Misrepresenting Halliday's Grammar As Semantic

Fawcett (2010: 58): 

For the purpose of a general comparison between the two models, then, we may treat the level of 'meaning potential' in Halliday's grammar (i.e., the level at which TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on are located) as roughly equivalent to the semantic system networks of the Cardiff Grammar. In other words, Halliday's adoption of the second position on levels of meaning makes no significant difference to the components of the model of language that we shall assume to be common to all of those who work in the framework of SFL. (But see the next section for a caveat to this claim.)

Blogger Comments:

[1] This continues the confusion between meaning potential (language as system) and meaning as a level of symbolic abstraction (semantic stratum), and the use of the confusion to misrepresent Halliday's grammar as semantic.

[2] This continues the misrepresentation of Halliday as having two "positions" on the stratification of the content plane as meaning (semantics) and wording (lexicogrammar), and the wrongful attribution to Halliday of recasting his grammatical systems are semantic.

[3] This is misleading.  On the one hand, the relocation of Halliday's grammatical systems to semantics creates serious theoretical inconsistencies and reduces its explanatory power (grammatical metaphor), as explained in previous posts.  On the other hand, the relocation is precisely what Fawcett needs in order to make theoretical space for his theory of syntax.

[4] But see the review of the next section for an examination of this caveat.