Fawcett's Claim That His Theory Does Not Use The Concept 'Unit'

Fawcett (2010: 188):

One reason for approaching the 'new' theory in the way that we now are is that it establishes from the start that there is a major change in this basic aspect of the theory. The precise nature of the concept that replaces the 'rank scale of units' will become clearer in the next section, and clearer still in Section 11.2 of Chapter 11. We shall find that the framework of syntax proposed here retains only a few incidental traces of the concept of 'rank'. There is consequently no role in the present theory for the concept of 'unit' in Halliday's original sense of 'unit on the rank scale'.

The major critical evaluation of the concept of the 'rank scale' will come in Section 11.1 of Chapter 11, under the more general heading of "constituency", and Appendix 4 provides some further notes on 'the rank scale debate'.

Even though the concept of 'unit' is not used here, a concept that was originally derived from it plays a central role in all modern SF grammars. This is class of unit, which we shall come to in Section 10.2. However, while all systemic functional grammars use the concept of 'class of unit', there is an important difference between Halliday's criteria for defining a class of unit and the criteria used by most other systemic functional grammarians who have written on the subject, as we shall see.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Fawcett's claim is that 'unit' plays no part in his theory, but that 'class of unit' does. Since 'class of unit' presupposes 'unit', just as 'class of bird' presupposes 'bird', this is nonsensical. The reason why Fawcett would jettison 'unit' as a theoretical concept is that he sees it as inextricably bound to the notion of a rank scale, and he rejects the notion of a rank scale because it is the grammatical rank scale that models syntax (and morphology) in SFL Theory, and which, therefore, makes his own model redundant.

[2] To be clear, as previously explained, a functional grammar relates the class of a unit to the function it generally realises; that is, classes are viewed 'from above'. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 76):

The class of an item indicates in a general way its potential range of grammatical functions. Hence words can be assigned to classes in a dictionary, as part of their decontextualised definition. But the class label does not show what part the item is playing in any actual structure. For that we have to indicate its function. The functional categories provide an interpretation of grammatical structure in terms of the overall meaning potential of the language. For example, see Figure 2.9.

As Fawcett has previously demonstrated, he defines 'class of unit' 'from below' — that is: not in terms of the function it realises — and it will therefore be interesting to examine the validity of the views of "most other systemic functional grammarians who have written on the subject" when Fawcett eventually relates them. Of course, any claim that a proposition is valid because a majority of people support it is an instance of the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum.