Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 284-5):
Tables 7.2 and 7.3 have introduced the three major participants in FitzSimons' text, namely the waves, their victims and the Bondi Boys. Each of these entities has to be constructed grammatically in nominal groups, so let's look more closely at how this is done, beginning with the waves – this time taking into account the whole of the article.
Experientially, the basic pattern here is to realise the waves as Thing and deploy Epithets to describe their size. From a discourse semantic perspective relations between Things are meronymic (part/whole relations): we have nature, including oceans, involving surf, consisting of waves, made up of water (Working with Discourse Chapter 3). Taken together the Epithet Thing structure of nominal groups and their meronymic relations to one another tell us what we are talking about.
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, the nominal group is the congruent grammatical realisation of a participant.
[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, meronymic relations obtain between lexical items — rather than grammatical Things — as one type of lexical cohesion. The function is thus textual, rather than experiential. Martin's (experiential) discourse semantic system of IDEATION is a rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's (textual) lexical cohesion, confused with logical relations between transitivity elements. Evidence here.
[3] For the theoretical problems with Chapter 3 of Working With Discourse (Martin & Rose 2007), see the clarifying critiques here.
[4] Clearly, the vast majority of speakers do not need to be told what they are talking about.
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