order to refer to the referent, the speaker projects
the referent an ad hoc ‘situation’ which is defined by the relation between the
head (as representative of the referent) and the qualifier. It is therefore this
relation that we are interested in capturing and defining.
Table 10-34: Examples of terminal features for [expressed situation] and [implied
situation]
expressed situation
[by reduced situation] the person going abroad
a company named Acme
someone to travel with
our supply of clean water
a web-based database of indicators
a little house with a yard
[by fully defined situation] a nice long message i typed to you
the building she wants
other parents that I know and trust
implied situation
[by non-finite situation] more of a desire to work hard and excel
a hard time getting out of the driveway
a chance to have your summer holiday
a valuable tool to monitor stand level and landscape level
change
[by relation with other thing] a key element of the Network’s success
a hotel room downtown
plans for this summer
plans with Bill
increasing concerns about climate change
It may be clear from the examples in Table 10-34 that some structures
appear in more than one category. This is seen as having both positive and
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negative implications. On the positive side, it reflects the fact that the
categorisation was made on functional criteria rather than purely structural
ones. On the negative side, it suggests that further specification is needed in
order to complete the system networks and in order to be able to account for
the differences in form. One terminal feature has not changed from the
original network presented in Figure 10-2 and this concerns qualifiers realized
as relative clauses. The only difference now is that the relevant feature is now
labelled as [by fully defined situation]. These types of qualifier are the only
ones expressing fully defined situations, realized as fully expressed clauses.
The feature [by reduced situation] refers to those complex referring
expressions where the additional situation, μ, is expressed but in a reduced
form. In structural terms, this feature will lead to inserting into the nominal
group a qualifier that is realized by either a non-finite clause or a prepositional
group. It should be noted that the selection of [by role in other situation] will
have an insertion rule associated to it that will insert a qualifier element in the
nominal group.
Further research will need to explore whether the so-called ‘missing
elements’ in the reduced situations are due to some kind of ellipsis or whether
an alternative representation would account for these forms more
appropriately. The option of describing the referent by an implied situation is
needed in the network in order to represent the option the speaker has of not
explicitly making reference to the type of situation in which the referent is
involved for the purposes of referring. There seem to be two ways of doing
this. The first is [by non-finite situation]. This differs from [by reduced situation]
because the type of process in which the referent is involved in the additional
situation, μ, is not explicitly stated. The same is true for [by relation with other
thing] where the qualifier is realized by either a nominal group or a
prepositional group. There must be a relation between the referent and the
other thing but the speaker has chosen not to state it explicitly.
There is insufficient space for a discussion of the realization rules that
would produce the formal representation of the systemic options. It is
assumed that many of the existing ones can be recycled since the formulation
here is more of a restructuring of the functional representation rather than a
completely new account. The only new structure added here is the non-finite
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clause as qualifier. New realization rules would have to be developed in order

to account for their use and the different types of non-finite clauses.
As a first proposal for a functional approach to complex referring
expressions, this must be seen as a work in progress. This area is perhaps
the most complex area of English grammar and the goal of this thesis was not
to discover the definitive answer but to begin to pave the way for the
development of a systemic functional approach to these expressions.
Future research should continue from this point and pursue developments
in this area of the system network for THING. For example, the proposal made
here would need to be tested to see if it has more descriptive and/or
generative power than the existing version. Then if this is the case, the
realization rules would have to be adapted (or in some cases created) to
account for the process of realization, translating the functions into linguistic
structures. Some very big questions remain such as what influences the
speaker when referring to a referent? What principles are guiding the selection
of functional (or structural) elements when producing a referring expression?
These questions along with many other interesting ones must be left for future
research.
10.6 Summary
This chapter presented the detailed results from a functional analysis of

