https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9320-558X
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Abstract
The current study seeks to unpack the corpus-driven semantics of the “referent things” underlying the use of the lexical item coronaviruses in the data of The Coronavirus Corpus [Davies, Mark. 2019-. The Coronavirus Corpus. https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/]. Drawing on the Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) Model of the Cardiff Grammar, a concordance-bound analysis has been conducted on the item coronaviruses as expounding the structural element head (h) of its relevant nominal-group patterns in the corpus data. The Cardiff Grammar Model has systematically revealed the semantics of coronaviruses’ referent things as realized by corpus-driven syntactic patterns of eleven coronaviruses-expounded nominal groups in two respects in the corpus data. First, the item coronaviruses has been empirically shown to have three dominant types of referent: (i) a particularized referent has been expressed through the system of PARTICULARIZATION, (ii) a substantive referent through QUANTIFICATION (selection by quantity, selection by typicity, and selection by representation), and (iii) cultural-classification referent through the two overlapping systems of CLASSIFICATION and SELECTION (selection by quality and selection by qualification). Second, these referents demonstrated two aspects of semantic representation via participant-role (PR) conflation: (i) a cultural-classification referent assumes the complementary participant roles of Identifier, Actor, and Patient; (ii) a particularized substantive referent has the sole PR of Agent.
Acknowledgment
This study is supported via funding from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University project number (PSAU/2023/R/1444).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Following the analytic tradition of the Cardiff Grammar Model, I shall henceforth use the term “performer” to denote the language user of a syntactic unit – in our case, the language user of nominal groups.
2 Indeed, Fawcett’s current principle can be corroborated should we take on board Dowty’s (Citation1986) postulate that the features of arguments (i.e., linguistic entities) are very different from the features of the arguments’ referents.
3 Note that all the abbreviations indicated here are drawn from Fawcett’s Appendix B on the key to all abbreviations of units, elements, and other symbols (Fawcett Citation2000a, 304). The full forms of the ones presented in the current quotation are the following (in the order they appear and without repetition): pd = partitive determiner, qd = quantifying determiner, m = modifier, & = Linker, v = selector (always of, = [v]), q = qualifier, dd = deictic determiner, and h = head. Also, note that, in due course, with each figure appearing from now onwards a key will be provided and updated with the new abbreviations throughout the article’s developing structure. Further, notice that in my analysis, unlike Fawcett’s, I use the abbreviation s for the element “selector,” instead of v; for, compared to Fawcett’s, no conflict of two abbreviations of s arises in the present context of research.
4 For convenience, I shall henceforth use the term “system(s)” – and occasionally “semantic system(s)” – in place of the full terminological complex of “semantic system network(s).” After all, the term gives full expression to the systemic functional postulate of meaning as a choice.
5 The information quoted here about the corpus data – as well as the other details about the corpus itself – can be found at the website of The Coronaviruses Corpus: https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/.
6 I follow the tradition of differentiating the two participant roles of “Actor” and “Agent” in the so-called semantic propositional analysis, where the former is described as being a conceptual argument that performs some action without affecting any other entity and the latter as an argument that affects some other entity (i.e., “Affected”) by its action (e.g., Kreidler Citation1998).
7 In the present context of functional syntactic analysis, the Cardiff-Grammar term “apex” (abbreviated as a) is reserved as the technical label for the pivotal elements of quality group (qlgp).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amir H.Y. Salama
Amir H.Y. Salama is currently Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English, College of Science and Humanities in Al-Kharj, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. Also, he is a standing Professor of Linguistics and English Language in the Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages), Kafr El-Sheikh University, Egypt. In 2011, Professor Salama received his PhD in linguistics from the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. Since then, he has published at international journals like Discourse & Society, Critical Discourse Studies, Pragmatics and Society, Cogent Arts and Humanities, Arab World English Journal (AWEJ), Semiotica, Corpora, and Translation Spaces. His research interests are semiotics, corpus linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, pragmatics, and cognitive semantics.