To summarise: the two mutually defining concepts of 'unit' and 'rank' have no explicit role in the theory of SF syntax that is set out here. Moreover, although they are heralded as central concepts in most works that describe the Sydney Grammar, neither Halliday nor Matthiessen make much use of them in practice — either in their theoretical statements or in their descriptions of English (except in their accounts of 'rank shift', where Halliday's preference is now for the term "embedding"). The twin concepts of 'unit' and 'rank' play no part in the operation of the grammar, and the centrality of the concept of 'unit' in "Categories" is replaced by the centrality of the concept of class of unit (as described in Section 10.2 below). The concept of the 'rank scale' is replaced by a statement about the probabilities that a given class of unit fills a given element of the same or another class of unit, as discussed in Section 11.2 of Chapter 11 and as exemplified in Appendix B.
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is misleading, because, as previous posts have demonstrated, Fawcett explicitly ranks his units on a scale from higher to lower.
[2] This is very misleading indeed. In SFL Theory, the rank scale provides the formal units that are modelled in terms of their functions in realising meaning. Paradigmatically, each unit on the grammatical rank scale is the entry condition for the systems that are realised as structures. Syntagmatically, each function structure at a higher rank is realised by a syntagm of forms at the lower rank. For example, a clause structure such as Sayer ^ Process ^ Verbiage ^ Location is realised by the syntagm nominal group ^ verbal group ^ nominal group ^ adverbial group.
[3] To be clear, if there is a class of unit, there is a unit of which there are classes.
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