Sunday 2 June 2019

Misrepresenting Halliday In A Footnote

Fawcett (2010: 71n):
However, it must be said that one of the five introductory 'assumptions' in Halliday (1977/78) seems to reflect the second of the two positions on meaning identified in Section 4.6. This is when he writes: "Let us assume that each stratum [...] is described as a network of options." This view is clearly incompatible with that modelled in Figure 4 of Chapter 3, because there the component that specifies the 'potential' at the level of form is the realisation rules — and so not a system network. Since the other assumptions are fully compatible with the model described in Figure 4 of Chapter 3, and since this one therefore appears to be at odds with those others, we shall take it that its inclusion in the paper is evidence that even as he wrote it Halliday was toying with the possibility of the second of his two models of meaning.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as previously explained, Halliday has had only one position on meaning.  As previously explained, the difference between the early model of more than 40 years ago (Halliday 1977/78) and the current model is that the former proposed that semantic structures were mapped onto grammatical structures, an interstratal relation, whereas the latter proposes that it is grammatical systems that are realised by grammatical structures, an axial relation.  In both models, the content strata are semantics (meaning) and lexicogrammar (wording).

[2] To be clear, as previously explained, Fawcett's model, described in Figure 4, is inconsistent with all of Halliday's models, past and present, not least because it confuses axial realisation with instantiation, and distributes phenomena of the same level of symbolic abstraction, features, across different levels, meaning and form, according to whether they are positioned in networks or rules.

[3] To be clear, Halliday's third assumption, that each stratum is described as a network of options, is not theoretically inconsistent with his other four assumptions.  In this early paper, Halliday provides no systems for either semantics or grammar, but describes the organisation of the lexicogrammatical system in his fifth assumption; Halliday (1978: 129):
Fifth, we shall assume that the lexicogrammatical system is organised by rank (as opposed to by immediate constituent structure); each rank is the locus of structural configurations, the place where structures from the different components are mapped on to each other. The ‘rank scale, for the lexicogrammar of English is:

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