Summarising The Main Point Made In This Section

Fawcett (2010: 63-4):

Let me summarise the main point that is made in this section. This is that, even if Halliday turns out to be right about the need to add another level of system networks above those in the 'meaning potential' of the lexicogrammar (which I do not think he is), it does not necessarily follow that we must deny that there is also realisation between the established levels of the generative apparatus that I have described in Chapter 3 (this generative apparatus being exemplified both in Appendix A and in Halliday's own early generative grammars). To assert that the only relationships involved in Figure 5 — and so in Figure 4 — are ones of 'instantiation' would be to sacrifice the great insight of the later 1960s and early 1970s that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc. are choices in meaning.* And for what would this sacrifice be made? Ultimately, it would be for the abstract (and undesirably limiting) notion that the specification of the 'potential' at every level of language necessarily has the form of a system network. The more desirable alternative, as our work in the COMMUNAL Project at Cardiff has shown, is to allow that a full model of language in use may require different ways of specifying the 'potential'. Indeed this concept is illustrated in the outline proposed in Chapter 3, in that we saw there that it is the role of the realisation rules to specify the 'form potential'.

* It would not solve the problem to label them as 'formal meaning' in contrast with 'semantic meaning' ; they are still patently more semantic than their syntactic correlates.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as already explained, the distinction between semantic networks and grammatical networks provides a systematic means of accounting for grammatical metaphor.

[2] Here again Fawcett confuses the systemic potential of language (meaning potential) with the stratum of lexicogrammar.

[3] To be clear, the 'generative apparatus' is Fawcett's flowchart (Figure 4).  As previously explained many times, it is based on misunderstandings of axis, stratification and instantiation, as well as being internally inconsistent.

[4] This is potentially misleading. To be clear, the exemplication of Fawcett's flowchart in Appendix A involves a system network and realisation rules.  It is this that it has in common with "Halliday's own early generative grammars".  The system itself confuses semantics (a system for 'thing') with lexicogrammar (nominal group features); see the earlier critique here.

[5] As previously explained, this is Fawcett's misunderstanding, deriving from the misunderstandings inherent in his own model.

[6] On the one hand, this is a non-sequitur inferred from a false premiss. On the other hand, in SFL theory, the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc. are choices in wording that realise meaning, and in the absence of grammatical metaphor, the wording and meaning agree (are congruent).

[7] On the one hand, 'undesirably limiting' is merely interpersonal attitude (negative appreciation) falsely presented as if logical argument.  On the other hand, the system network is the formalism of Systemic Functional Linguistics, embodying the fundamental principle of meaning as choice.

[8] Again, 'more desirable' is merely interpersonal attitude (positive appreciation) falsely presented as if logical argument.  The claim that work has shown this to be so is merely Fawcett's own assessment, made without providing the evidence on which it is based.

[9] This is potentially misleading.  The only alternative to system networks for representing potential that Fawcett proposes is realisation rules/statements (Figure 4), and in SFL theory, these are located in system networks.

[10] To be clear, in SFL theory, this contrast is the stratificational distinction of wording (lexicogrammar) and meaning (semantics), these being two levels of symbolic abstraction modelling the same phenomenon: linguistic content.