Three Degrees Of Nuclearity In The Nominal And Verbal Group Summarised

Martin & Rose (2007: 98):

So at the rank of word group, the centre is occupied by the Thing and Classifier or Event and Particle, the nucleus by the Epithet or second Event, and the periphery by the Qualifier or Quality, schematised in Figure 3.14. 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To recap, Martin & Rose have not identified the variable according to which Thing and Event are said to be 'central' in the nominal and verbal group.

[2] To recap, the authors' argument, that Classifier is 'central' in the nominal group because the grammatical structure Classifier^Thing forms a "unified lexical element", is invalidated by any Classifier^Thing structure that does not form "a unified lexical element", such as imaginary centipede.

[3] To recap, the authors' argument, that the particle of a phrasal verb is 'central' in the verbal group because the entire phrasal verb can be paraphrased as simple verbs, is invalidated by the fact that 'particle' is neither a function nor a constituent of a verbal group.

[4] To recap, the authors' argument, that Epithet is 'nuclear' in the nominal group because of its structural distance to the Thing, is contradicted by the fact that an element that is closer to the Thing, Qualifier, is categorised as 'peripheral' (further away).

[5] To recap, if the authors had provided an argument as to why second Event is 'nuclear' in the verbal group, it would have been invalidated by the the fact that each verbal group features only one Event.

[6] To recap, the authors provide no argument as to why Qualifier is 'peripheral' in the nominal group, even though this classification directly contradicts the reason (structural distance) for designating Epithet as less peripheral ('nuclear').

[7] To recap, if the authors had provided an argument as to why Quality is 'peripheral' in the verbal group, it would have been invalidated by the the fact that Quality is not a functional element of the verbal group.

[8] Trivially, this form of representation first appears in Cléirigh (1998: 346-8), where it is used to model clause and group structure as a scalar field.