delicacy (n.)

In HALLIDAYAN LINGUISTICS, a term used to refer to one of the scales of analysis which interrelate the CATEGORIES of the theory, viz. the dimension which recognizes increasing depth of detail. An increasingly delicate analysis of the notion of CLAUSE, for example, might recognize AFFIRMATIVE v. INTERROGATIVE types; interrogative clauses could then be analyzed into several QUESTION types; and so on. Other scales in this approach are labelled RANK and EXPONENCE.