Chapter 2 explores nominal group system and structure. In doing so, it concentrates on what in SFL is referred to as multivariate structure. Multivariate structures are structures involving a finite number of functions, each playing a distinct role. In this chapter we concentrate on developing multivariate structures for nominal groups in English, Spanish and Chinese.

Ingrid Lossius Falkum uses data from young children’s communicative development to argue that metaphor and metonymy rely on different pragmatic mechanisms. Metaphor and metonymy do have certain characteristics in common: they both target individual words or phrases, they both contribute content to the proposition explicitly expressed, and they both lie on a continuum of literal and figurative uses. However, developmental data suggests that early metonymic uses may be the result of a more basic process than metaphorical uses, one in which the child exploits salient associative relations to compensate for gaps in vocabulary.

Tim Wharton and Claudia Strey make the case that it is time to develop an account of how emotions are expressed and communicated and to fully integrate it into pragmatic theory. They discuss the descriptive ineffability of emotional communication and argue for the introduction of a new notion of ‘positive emotional effect’ to complement the existing notion of ‘positive cognitive effect’. They also suggest that recent developments in relevance theory, specifically work on indeterminacy of meaning and on procedural meaning, make it uniquely capable of accommodating these vaguer aspects of communication.