Tuesday, 19 April 2022

Misrepresenting Material 'Prescribe' As Behavioural

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 124):
Compare 
doctors are quick to prescribe antibiotics : doctors prescribe antibiotics quickly/willingly. 
In both cases the process being construed is the behavioural prescribe. But in the second case, an additional meaning feature has been added to create a ‘verbal group complex’.


Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, prescribe does not function as a behavioural Process here, as demonstrated most clearly by the fact that the Range participant antibiotics is not a Behaviour. Given this, and the fact that the simple present tense here carries the added feature of 'habitual', the Process is clearly material.

[2] Trivially, the second case does not feature a verbal group complex.

No comments:

Post a Comment