Sunday 26 February 2017

Misrepresenting Halliday (1961) On The Meaning Of 'Grammar'

Fawcett (2010: 3):
Before going any further, I should try to clarify the senses in which I am using the terms "grammar" and "syntax". In "Categories", the term "grammar" has a meaning close to a combination of the usual senses of the terms syntax and morphology. Here, however, I shall use the term "grammar" in the sense of 'a model of the sentence-generating component of language' …. And I shall use syntax in the sense of 'syntagmatic relations at the level of form, including inflectional morphology'.

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This is misleading.  Even in Halliday (1961), the meaning of the term 'grammar' had been extended well beyond "a combination of the usual senses of the terms syntax and morphology", as demonstrated by the following quotes.  Halliday (2002 [1961]: 40-2):
Grammar is that level of linguistic form at which operate closed systems. Since a system is by definition closed, the use of the term “closed” here is a mnemonic device; but since “system” alone will be used as the name of one of the four fundamental grammatical categories it is useful to retain “closed system” when referring to the system as the crucial criterion for distinguishing grammar from lexis. … 
Any part of linguistic form which is not concerned with the operation of closed systems belongs to the level of lexis. The distinction between closed system patterns and open set patterns in language is in fact a cline; but the theory has to treat them as two distinct types of pattern requiring different categories. For this reason General Linguistic theory must here provide both a theory of grammar and a theory of lexis, and also a means of relating the two. … 
The fundamental categories for the theory of grammar are four: unit, structure, class and system. … 
The relation of these categories to each other and to the data involve three distinct scales of abstraction, those of rank, exponence and delicacy; … 
In discussing these I have used the terms “hierarchy”, “taxonomy” and ‘cline’ as general scale–types.

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