Fudging The Data

 Fawcett (2010: 326):

(I have slightly altered the wording of Huddleston's examples to create 'minimal pairs' that make the relevant contrasts fully explicit.)

(1a) He left the room before they voted. 

(2a) He left the room before the vote. 

(3a) He left the room, then they voted.

Huddleston's grammatical analysis of (la) — which is broadly similar to mine — is to treat it as a single clause in which the embedded clause before they voted functions as an Adjunct that identifies the 'time position' of the event of 'leaving' by relating it to an event that is already known to the addressee (the 'voting' event), in the same way that before the vote does in (2a). Indeed, Halliday and M&M would agree with Huddleston and me that, when the event of 'voting' is nominalised as in (2a), it serves this function and is therefore an Adjunct. So why, we might ask, do they not also treat before they voted in (la) as an Adjunct? Essentially, their approach is to interpret (la) as a relating of two events (rather than as a 'main' event that is located in time by relating it to another event) — and to claim that this 'relating' can be achieved either 'paratactically', as in (3a), or 'hypotactically' as in the second interpretation of (la).

Blogger Comments:

In SFL Theory, the three instances are analysed as follows:

[1] This is misleading, on two counts. On the one hand, Fawcett's slight alteration of the data does not create 'minimal pairs', and on the other hand, it does not make the relevant contrasts fully explicit. Instead, the contrast it makes explicit is one of time: 'earlier' ((1a) and (1b)) vs 'later' (1c), which is the irrelevant to the distinction between hypotaxis and embedding.

[2] To be clear, this is bare assertion unsupported by reasoned argument.

[3] This is not misleading, because it is essentially true.