Presenting Concrete Objects

Martin & Rose (2007: 163):

In Chapter 3 we looked at different kinds of entities that can participate in figures, including people, objects, institutions and abstractions, as well as figures that function like things. Each of these different kinds of entities can be identified in different ways. 

Concrete objects, that we can touch, taste, hear, see or feel, are identified pretty much like people. They are introduced indefinitely, and then tracked with determiners like the or pronouns like it:

We used a yellow portable Robin generator to send electric shocks through his body when we put the generator on his body was shocked stiff…

they started to take a plastic bag then one person held both my hands down and the other person put it on my head. Then they sealed it so that I wouldn't be able to breathe and kept it on for at least two minutes…

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[1] To be clear, the notion of 'figure' derives from the ideational semantics of Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) — not from Martin's (1992) discourse semantics — wherein the "different kinds of entities that can participate in figures" are elements, a different order of phenomenon from figures. "Figures that function like things" are instances of grammatical metaphor where what would congruently be realised as a clause is instead realised as a nominal group (the congruent realisation of an element).

[2] This claim, unsupported by evidence, is falsified by every single text, during the course of which, any inanimate object is initially realised by a specific nominal group — i.e. one featuring the determiners the, this, that, its, or the pronoun it.

Moreover, the realisation of concrete objects as non-specific nominal groups is reference in the sense of ideational denotation, not reference in the textual sense, since non-specific nominal groups do not include a reference item whose identity is recoverable elsewhere, since non-specific determiners do not specify.