The Authors' Claim That '(Afore)said' Is A Specialised Version Of 'The'

Martin & Rose (2007: 165-6):

In legal and administrative discourse quite a lot of pressure is put on identification resources in order to be precise. This includes some specialised features which we can see in the Act which established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The word said for example is used alongside the to refer precisely to what has just been said, specifying dates:

... the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights committed during the period from I March 1960 to the cut-off date contemplated in the Constitution
... acts associated with a political objective committed in the course of the conflicts of the past during the said period

And specifying purposes:

To provide for the investigation and the establishment of as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights committed and for the said purposes to provide for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a Committee on Human Rights Violations, a Committee on Amnesty and a Committee on Reparation and Rehabilitation;

The words said or aforesaid are specialised versions of the, specifying that the identity presumed can be found in the preceding text.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, identification (reference) does not increase the precision of the meaning being made, because it involves the use of reference items whose identity may or may not be resolved by the reader.

[2] To be clear, the words said and aforesaid are not specialised versions of the, most obviously because they occur with the rather than in place of it. More importantly, what they have in common is that all serve as Deictic elements in the nominal group. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 373, 374):

In addition to the Deictic element we have just discussed, there may be a second Deictic element in the nominal group, one which adds further to the identification of the subset in question. We will refer to these as post-Deictic or Deictic₂. The post-Deictic identifies a subset of the class of ‘thing’ by referring to its fame or familiarity, its status in the text, or its similarity/dissimilarity to some other designated subset.

As Deictic elements, the and said specify the Thing of their nominal groups — period and purposes. However, only the determiner the serves as a reference item that specifies a recoverable identity. This can be demonstrated by removing the determiner from the nominal groups in question:

• said period
• said purposes.

Here it is clear that said does not present a recoverable identity (cf the period — what period?). Once again, Martin & Rose have confused deixis with reference.