Craig,
I will continue to insist that there is more to -- let's call it the
agentive 'be' -- than just the aspectual difference. Your perfect
versions would not be as you write them: There is a difference between
"George had been a jerk" or "George has been a jerk" and "George had been
being a jerk" and "George has been being a jerk". Once more, a sense of
deliberate action on George's part is being stated. Your perfects are
statements of past category membership. They aren't more active. They do
signal a change from George being categorizable as a jerk to his being
categorizable as something not a jerk. That might imply some
agency -- perhaps he worked on not being a jerk anymore, or maybe he had
a brain event that changed his personality. But that is not directly
coded in the expression; it is gotten by inference.
I'm curious as to whether others on the list share my intuition about
the deliberateness of this 'be'. If you tell someone "Stop being such a
jerk!" You are addressing their behavior at the moment, and to me there
is a strong sense that the person is deliberately being annoying. You
don't say to a cow "Stop being a cow!"
I was confused about the terms token, role, value. I don't know much
Hallidayan grammar. My training is in Cognitive Grammar and mental space
theory. In this school, "role" is the generic slot to be filled, and
"value" is the person or thing plugged into the role. So if you say
"Clinton used to be President", "Clinton" is the value and "President"
is the role.
Roles are different from categories because categories have more than
one member: To say "Carla is a dentist" is to say that she is in a
category with many other dentists. For the USA, there is only one role
of President.
"Token" is used to refer to the person/thing being assigned to the
category. So in "Carla is a dentist", "Carla" is token and "dentist" is
category.
People reading these messages must be quite frustrated with the varying
usees of terminology. That's a fact of life when you have multiple
approaches to grammar, and it's a problem we have to face if we want to
come up with a relatively uniform set of terms for teaching.
As to Bruce's remark, in American (not Hallidayan) functional grammar,
the grammatical shape of an expression comes from its communicative
function. In Cognitive Grammar, there is no difference between syntax
and semantics. Parts of speech have meaning-based definitions, and how
something functions syntactically is determined by those meanings. I
haven't been following recent developments in CG, but by now I believe
discourse function is being incorporated into it, which I feel is
absolutely necessary. In Cog. Gr., we don't "resort to" meaning; we seek
an explanation from meaning first; purely formal explanations are the
last resort.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-2596
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] • Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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