What kind of structure?—interpersonal meaning and prosodic realization across strata

Abstract

The starting-point of this article is Halliday's view that different types of meaning are realized by different forms of grammatical organization: experiential meaning is typically represented by particulate structures, interpersonal meaning by prosodic structures, and textual meaning by periodic structures. The aim of this article is to further develop the claim that interpersonal meanings are prosodically organized. It is argued that the same strategies for expressing ‘appraisal’ operate at the level of discourse and at the levels of clause and nominal group. The strategies of ‘saturation’, ‘intensification’, and ‘dominance’ distribute interpersonal meanings ‘suprasegmentally’ across phases of discourse as well as in the clause and the nominal group. Within the strategy of ‘dominance’, ‘scope’ plays a central role: evaluations are seen as dominating and coloring the meanings in their scope. At the levels of clause and nominal group, this leads to a further distinction between three types of scoping strategies: interpersonal meanings can be localized as the ‘nub’ of the clause or group (as is the case with mood in English), as the ‘crest’ (having thematic prominence), or as the ‘logical head’ of the clause or group, with other elements hypotactically dependent on it (as is the case with modal metaphors such as I think).