English Morphemic Constituents Working for Discourse Wording: Extending Rank Scale from “Clause (Complex)” up to “Text (Type)”

Abstract

This paper aims to elaborate Halliday's observation of "text as wording" alongside the already accepted view of "text as meaning" and, accordingly, to address two interrelated issues: (i) how morphemic options work for such grammatical units as words, groups / phrases, clauses, clause complexes and even text; and (ii) how they simultaneously create text wording apart from text meaning, the two being in complementarity, with wording as the main concern. The author first illustrates the grammatical and contextual functions morphemes serve for making text process as well as those units below. Next, it carries out a case study of a sample text to observe two aspects of the present issue: (i) the selections of relevant morphemic tense options, with a few lexical items, to construct their wording textures of discourse; and (ii) the underlying accumulations of identical categories into their expanding temporality domains on the one hand and the integrations and contractions into a meaning unit of the whole text on the other, both processes being visualised as two cones in opposite directions, with the two butts joint to form a spindle, a 3-dimensional model of text as "socio-semantic unit", a project to be further run.