Sunday 25 November 2018

Misrepresenting Fawcett's Flowchart As The Architecture Of SFL Theory


Fawcett (2010: 60):
I claimed in Chapter 3 that Figure 4 (in Section 3.2 of that chapter) represents the way in which both the Sydney and the Cardiff grammars operate. As we have seen, Halliday's more recent writings have increasingly strongly taken the position — which he first explored in the 1970s — that there is a 'higher semantics' as well as the 'meaning potential' within the lexocogrammar (e.g., Halliday 1993 and 1996). How would this affect the overall model of language?


Blogger Comments:

Here again Fawcett makes multiple use of the logical fallacy known as proof by (repeated) assertion

[1] To be clear, Fawcett's Figure 4 (p36) is:

As first demonstrated here, and many times since, the model represented in Figure 4 is invalidated by its own internal inconsistencies, arising from misunderstandings of axis, stratification and instantiation.  Fawcett's flowchart does not represent the architecture of SFL theory, not least because the architecture is dimensional, not modular.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 32):

[2] This is misleading, because, since the inception of SFL theory, Halliday has always posited a level of semantics (meaning) above a level of lexicogrammar (wording).  For example, Halliday & Hasan (1976: 5):

[3] Here Fawcett confuses meaning potential (the system pole of the cline of instantiation) with lexicogrammar (the level of wording in the hierarchy of stratification).

[4] On the one hand, the level of semantics is already a part of the SFL model.  On the other hand, by 'the overall model of language', Fawcett means his own flowchart (Figure 4), which he is about to use as the benchmark for assessing Halliday's model, as will be seen in the next few posts.  

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