On The Differences Between Halliday's Encyclopædia Article And IFG2

Fawcett (2010: 102, 103):

Why should "Systemic theory" introduce so many concepts that have little or no role to play in IFG? And, if the concepts of 'unit', 'class of unit', and 'element of structure' are present in IFG — if only in the background — why should they be absent from "Systemic theory"? Or, to put the question in more general terms, why should there be this great disparity between the presentations of the theory in these two works of the early 1990s? 

The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that the two works are intended for different readerships, so that Halliday foregrounds different aspects of SFL in each of the two works. …

It is because IFG is intended primarily as a grammar for students and others who are engaged in the task of text analysis that the emphasis is on the description of the outputs from the grammar, rather than on the grammar itself. This is probably also the reason why the focus in IFG is on the substantive categories of the description (such as Subject and Actor) rather than on the abstract categories of the theory that underlies the description, (such as 'functional element' and 'class of unit'). 

However, while this may be the reason for the differences between the two works, it is far from being a satisfying answer to the question with which this section began. 

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, "Systemic theory" (Halliday 1993) is an entry in an encyclopædia that sets out the architecture of Systemic Functional Theory, whereas IFG (Halliday 1994) is a work that sets out the structural realisations of grammatical systems, as Halliday (1994: x) makes clear from the outset:

The reason the present work is not called an introduction to systemic grammar is that that is not what it is. Since it was being written specifically for those who are studying grammar for purposes of text analysis, I did not include the systemic part: that is, the system networks and realisation statements, which constitute the main theoretical component (and would be central if the book was an introduction to systemic grammar). What is presented here is the functional part: that is, the interpretation of the grammatical patterns in terms of configurations of functions. These are more directly related to the analysis of text.

Fawcett provides no argument as to why Halliday's clarification — which he misrepresents above as his own conclusion — is 'a far from satisfying answer' to the question he initially raises above.