Misconstruing Mood And Conjunctive Adjuncts As 'Expectant Temporal Continuatives'

Martin & Rose (2007: 143):

Temporal continuatives indicate that something happens sooner or later, or persists longer, than one might expect. Helena is appalled at how white peoples’ greed persists longer than might be reasonably expected:

If I had to watch how white people became dissatisfied with the best and still wanted better and got it.

Helena also uses finally to signal that it took longer than expected to understand the struggle:

I finally understand what the struggle was really about.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, neither of these items is a continuative, and neither instance expresses expectation with respect to time.

When the item still expresses a temporal feature, with the sense of 'even now', it functions interpersonally as a mood Adjunct of temporality (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 188); see [3] below. However, in this instance, (and) still marks the clause complex paratactic expansion relation of concessive condition, with the sense of 'and yet' (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 614). The meaning of concessive condition is 'if P then contrary to expectation Q'. That is, this relation features 'expectation', but not 'time'.

This instance of finally, on the other hand, expresses a feature of 'time', but not a feature of 'expectation'. Here finally serves as a conjunctive Adjunct marking the textually cohesive temporal relation of 'conclusive'; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 614).

[2] Here Martin & Rose not only misunderstand the meaning of the quoted text, but also judge that it is reasonable to expect white people's greed, provided it doesn't persist too long.

[3] To be clear, the item finally gives no indication as to the expectation with regard to the speaker coming to an understanding; it merely indicates that after some time, she did. The confusion here is with the item eventually in its function as a temporal modal Adjunct that expresses 'remote future' with respect to the here-&-now of deictic time, as in:

• I will eventually understand what the struggle was really about

which is agnate to:

• I once understood what the struggle was really about ('remote non-future')
• I will soon understand what the struggle was really about ('near future')
• I just understood what the struggle was really about ('near non-future')

In contrast, the temporal modal Adjuncts that do express expectation with regard to deictic time are exemplified by:

• I still understand what the struggle was really about ('since positive')
• I no longer understand what the struggle was really about ('since negative')
• I already understand what the struggle was really about ('by positive')
• I do not yet understand what the struggle was really about ('by negative').