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MEANING AND FRAMES 129

would have felt more comfortable with is on the question ‘what might that
relationship be?’
His form has no quotation marks around the embedded clause, so it has lost its
status as a real question; it is ‘reported’ rather than ‘quoted’; it is on the road to
being syntactically integrated into the rest of the writer’s (own) text. He has,
however, left the question mark there, to show that there was – and remains? – a
real question. (Of course I imagine that this question was his too, but
syntactically and textually it is treated as ‘from outside’.)
A further option would have been to show that question as ‘reported thought’
(even if not ‘reported speech’), that is, a form which is ‘earlier’ in the assumed
sequence of internal assembly than the actual reported speech. On the question
of ‘what might that relationship have been’ the author has gone one step further
in the direction of syntactic integration and processing of this sentence, to
integrate the second formerly independent clause more tightly. An increase in
structural work has led to a reduced marking of structure: ‘the question of what
might that relationship be?’
Of course, this utterance could have been processed even further than my
suggested form, dropping the question mark, inverting the order of modal auxiliary
and subject noun-phrase to move back from the interrogative to the declarative
syntax. The fact that there was a question is now no longer signalled by syntax or
by punctuation, but by lexis alone, to give something like ‘casts us out to sea on
the question of what that relationship might be’. This is close to indirect
(reported) speech, which is fully realised as ‘the question what that relationship
might be’.
We could of course change that too, to have a straightforward clause. We
would then be closest to transduction, where an utterance and its semiotic
material is not transformed from its modal realisation in one mode into modal
realisation in another, but is recast within the potentials of the other mode.
Alternatively, we might say – if we knew nothing of the history of this utterance
– that the form below is realised in the mode of writing right from the beginning.
‘The rejection asks about the relationship …’
A fourth example is the opening sentence of another mock school-leaving
examination answer.

The recent call for taxation reform in Australia has been prompted by the
fact that Australia’s taxation system is becoming less equitable.
Relatively close integration of clauses (an example of type 3, and type 4, with
an example of type 5 embedded in it)

This is a sentence which contains between two and four clauses, something like
(not of course in actual utterance): ‘recently someone called that taxation should
be reformed in Australia, which has been prompted by the fact that Australia’s
taxation system is becoming less equitable’. (A more thorough-going parsing
might analyse both taxation and taxation system as nominalisations, that is, as