Misrepresenting Fawcett's Views As Halliday's

Fawcett (2010: 120-1):

To summarise so far: Halliday recognises that texts should in principle be represented in terms of their features in the 'meaning potential' as well as their functional structures. Indeed, he states that "the system takes priority". However, the fact that IFG is written "specifically for those who are studying grammar for text analysis purposes" ((1994:x) has led him to focus on representations of texts that display the functional structure rather than the more abstract systemic features, one reason being that it is easier to understand such analyses. The answer to Question la is therefore that Halliday, like me, believes that in a SF model of language a text should, in principle, be analysed in terms of both its meaning potential and its structure — this being the model summarised in Figure 4 of Section 3.2 of Chapter 3 (or perhaps for Halliday the topological variant in Figure 5 in Section 4.7 of Chapter 4, with its unsatisfactory representation of 'instantiation' and 'realisation').

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, for Halliday, 'meaning potential' is language as system, whereas as text is language as instance.

[2] As previously pointed out, Halliday presented function structures in IFG, not because they are easier to understand, but because they are more directly related to text analysis (Halliday 1994: x, xxvii).

[3] This is misleading, because it misrepresents Fawcett's understanding as Halliday's. For Halliday, 'meaning potential' is language as system, not language as text.

[4] This is misleading, because it misrepresents the architecture of Fawcett's model (Figure 4) as the architecture of Halliday's theory. For the original critique of Figure 4, see here.

[5] This is misleading, because it misrepresents Fawcett's reworking of his own model (Figure 5) as a possible architecture of Halliday's theory. Moreover, as previously demonstrated, Figure 5 is not a topological variant of Figure 4, and the architecture of both models, Figures 4 and 5, is invalidated by Fawcett's own misunderstandings of instantiation and realisation. For the original critique of Figure 5, see here.