The Fact On Which Fawcett's Main Argument Depends

Fawcett (2010: 129):

What, then is the position on this matter of those who have sought to implement Halliday's model? The fact is that all of the theoretical-generative publications in the framework of the Sydney Grammar show that no systemic functional grammarian has even considered building a generative grammar that works on the principle of 'structure conflation' [author's bolding]. The importance of this fact for the main argument that is made in this book cannot be overstated, because it shows that the multiple structure representations used in IFG have no real position in the theory. (It is of course still possible that they may have some other value — a topic to which we shall return shortly.)

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the reason why "no systemic functional grammarian has even considered building a generative grammar that works on the principle of 'structure conflation' " is that structure conflation is not a principle of the theory, as previously explained.

[2] To be clear, Fawcett rests the main argument of this publication on a misunderstanding he takes to be a fact.

[3] To be clear, this is an invalid conclusion inferred from a false premiss.  The false premiss is the notion that structure conflation is a principle of SFL Theory. The conclusion is invalid because the fact that linguists have not considered building such a generative grammar does not logically entail that metafunctional clause structures have no real position in the theory. What linguists choose to build, or not, does not invalidate any dimension of a theory. In terms of reasoning, this is simply a non sequitur.