The Place Of Systemic Features In The Cardiff Grammar

Fawcett (2010: 148, 149):

This view of the nature of language is no less 'systemic' and no less 'functional' than that expressed in Halliday's "Systemic theory" and in IFG, because the sentence is still derived from system networks of choices between meanings, and the representation still shows the contribution to the integrated structure of the various strands of meaning for which the system networks provide. There is some conflation of individual elements (as opposed to structures), as Figure 10 shows, but the emphasis is now squarely on the representation of 'meaning' through the use of the features from the networks that model the 'meaning potential' of the language. And this is surely as it should be in a systemic functional representation, if Halliday is right that, in this theory, "the system takes priority" (Halliday 1993:4505). Moreover, the Cardiff representation adds an important element that is missing from the IFG representation, namely the representation of the integrated structure.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in this entire publication, Fawcett does not provide either (a) the system networks from which his semantic features are drawn, or (b) the realisation statements that specify how his structural elements at the level of form are derived from systemic choices at the level of meaning.

[2] As previously observed, Fawcett's semantic analysis (Figure 10) ignores the axial distinction of paradigm versus syntagm by representing paradigmatic features as syntagmatic ('strands of meaning'), which also has the further theoretically inconsistent consequence of assigning features of the entire clause to individual elements of clause structure.

[3] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the notion that the three metafunctional structures of the clause can be integrated as a single function structure is nonsensical. This is because, as previously explained, a structure is defined as the relations between elements, and the relations between elements of a clause differ according to metafunction. In SFL Theory, the three metafunctional clause structures are integrated as the formal syntagm of group/phrase units that realise them.