Misrepresenting Halliday And Misunderstanding Stratification

Fawcett (2010: 56-7):

Thus Halliday himself did not take on the task of a thorough re-working of the existing systemic descriptions that the revolutionary new model logically called for. However, the few new networks that emerged from that period such as those for 'modality' (Halliday 1970/76a) are more clearly oriented to meaning than most of the 1964 networks reproduced in Halliday (1976). The position remains that some of Halliday's networks (e.g., TRANSITIVITY, the network for generating Participant Roles, etc.) have been pushed very much further towards the semantics than others (e.g., the MOOD network). 

In recent years, however, Halliday appears to have reached the decision that it really is necessary to add a second and higher level of 'meaning'. This is the position that is expressed in Halliday (1996), Matthiessen (1995) and in Halliday & Matthiessen (1999) — the latter being the exploration of a possible 'experiential semantics'. As a consequence of this decision, Halliday now uses the term "semantics" for this new level of 'meaning' — while continuing, however, to describe the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on as "meaning potential" (e.g., Halliday 1993:4505).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the task that Fawcett thinks was "logically" called for was the reconstrual of Halliday's grammatical systems as semantic systems; see below. Here yet again Fawcett employs the logical fallacy of proof by assertion: repeating a false claim as if multiple repetitions of the claim have established it as valid. 

[2] To be clear, Halliday's system of modality is a grammatical system, and, like all grammatical systems, including TRANSITIVITY and MOOD, it was theorised from the viewpoint of semantics, that is: in terms of the meanings it realises.

[3] This misunderstands the SFL stratification hierarchy.  Semantics is not "a new added second and higher level of meaning".  On the one hand, it is misleading to claim that semantics is a "new added" level, since it was theorised as a level in, for example, Halliday & Hasan (1976).  On the other hand, on the SFL model, there is only one level of meaning, semantics, and this is distinguished from the level of wording, lexicogrammar, with these two constituting the two levels of the content plane.

[4] As previously explained, Fawcett continually mistakes 'meaning potential' (language as system) for 'meaning' as a level of symbolic abstraction (semantic stratum).