How The Cardiff Grammar Handles Hypotactic "Elaboration"

 Fawcett (2010: 271):

However, Halliday's third type of 'hypotactic expansion' [i.e. elaboration] is analysed as a special type of co-ordination, termed a 'pseudo-relative', as follows:

[John[S] ran[M] away[Mex], [Cl]][which[S] surprised[M] everyone[C] [CI]].

Here which surprised everyone is treated as equivalent to and this surprised everyone, and the two clauses jointly fill a sentence (which is omitted above).

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the combination of elaboration and hypotaxis yields a non-defining relative clause as the dependent (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 464), whereas it is the combination of extension and parataxis that yields co-ordination (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 472).

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, strictly speaking, this is not a case of elaboration, since the meaning of the relative clause does not elaborate the meaning of the primary clause. Instead, it is a case of extension, since it adds meaning to the meaning of the primary clause; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 468). This is also borne out by the lack of tone concord in its phonological realisation, since tone concord characterises genuine instances of hypotactic elaboration; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 467).

In short, Fawcett here exemplifies elaboration with a case of extension in order to justify treating elaboration as co-ordination (extension).

[3] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the two clauses are hypotactically related in a clause complex.