Fawcett's Third Difficult Question For The Cardiff Grammar

Fawcett (2010: 146-7):

The third question was "In the representation at the level of form, is the conflation that occurs between the realisations of the various strands of meaning a conflation of whole structures or of individual elements?" Here the answer will be clear from the previous sections, and it is that the conflations occur between specific coterminous elements, as complex nodes in the single integrated syntactic representation.

Blogger Comments:

Reminder of the Cardiff Grammar representation (Figure 10, p148):

[1] To be clear, Fawcett's third "difficult" question for the Cardiff Grammar is merely an invitation for him to describe one aspect of it. It is not a question that seeks a justification of the theorising itself.

[2] To be clear, the rhetorical significance of this question is that Fawcett has previously misrepresented Halliday's model as involving structure conflation, and argued that structure conflation is problematic. Fawcett's model therefore does not suffer from the problems he wrongly attributes to Halliday's model.

[3] To be clear, Fawcett's answer is merely a bare assertion, with no supporting argumentation — either here or in the previous sections. For example, having argued against representing metafunctional meanings at the level of form, he provides no explanation as to why the two conflations in Figure 10 are conflations of interpersonal elements with experiential elements: Subject with Agent, and Complement with Affected (Medium) — leaving aside the fact that, in terms of SFL Theory, Subject actually conflates with Medium, and Complement with Range.