This book is aimed at fellow practitioners and researchers in functional
linguistics. It offers a friendly but critical appraisal of a major
component of the 'standard' version of SFL, i.e. the account given by
Halliday and Matthiessen of tense and aspect in English. Supporting his
criticisms with evidence from a project in corpus linguistics, Bache
suggests that this account fails in several ways to satisfy accepted
functionalist criteria, and hence needs revising and extending.
After surveying alternative functionalist approaches to modelling time
and tense in English (including Fawcett's Cardiff school approach and
Harder's instructional-semantic approach), and after presenting a number
of principles of category description, Bache goes on to offer an
alternative SFL account of this area of grammar.
In Bache's model, the focus is on the speaker's communicative motivation
for choosing particular verb forms. The relevant choice relations are
seen to draw on metafunctionally diverse resources, such as tense,
action, aspect and other domains. The basically univariate, serial
structure of the verbal group is accordingly enriched with certain
characteristics associated with multivariate structures, and the idea of
recursion is abandoned. Bache finally examines the descriptive potential
of his model in connection with projection, conditions, and narration.