Misrepresenting Halliday And Deploying A Logical Fallacy

Fawcett (2010: 59):

I am therefore as confident as it is ever possible to be in science that it is indeed possible to make a reality of Halliday's original proposal that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on should be, to adapt Halliday's metaphor (1994:xix) "pushed all the way to the semantics". We who work in the framework of the Cardiff Grammar — together with all of the many other systemic functional grammarians who take the view that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc. constitute the major level of meaning in language — have therefore come to a different conclusion from Halliday on this matter.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, since it misrepresents Halliday.  As previously explained, Halliday's systems have, from their beginnings, been presented as grammatical systems, not semantic systems.

[2] The citing of others who share Fawcett's view is here presented as an argument in its favour.  In terms of logical fallacies, this is another instance of the fallacy of relevance known as an appeal to popularity:

Appeals to popularity suggest that an idea must be true simply because it is widely held. This is a fallacy because popular opinion can be, and quite often is, mistaken.

[3] To be clear, on the SFL model, there is only one level of meaning in language: semantics.  Lexicogrammar constitutes the level of wording, the lower stratum of the content plane.