Friday 17 January 2020

Fawcett's Claim That There Are Two Versions Of Halliday's Grammar

Fawcett (2010: 124):
The first part of the answer is that there appear to be two versions of the Sydney Grammar that differ from each other on this matter. Roughly speaking, the two seem to correspond to each of the two 'strands' of the theory that I characterised in Section 5.2 of Chapter 5 as the 'text-descriptive' and the 'theoretical-generative'. When Halliday or Matthiessen are writing from a 'text-descriptive' viewpoint, they typically write in terms of what we shall call the structure conflation model, but when they are writing from the 'theoretical-generative' perspective they tend to write in terms of what we shall call the element conflation model.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue. There is only one version in this regard. What Fawcett mistakes for two versions are two aspects of the one theory.

On the one hand, what Fawcett calls 'the structure conflation model' is actually the integration of metafunctional clause structure in the syntagm of group/phrase rank units that realise it; for example, in the clause Ian Curtis was Joy Division's singer, the experiential structure Token ^ Process ^ Value is realised by the syntagm nominal group ^ verbal group ^ nominal group.  Structures themselves cannot be conflated because, as previously noted, a structure is actually the relation between elements.

On the other hand, what Fawcett calls 'the element conflation model' is actually the case of two or more functions being realised by the same unit of a syntagm; for example, in the clause Ian Curtis was Joy Division's lyricist, the nominal group Ian Curtis realises the conflation of Theme, Subject and Token.

[2] For the confusions involved in Fawcett's distinction between 'text-descriptive' and 'theoretical-generative', see the original post here.

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