Not Addressing The Theoretical Motivation For The Stratification Of The Content Plane

Fawcett (2010: 57n):

In my view the addition of this new level of meaning is an unnecessary complication to the theory. It has the considerable disadvantage that it requires a whole new level of system networks, which together must cover the same broad range of types of meaning as the existing ones. We need to be absolutely sure that this very large new level of system networks really is needed, before we commit ourselves to a vast amount of new work, the result of which will be to complicate even further what is already a very rich and complex model of language. I believe that the evidence is that this vast extension of the theory is neither desirable nor necessary — so long as we actually carry out the implications of Halliday's proposal that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on should model choices between meanings. I consider that the phenomena that have led Halliday to adopt his latest position are to be explained in other ways (one being to further semanticise some of Halliday's networks, e.g., that for MOOD). See Fawcett (forthcoming a) for a set of such semantic system networks.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Fawcett studiously ignores the reasons given for the stratification of the content plane in the work he has just cited, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 237):

Of course, what we are recognising here as two distinct constructions, the semantic and the grammatical, never had or could have had any existence the one prior to the other; they are our analytic representation of the overall semioticising of experience — how experience is construed into meaning. If the congruent form had been the only form of construal, we would probably not have needed to think of semantics and grammar as two separate strata: they would be merely two facets of the content plane, interpreted on the one hand as function and on the other as form.

[2] As previously explained, this level of meaning is not new, and the "old level of meaning", lexicogrammar, is wording, not meaning.

[3] These clauses project bare assertions, unsupported by reasoned argument.

[4]  This promised work was "forthcoming" in 2000, and is still "forthcoming" in 2018.