Just to add a bit more to this in maroon below and use some testing criteria to
determine the answers
From: <sys-func-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Rodrigo Esteves de Lima
Lopes <rll307@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply to: "sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tuesday, 31 May 2022 at 4:03 am
To: "sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <sys-func@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [sys-func] Re: Help with transitivity
Hi Anderson,
I hope this email finds you well.
Then the girl (Actor) had (Material Process???) her first child (Goal); a
beautiful baby girl (Attribute???).
* I agree with you, to have in this context seems to be material.
The question here is: on what basis do we decide this and of course there are
both the semantics and the grammar. So semantically, had means ‘gave birth’ or
‘birthed’. But grammatically had is a possessive relational (or intensive)
process so you need to decide which criteria you are using to decide with and
go from there. So if you say material, then in material you need to look to the
other processes that seem relatively empty of meaning. The examples in IFG are,
I think, things like: did a dance, had a bath/drink, where the process is bled
of meaning, as it were, and the meaning is carried by the following
participant. These can be reframed as processes eg danced and bathed/drank etc.
And the participant following them is a Scope, not a Goal – none of these
Scopes are in any way affected by the process. So does this apply here I
wonder? Not really, because the thing the girl had is another person so they
are completely affected by the process. They are born. So after that, I think I
would agree that had is material, standing in place of birthed. We just don’t
say birthed anymore.
* a beautiful… is an attribute to the child.
regarding the Attribute a beautiful baby girl, we have to backfill the ellipsis
to see the whole meaning, which I think could be as follows:
Then the girl had her first child; (which was) a beautiful baby girl
So I agree here that a beautiful baby girl is the Attribute– I just think it’s
good to show the reasoning – the message here is: backfill all ellipsis and
things become clearer.
But the shadow she (Actor) gave birth to (Material???) a little monster (Goal).
(The preposition “to” is attached to the verb, isn’t it?
* We also agree here: Give birth is material and the preposition is attached
So I think what’s interesting here is all the ways we talk about giving birth.
Semantically had, birthed, gave birth to are all versions of that and so if we
say we are going to treat all versions of birthing as verbs no matter whether
they are verbal groups with one lexical verb: birthed and had, or are phrasal
verbs with three words: gave birth to, then well and good. You can say they are
all material, just different grammatical realisations of that meaning ‘to birth
a child’. I think the bible has other ways of rendering this too eg begat
They (Actor) had to cut (Material Process) her (Goal) open (Attribute???) (Is
‘open’ an Attribute or part of the verb like ‘shut down’?)
* I think cut open is a single verbal item. Open seems to be a bit more
than just an attribute to her.
Ok so for this one, again we need the criteria upon which we will make this
decision. To work out whether this is a phrasal verb (if you think cut and open
stay together) or whether open is, or is part of, the next constituent, we need
to do the tests. There are both semantic tests and grammatical tests. For the
semantic test I’ll use the example of look after in I look after you. In this
case, we know semantically that looks after is one phrasal verb because we can
replace it with one word like nurture. We thus know the meaning of look after
as one process which is a very different process from look without after. So
let’s apply this to our example: is cut open a very different process to cut
without the open and can we replace cut open with one word. I don’t think so
(having consulted the thesaurus). I think we would still need open. We could
replace cut with slit for example, but we’d still need open. So this doesn’t
really help here.
Now let’s apply some grammatical tests: Change the order of the constituents in
the syntagm to make a clause beginning with It and see if the words in the
proposed phrasal verb stay together or come apart eg if we swap the order or
words in I look after you to It is you I look after, the phrasal verb look
after stays together. This is not always the case and I can’t think of one
(Geoff Thompson was/is good on this). So with your example, let’s make an It
clause and see what happens:
It was her/she they had to cut open
This makes it look like a phrasal verb.
But it strikes me that there’s another thing going on here. Can you cut someone
in any other way or is it always cut open? Maybe you can say open her with a
knife but native speaker intuition tells me we would not ever say that (could
do a google or corpus search of that to test it).
Finally, I think we do have a number of phrasal verbs that get split like this
eg pick up. We can either say I picked up the baby or I picked the baby up. I
guess this is one of those:
They cut open her or they cut her open and again native speaker intuition tells
me we wouldn’t use the first one even if it is not grammatically incorrect. We
just don’t say that.
The last test is make the second participant (in this case her) the Subject of
the clause (Ie make a passive clause in this case) and see what happens to the
phrasal verb – ie does it stick together?:
She was cut open by them
It sticks together, so I would agree with Rodrigo on this one two.
Hope my reasoning helps you work out other tricky clauses 😊
Shooshi
All the best
R.
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On Fri, 27 May 2022 at 22:10, andersondesouza
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Dear all, greetings from Brazil,
I was wondering if you could help me analyze the following processes taken from
the movie Us by Jordan Peele.
Then the girl (Actor) had (Material Process???) her first child (Goal); a
beautiful baby girl (Attribute???).
But the shadow she (Actor) gave birth to (Material???) a little monster (Goal).
(The preposition "to" is attached to the verb, isn't it?)
They (Actor) had to cut (Material Process) her (Goal) open (Attribute???) (Is
'open' an Attribute or part of the verb like 'shut down'?)
In case you need more co-text, please see the original passage.
Thank you in advance,
Best regards,
Anderson
ORIGINAL PASSAGE
Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow. The two were
connected; tethered together. So whatever happened to the girl happened to the
shadow... When the girl ate, her food was given to her, warm and tasty, but
when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbits, raw and bloody. On
Christmas the girl received wonderful toys, soft and cushy, but the shadow’s
toys were so sharp and cold they’d slice through her fingers when she played
with them. Time passed. They both got older, and one day the girl met a
handsome prince and fell in love. At that same time, the shadow met Abraham. It
didn’t matter if she loved him or not, he was tethered to the girl’s prince
after all. Then the girl had her first child; a beautiful baby girl... but the
shadow... she gave birth to a little monster. Umbrae was born laughing. The
girl had a second child, a boy this time. They had to cut her open and take him
from her belly. The shadow had to do it all herself. She named him Pluto. He
was born to love fire. So you see, the Shadow hated the girl so much for so
long, until one day she realized that she wasn’t being punished by the girl at
all. She was being tested by God.
