This book, then, focuses on syntagmatic relations. There are in fact two aspects to syntagmatic relations in language: part-whole relations and sequential relations. The more fundamental concept is that of part-whole relations, and while syntagmatic relations are usually thought of in terms of the level of form, part-whole relations are found at both the level of semantics and at the level of form. But it is the level of form that we shall focus on here, i.e., as shown in Figure 4 in Section 3.2.
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[1] To be clear, in SFL theory (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 60, 83) there is an important distinction between:
- a structure: a configuration of functions, such as Senser ^ Process ^ Phenomenon
and
- a syntagm: a sequences of classes (of form), such as nominal group ^ verbal group ^ nominal group.
[2] To be clear, in SFL theory, part-whole relations are organised as a rank scale. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 21):
Structure (syntagmatic order) … is the compositional aspect of language, referred to in linguistic terminology as ‘constituency’. The ordering principle, as defined in systemic theory, is that of rank: compositional layers, rather few in number, organised by the relationship of ‘is a part of’.
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