"Comparing People"

Martin & Rose (2007: ):

We have seen that participants can be referred to as different from others, with another or someone else. These kinds of resources compare one participant with another, and so are known as comparative reference. Comparative reference may involve simple contrast, or numbers such as first, second and superlatives such as best, better:

my first love
someone else
another policeman

In English, unlike many languages, we tend to insist on signalling whether we are presenting or presuming every time a participant is mentioned. However comparison is optional; we just use it when we need to.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the unacknowledged sources of comparative reference are Halliday & Hasan (1976: 76-87) and Halliday (1985: 294-5). Moreover, the function of comparative reference is not merely to compare one participant with another, but to create cohesion through a relation of contrast. Halliday (1985: 294):

[2] To be clear, ordinatives and superlatives do not serve as comparative reference items, and Martin & Rose provide no argument in support of their claim that they do. Moreover, reference items are not restricted to the domain of the nominal group. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 633) classify comparative reference items as follows:

[3] Trivially, better is not a superlative, but non-trivially, as a comparative adverb, it does serve as a comparative reference item.

[4] To be clear, the authors' 'presenting reference' is concerned with their notion of 'introducing participants', and their 'presuming reference' with their notion of 'tracking participants'. However, the distinction here is not one of reference, but one of deixis: non-specific ('introducing/presenting') vs specific ('tracking/presuming') — and it is this distinction that "we tend insist on signalling" in English.

This is shown by the fact that non-specific determiners do not refer, and by the fact that Martin & Rose are concerned with the identity realised by the nominal group in which the determiner functions, rather than with information elsewhere in the text that would resolve the identity referred to by a genuine reference item.

[5] To be clear, the 'optionality' of comparative reference, in this context, lies in the fact that it is not a feature of deixis.  Presumably, when 'we need to use it', it ceases to be 'optional'.