Fawcett's 'Alternative Way Of Representing The Multifunctional Nature Of Language'

Fawcett (2010: 145-6):

In Section 7.8 we shall meet an alternative way of representing the multifunctional nature of language in diagram form. It is an exploration of a method suggested by Halliday himself in the passages cited in Section 7.3, and it has the advantage that it suffers from none of the problems that we have encountered in our examination of the type of representations used in IFG — except that there is no published account of it with the breadth of coverage of IFG and Matthiessen (1995) — not as yet, that is.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the "alternative way of representing the multifunctional nature of language in diagram form" is Fawcett's Figure 10 (p148):

[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue.  The cited passages (p118) are:

This book [...] presents the structures which are the 'output' of the networks — which collectively realise the sets of features that can be chosen. (Halliday 1994:xxvii) 

all the structural analyses could be reinterpreted in terms of the features selected. (Halliday 1994:xxvii) 

in systemic theory the system takes priority; the most abstract representation [...] is in paradigmatic terms. [...] Syntagmatic organisation is interpreted as the 'realisation' of paradigmatic features, the 'meaning potential'. (Halliday 1993:4505)

As these quotes demonstrate, Halliday is concerned with identifying system as the most abstract representation, and structure as its lower level realisation. Halliday does not suggest confusing syntagmatic structures of the grammatical stratum with paradigmatic features of the semantic stratum.

[3] This is misleading. On the one hand, as previously demonstrated, the "problems that we have encountered" are problems with Fawcett's understanding of SFL Theory, specifically its model of function structure and formal constituency. On the other hand, there are multiple theoretical inconsistencies with Fawcett's model, such as

• confusing function labels (Subject/Agent, Operator, Complement/Affected, Adjunct) with class labels (Main verb),
• assigning clause features to individual elements of structure rather than to the clause itself, 
• confusing systemic features (repeated past, social action, periodic frequency, positive, unassessed) with structural elements (overt agent, overt affected, information giver, subject theme, unmarked new), and
• misrepresenting information as a clause system.

Moreover, Fawcett does not provide any systems to justify his features, and the analysis itself is inconsistent with SFL Theory. For example,

• the Medium (we) is misconstrued as Agent,
• the Range (Mrs S) is misconstrued as Affected (Medium).