Misrepresenting A Disadvantage Of The Cardiff Grammar As A 'Great Advantage'

Fawcett (2010: 150n):

One great advantage of a model in which the system network is explicitly semantic is that it often avoids the need to introduce the 'double analysis' of a single 'strand of meaning', which involves what Halliday calls 'grammatical metaphor'. (For an introduction to this set of concepts see Halliday 1994:340-67.) 

Consider the case of Could you read that again? In the Cardiff Grammar this is analysed as directly expressing the meaning of 'request' (a choice in the semantic network for MOOD), but in IFG there is no such feature at this level of analysis and it would be analysed as a 'polar interrogative' — but one which the Addressee is expected to re-interp[r]et as the 'imperative' Read than again\. 

A similar example of "interpersonal metaphor" occurs in IFG (p. 378), where Halliday first analyses you have to be beautiful with it as a 'declarative', and then re-expresses it as be beautiful with it and analyses it as an 'imperative'. In the Cardiff Grammar, it is treated as a direct realisation of an option in the semantic MOOD network (specifically, as a sub-type of 'directive' with the feature 'requirement').

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it misrepresents — in a footnote — a significant disadvantage of the Cardiff Grammar as "one great advantage". In Halliday's model, grammatical metaphor involves making two meanings at once, and this is unaccounted for in a model (Figure 4) whose levels of analysis are merely meaning and form.

[2] To be clear, the wording Could you read that again? could realise either:

• a command: Could you read that again (please)?, or
• a question: Could you read that again (if you had to)?

Fawcett offers no principled way of differentiating the two meanings from the same wording in his analysis.

[3] This is misleading, because it misrepresents how Could you read that again? would be analysed using IFG (Halliday 1994). At 'this level of analysis' — semantics — this instance would be analysed as a command (the SPEECH FUNCTION features 'demand' and 'goods-&-services'), whereas 'polar interrogative' (MOOD) would be the analysis at the level of lexicogrammar. It is the mismatch between meaning and wording that constitutes the grammatical metaphor: a command is congruently realised by imperative mood, whereas interrogative mood is the congruent realisation of a question.

[4] This is misleading, because it underplays the significance of Halliday's analysis, which shows both the metaphorical wording (MOOD (1)) and the congruent wording (MOOD (2)), thereby also demonstrating the systemic agnation of imperatives and modulated declaratives. (Halliday 1994: 378):

[5] To be clear, the Cardiff Grammar analysis merely relabels 'imperative' MOOD as 'directive' and 'modulation' as 'requirement' and provides no explanation as to why such features should be realised as a declarative clause instead of an imperative. (The systems from which these features derive are not provided.)