The Systems Of Determination And Substitution/Ellipsis

Matthiessen (1995: 693):

From a textual point of view, the nominal group provides the resources for presenting and contextualising discourse referents — instances of participants brought into referential space — and for differentiating between continuous and contrastive information. There are two textual sets of systems, DETERMINATION and SUBSTITUTION/ELLIPSIS. Both deal with recoverability of information. DETERMINATION is concerned with the recoverability status of discourse referents (their identifiability), whereas SUBSTITUTION/ELLIPSIS is concerned with the recoverability of words.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, these are non-structural cohesive systems, not systems of the nominal group. Systems of the nominal group specify the structure of the nominal group, relationships between its elements, whereas systems of COHESION do not.

[2] To be clear, this confuses a genuine nominal group system, DETERMINATION (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 366) with the non-structural cohesive system of REFERENCE (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 623).