Misrepresenting Halliday's Grammatical Systems As Semantic

Fawcett (2010: 58):

The perception that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc. represent the meaning potential of a language is, in my view, the most significant of all of Halliday's insights. As I pointed out above, one important result of accepting this major claim is that it challenges us to develop our system networks further, with the explicit goal of making them represent choices between meanings (rather than forms), and so to model the level of semantics in language.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This continues the misrepresentation of Halliday's grammatical systems as semantic systems, and the misrepresentation of meaning potential (language as system) as semantics (meaning as a level of symbolic abstraction).

[2] To be clear, in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the system network is the theoretical formalism for modelling all strata.  In SFL, language is stratified as meaning (semantics), wording (lexicogrammar) and sounding/writing (phonology/graphology) — not meaning and form — with grammatical form incorporated through the rank scale of clause, group/phrase, word and morpheme.

For system networks that represent choices between meanings, see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999); for system networks that represent choices between wordings, see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014).