complex referring expressions. As such it serves as confirmation that the
theoretical approach developed in this thesis can be applied to naturally
occurring instances of language in use. This chapter offers an empirically
based description of complex referring expressions, which also contributes to a
general descriptive account of nominal groups. It has also considered the
theoretical implications of the approach taken here and it discusses a proposal
for revising the relevant system network based on this functional approach.
The next chapter concludes this thesis and offers a summary of the main
contributions of the thesis, some considerations of the limitations of the
research and several indicators of directions for future research.
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Chapter 11: Conclusion
11. Conclusions
As first stated in Chapter 1, this thesis was not a study of the nominal
group and yet it was. This statement summarises the main paradox
experienced throughout this research. The nominal group is an area of the
grammar which is particularly complex and nominal postmodification is one of
the main unresolved areas. Since almost all studies of postmodification rely
on primarily structural criteria, it was felt in this research that by looking at the
problem in a different way, a new understanding may be gained for some of
the complexities and unresolved issues. Ironically even the most functional
linguists remain focussed on the structural identity of the nominal group (or
noun phrase). Consequently, one of the main goals of this thesis was to
develop a functional approach the nominal group.
There is no single functional term in Systemic Functional Linguistics for
these expressions (cf. Halliday’s (1969) ‘participating entity’). This is very
surprising since in SFL meaning is meant to hold a central place in the theory.
Meaning is represented in the system networks which attempt to model
relations among meaning. As Neale (2002:305) concludes, “a ‘part-of-speech’
analysis of a corpus, which is based on traditional grammatical classifications
in terms of classes at the level of form, is a less useful method for this kind of
model building”. In this thesis, an attempt has been made to shift the focus
from traditional grammatical classifications to more functional classifications.
In a sense then this thesis could be summed up generally as broadening
Systemic Functional Linguistic theory to develop a systemic and functional
approach to the nominal group by foregrounding its meaning as a referring
expression.
The remainder of this chapter is organised as follows. The next section
examines the main contributions of the thesis. Then, in the third section the
limitations of the current research will be discussed. Finally, the last section
will consider some directions for future research.
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Chapter 11: Conclusions
11.1 Main contributions of this thesis
This thesis has made contributions in three main areas. The first of these
is in the area of descriptive linguistics. It offers a full descriptive account of the
occurrences of referring expressions in three corpora. This description
provides a good account of the frequency distribution of the componence of
the nominal group, offering specifically not only an account of the relationship
among the elements of the nominal group but also an account of how the
frequency of the elements varies according to the position of the referring
expression (nominal group) in the clause (e.g. Subject, Complement, or
Adjunct).
The second area in which this thesis contributes is theoretical linguistics.
This thesis proposes a new theoretical model for analysing complex referring
expressions in Systemic Functional Linguistics. By extending the concept of
transitivity, and by considering the multifunctional nature of referring
expressions, this thesis shows that the meanings expressed in complex
referring expressions can be best accounted for in terms of the situation
created by the presence of a qualifier in the nominal group. The relationship
between the head and qualifier in the nominal group can then be expressed in
a way that is analogous to the transitivity system for the clause.
The third area of contribution is with respect to methodology. This thesis
offers a useful description of the methodology developed for adapting the
features from the system networks to an analytical coding scheme. One of the
main criticisms of other large scale studies of the nominal group (or noun
phrase) is the lack of transparency (cf. Section 2.5). It is often very difficult to
know exactly how the categories were determined and how the statistics were
calculated. The methodology offered here is highly transparent making the
research presented here available for comparison with other studies. More
important than this though is the contribution concerning modelling choice in
the analytical framework. The methodological approach developed here was
largely inductive. It set out to build a model of analysis that maintains, to the
extent possible, the features from the system networks. This will be discussed
again in Section 11.3 below.
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11.2 Limitations of the research
All research projects must set boundaries in order for the main body of
work to be completed. Consequently this imposes limitations in terms of the
range of phenomena that can be addressed and in terms of the amount of
information that can be presented as a result.
Concerning the first of these, this thesis was limited to an in depth study of
referring expressions as realized by nominal groups. Other types of referring
expressions were excluded. Furthermore the study was restricted to
considering the nominal group within the clause and consequently text and
discourse level functions were excluded. Future work would need to extend
beyond structural criteria and consider linguistic reference in a much broader
sense.
A second limitation concerning the range of phenomenon addressed
relates to the actual amount of data analysed. Depending on one’s
perspective analysing a total of nearly 14 000 words and 3 000 nominal groups
may either seem like a substantial amount or a limited amount. Since, due to
the nature of the exploration of the expressions under study, all units had to be
coded by hand rather than by automated software, the amount of data was
suitably large when the research was defined. However after completing the
analysis, it is clear that due to the relatively infrequent use of certain functions,
a much larger corpus would be needed to further investigate the phenomena
discovered in this thesis. If the frequency rate of complex expressions can be
assumed to be relatively stable, then the size of the corpus analysed here
would have to be multiplied by 100 at least. This would mean over a million
words and over 300 000 nominal groups. However it must be emphasised that
these figures would constitute a bare minimum.
Another limitation faced in this research concerns the challenges in
developing the methodology. As discussed in Chapters 8 and 10, there is no
obvious or direct association between the semantic options in the system
networks and the analytical framework. The reasons for this are related to the
nature of each aspect of the theory. The system networks approach the
phenomenon in question in a non-linear way. The process of modelling the
production of a referring expression is recursive in nature and therefore the
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entire process is non-linear. However the analytical approach to the study of

