Misrepresenting Halliday On 'Syntax'

Fawcett (2010: 159):

As its dates of its first publication indicate, the three-part paper by myself that is to be reviewed here first appeared about fifteen years after "Categories", and it was later republished informally in a lightly revised edition in 1981. By the mid-1970s the new set of concepts associated with Systemic Functional Grammar (described in Chapter 4) were beginning to make themselves felt, but the original concepts presented in "Categories" were still widely accepted among systemic functional linguists (as we were beginning to call ourselves) as fully relevant to the description of the level of syntax or "grammar", as Halliday terms it. I would claim that "Some proposals" reflects the position of syntax in the model much as Halliday presents it in Halliday (1970/76) and (1977/78). 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, "Categories" (Halliday 1961) outlines Halliday's first theory, Scale and Category Grammar, which differs from Systemic Functional Grammar in significant ways, including the absence of metafunctions, and a different model of stratification, as previously explained.

[2] To be clear, the model of Systemic Functional Grammar in Halliday (1970/76, 1977/78) is an earlier superseded model, as previously explained.

[3] This very misleading, because, even in his first theory, Halliday is explicit that syntax is not the same as grammar, and that it can seen as the complement of morphology, and modelled as a rank scale. Halliday (2002 [1961]: 51):

The distinction does, however, need a name, and this seems the best use for the terms “syntax” and “morphology”. Traditionally these terms have usually referred to “grammar above the word” (syntax) and “grammar below the word” (morphology); but this distinction has no theoretical status. It has a place in the description of certain languages, “inflexional” languages which tend to display one kind of grammatical relation above the word (“free” items predominating) and another below the word (“bound” items predominating). But it seems worthwhile making use of “syntax” and “morphology” in the theory, to refer to direction on the rank scale. “Syntax” is then the downward relation, “morphology” the upward one; and both go all the way.