Fawcett's Tribute To Halliday (1961)

Fawcett (2010: 187):

The concept of 'unit', in the sense defined in Halliday's "Categories", is inextricably bound up with the concept of 'rank' (as we saw in Section 2.3 of Chapter 2). In other words, there can be no concept of 'unit', in the "Categories" sense of the term, without the concept of a 'scale' of units that relates such units to each other in terms of their 'rank' on that scale — together with the accompanying set of 'rank shift' restrictions as to what 'rank' of unit may occur as an element of what other 'rank' of unit. Thus the concepts of 'unit' and 'rank' are inextricably intertwined in Halliday's theory of language, and together they make up the composite notion of the 'rank scale' that provides the backbone of Scale and Category (S&C) Grammar.

It is a tribute to the continuing influence of Halliday's founding paper "Categories of the theory of grammar" (1961/76) that the most helpful first step in explaining the new theory of syntax to be set out here to state the two basic Hallidayan concepts that it does not have. These are the precisely two concepts of 'unit' and 'rank'.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in both of Halliday's theories, Scale & Category Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar, the term 'unit' refers to a unit of form — on the grammatical stratum: the clause, phrase, group, word and morpheme — and these are organised in terms of composition, such that a clause consists of one or more groups and phrases, which consist of one or more words, which consist of one or more morphemes. It is this compositional arrangement that constitutes the rank scale. Thus it is the rank scale that models what other theories model as syntax and morphology, and which, therefore, makes Fawcett's "Systemic Functional" syntax redundant.

[2] To be clear, here Fawcett claims that his rejection of Halliday's 'unit' and 'rank' is a tribute to the continuing influence of Halliday's theory. The question as to whether 'unit' and 'rank' are genuinely absent from Fawcett's theory will be explored in future posts.