these expressions is necessarily linear. The coding scheme developed in the
methodology was limited to the linear level of analysis. New software has
become available which might contribute to a better means of analysing such
complex data (O’Donnell, 2006). Future work in this area would benefit from
an analysis that can maintain various levels of complexity and push the
approximation of the system networks even further.
A final limitation of this thesis relates to limitations of space. The thesis is
constrained to a certain number of words and decisions must be made in
terms of what information that can be presented. The analysis carried out in
this research produced a vast amount of information. Not all of it was included
in the thesis presented here. As suggested in Chapters 9 and 10, the
relationships among the various elements of the nominal group were explored.
In some cases considerable variation was discovered and in others, the
opposite was found where some relations seemed to be stable. Further
research should continue to explore these relationships.
Before moving on to the next section, the obvious must be stated. This
thesis represents a work in progress. It must not be seen as a definitive
statement in any sense. However it does constitute a considerable first step in
developing a functional approach to the nominal group.
11.3 Directions for future research
This thesis has opened up several directions for future research. This
section will highlight some of the main ones.
The first follows from one of the limitations described in the previous
section. Further research should develop in more detail the system network
for ad hoc description. This should be done in two main areas.
The first is to reconsider the distinction between prehead and posthead
modification. This is a purely structural position to take and the system
features should be developed further in the direction of modelling the relevant
meanings. In other words, there may be cases of what is structurally classed
as a postmodifier but is actually functioning like a prehead modifier. If so, the
similarities in meaning should be reflected in the system networks.
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The second area of future research concerning the system networks is to

further develop the proposed revision to the ad hoc description system
presented in this thesis. In addition to this the realization rules must be
reviewed and revised in order to complete the description of complex referring
expressions within the Cardiff Grammar.
The main defining criterion for studying referring expressions was the
identification of the units which fill the experiential elements of the clause. The
detailed analysis was therefore carried out uniquely on nominal groups filling
the roles of Participant or Circumstance. Future research should consider a
comparative study of nominal groups which fill different units in various places
in the clause and in other groups. This should include for example nominal
groups filling quantifying determiners, modifiers, and other determiners.
Studies of the nominal group (or noun phrase) in corpus linguistics have
claimed that variability in nominal groups can be a strong indicator of text type
(Quirk et al., 1985; Biber et al., 1998). The results presented in this thesis
would also concur with this statement. However this does not explain
significant variation for an individual speaker. Further research should yield
interesting results when factors contributing to the production of referring
expressions are taken into account, such as for example discourse roles and
information flow (cf. Fries, 1999).
It has been emphasised in this thesis (notably in Chapter 7) that the
identification of the head element of the nominal group is extremely important
in studies of this nature as it determines the evaluation of the remaining
elements of the nominal group (cf. Fawcett, 2007, Abney, 1987, for example).
One rather implicit outcome of this thesis is the suggestion that the current
view of noun senses as an extension of the thing network is unsatisfactory.
The direct link between referring expressions and noun senses is through the
cultural classification system and this is realized structurally through the head
element of the nominal group. Therefore the head element is a critical element
both in terms of pursuing a theoretical understanding of referring expressions
and for analysing them and building an analytical framework.
There are theoretical implications for related fields of study as well. For
example, the very nature of collocation would be challenged if all noun senses
were an extension of the thing network. From the systemic functional
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perspective, collocation implies that certain lexical selections would have to

