Misrepresenting Halliday (1994) On Structure

Fawcett (2010: 140):

In a table on p. 36 of IFG, for example, one column lists words ('constituency', 'prosodic', etc) that describe the "favoured type of structure" [my emphasis]. And in "Systemic theory" (1993:4506) his wording is that "the different metafunctions [...] tend to be realised by different structural resources" [my emphasis]. In other words, from the theoretical viewpoint it can be said that he is simply pointing out interesting tendencies in the structural patterns in which each type of meaning gets realised. This falls a long way short of saying that each strand of meaning must obligatorily be realised in that type of structure. Indeed, the emphasis in his general descriptions is on the fact that, in his words, "constituent structure is the prototype to which all three [in fact four] metafunctions can be referred" (1994:35), and the box diagram representations that he provides in IFG are, of course, simply one way of representing the 'flat tree' type of constituency. But the fact remains, as I pointed out in the last subsection, that Halliday gives 'function' labels to many of the 'long boxes' in his diagrams that it would be more accurate to leave unlabelled.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because Fawcett misrepresents his source. Halliday (1994: 36) describes the favoured structure type of the experiential metafunction as segmental, not constituency:

That is, constituency is the principle on which segmental structure is based. The distinction is very important from a theoretical point of view, because constituency is modelled in SFL as a rank scale of forms, whereas segmental structure is a configuration of functions.

[2] This is deliberately misleading, because Fawcett omits from the quote the words that contradict his claim: Halliday's glossing of 'constituent structure' as the rank scale. Halliday (1994: 35):

[3] Here Fawcett once again confuses the notion of 'flat tree constituency', the 'minimal bracketing' approach to constituency on which the rank scale is based, with syntagmatic structures at one of those ranks, the clause. See Halliday (1994: 20-8).

[4] This "fact" is misleading, since it is the opposite of true. As previously explained, the functions in question, Rheme, Residue and Given are negatively defined as 'not Theme', 'not Mood' and 'not New', and it makes no difference in accuracy whether these functions are represented as a positive (+ label) or a negative (– label).