Fawcett (2010: 58):
In terms of the change from "Categories" to a modern SF grammar, we may say that the effect of the fundamental change in the theory in the late 1960s was that the concept of 'system' was removed from the account of language at the level of form, and made the central concept at the level of meaning. As a result there were now the two levels of 'instances' shown in Figure 4 of Chapter 3: the selection expression at the level of meaning and the richly labelled tree structure at the level of form.
Blogger Comments:
[1] This continues the misrepresentation of Halliday's grammatical systems as semantic systems and meaning potential (language as system) as semantics (meaning as a level of symbolic abstraction).
[2] This is a non-sequitur, since the latter claim is not entailed by the former, regardless of the validity of either claim. That is, the relocation of grammatical systems to the level of meaning does not necessarily result in Fawcett's model of "two levels of instances".
[3] As Figure 4 shows, Fawcett's model confuses the dimension of instantiation: the relation between system and instance (selected features) with the dimension of axis: the relation between system and structure (tree structure). (It also proposes that systems are realised by realisation rules.)
See also the critique of Figure 4 here.
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