carry co-selection rules (or at least same pass rules). Therefore the stage at
which the cultural classification is determined is critical to the study of referring
expressions whether from the theoretical systemic perspective or from the
analytical perspective. Furthermore, it is obvious that the referent is always
known to the speaker. In other words, the speaker always knows the object
they wish to refer to, although there are cases where the targeted lexical item
is irretrievable or overly vague (cf. Lamb, 1999 and Clark and Wilkes-Gibb,
1986, e.g. thingamajig and other dummy noun phrases). It may well be that the
selection of cultural classification (i.e. item expounding the head element) must
be determined much earlier than currently thought. However it is unlikely that
this selection occurs first as is implied by studies of postnominal complements
or relational nouns (cf. Asmuth and Gentner, 2005).
The ‘problem’ of the head element and its role in referring expressions
relates to the discussion above concerning the challenges of reconciling an
analytical approach with the development of a theoretical model. The
identification of the head element of the nominal group leads the analyst to
make inferences and to draw assumptions based on the functions inherent to
these expressions. In a sense this introduces a bias into the research
process. Future research should therefore define criteria for the identification
of the head element for the analyst whilst exploring how its selection can be
modelled in the system networks.
This thesis has accomplished what it set out to accomplish within the
confinements of the constraints imposed by the nature of the thesis itself. The
most important future research goal is that this thesis will be used as the basis
for further developing and refining the ideas that it represents.
324
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Appendix
The accompanying CD-ROM is included overleaf.
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A Systemic Functional Approach to Referring Expressions:

Reconsidering postmodification in the nominal group

Lise Margaret Fontaine

Thesis submitted in part fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Language and Communication Research

Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy

Signed …………………………………… (candidate) Date …………………………

Signed …………………………………… (candidate) Date …………………………

This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where

Signed ……………………………………… (candidate) Date …………………………

Signed ……………………………………… (candidate) Date …………………………

STATEMENT 4: PREVIOUSLY APPROVED BAR ON ACCESS

Signed ……………………………………… (candidate) Date …………………………

The research presented in this thesis explores three main areas:

• to develop a methodology for analysing referring expressions following

• to contribute to the systemic functional theoretical model of language in

• to develop a new theory of complex referring expressions which is

1. A linguistic perspective on referring expressions ...........................................1

1.1 On referring expressions, noun phrases and nominal groups .......................1

1.2 Aims and scope .............................................................................................8

1.3 How this thesis developed ...........................................................................10

1.4 Overview of the thesis .................................................................................14

2. An overview of selected approaches to referring expressions ....................17

2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................17

2.2 Philosophical approaches to referring expressions .....................................19

2.3 Referring expressions from a computational linguistics perspective ...........23

2.4 Psycholinguistic and cognitive approaches to referring expressions...........34

2.5 Referring expressions and corpus linguistics ..............................................43

2.6 Summary .....................................................................................................49

3. An overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics ...........................................51

3.1 Structure and function..................................................................................52

3.2 The multifunctional nature of the clause ......................................................54

3.3 System networks .........................................................................................56

3.5 Summary .....................................................................................................62

4. Halliday’s Nominal Group.................................................................................64

4.2 Description of the nominal group .................................................................79

4.3 Complex nominal groups in Systemic Functional Linguistics ......................84

4.4 Summary .....................................................................................................95

5. The Cardiff Grammar.........................................................................................97

5.1 Overview of the Cardiff Grammar ................................................................98

5.2 The main components of the model ..........................................................102

5.3 Cardiff theory of functional syntax .............................................................114

5.4 Summary ...................................................................................................129

6. The place of referring expressions in the Cardiff model .............................131

6.1 Conceptual and formal representations of referring expressions ..............132

6.2 Planning a referring expression .................................................................134

6.3 System network for ‘referent thing’ ............................................................140

6.4 The formal representation of referring expressions ...................................151

6.5 Summary ...................................................................................................155

7. Towards a functional grammar of complex referring expressions ............157

7.1 Introduction ................................................................................................157

7.2 Postmodifiers as Complement and Adjunct...............................................159

7.3 Issues concerning qualifier in the Cardiff Grammar...................................163

7.4 Current applications of transitivity in the nominal group ............................169

7.5 A theory of transitivity for complex referring expressions ..........................177

7.6 A Functional approach to postmodification................................................185

7.7 Summary ...................................................................................................195

8. A methodology for the analysis of referring expressions ...........................198

8.1 Data Collection ..........................................................................................200

8.2 Construction of the Corpora.......................................................................202

8.3 Coding the data: converting theory to application......................................204

8.4 Summary ...................................................................................................229

9. A functional analysis of simple referring expressions ................................231

9.1 Grammatical Categories ............................................................................232