"The Focus In The Present Book"

Fawcett (2010: 158):

However, the focus in the present book is not on text analysis, but on establishing the concepts that are required in a theory of syntax for SFL. We shall therefore not discuss such representations further, except in so far as they affect the theory of syntax that is required in a modern SFL. Clearly, the focus from now on must be on the nature of such a theory — and this is, of course, the topic of Part 2. 

Up to this point, Part 1 has been principally concerned with establishing the antecedents to a modern theory of SF syntax in terms of the Sydney Grammar, principally through the writings of Halliday himself. However, there is a third set of post-"Categories" concepts that has had some influence on a number of current descriptions of systemic syntax, and it is this body of work that is the direct antecedent of the framework of concepts to be set out in Part 2. It is to this work that we turn in Chapter 8.

Its genesis is significantly different from that of either "Systemic theory" or IFG, in that it was formulated as a theory of syntax in the 1970s as an explicit response to Halliday's still recent proposal that the system networks should regarded as modelling the meaning potential of a language. It is not impossible that Halliday might have produced a theory of syntax that would have been something like the one to be considered in the next chapter, if in the 1970s he had chosen to develop SFL in the way indicated in Sections 4.3 and 4.9 of Chapter 4, i.e., with the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME and so on treated as explicitly modelling semantics.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as Halliday (1985 & 1994: xiv) pointed out, a model in which syntax is opposed to semantics, like Fawcett's, is inconsistent with the theoretical assumptions and method of inquiry of SFL Theory:

[2] As previously pointed out, Halliday's 'meaning potential' refers to language as system, as opposed to instance (text). Fawcett repeatedly misunderstands the term as referring just to the semantic stratum.