Types of Structure: Deconstructing Notions of Constituency in Clause and Text

Abstract

In this paper I will present arguments in favour of a view of text structure in which constituency is not privileged, but deconstructed as just one way of looking at text organisation. This view of text structure has been developed in Australia in dialogue with Halliday’s (e.g., 1994) and Matthiessen’s (e.g., in press) work on English clause grammar. Consequently I will begin with an overview of their clause analysis before moving on to argue the main point of my paper—namely that constituency is a semantically biassed and reductive form of representation for text structure (i.e. that a text is not a tree).