Misrepresenting Halliday On 'Sentence'

Fawcett (2010: 191-2, 192n):

Halliday's formalisation of the concept of the 'rank scale' is, as with a number of his concepts, the formalisation of concepts that are found in traditional grammar. We therefore find broad equivalences to his proposals in works such as Quirk et al (1985), with the presentation of the concept that the units of the sentence (but often with reservations) clause, group or phrase, word and morpheme are typically related to each other in a 'constituency' relationship. Interestingly, however, Halliday later changed his view on the status of the "sentence", redefining it as a "clause complex", and limiting the use of the term "sentence" to clause complexes that occur in writing. Since his framework also allows for "group complexes" (and also, though very much less frequently, for "complexes" of "words" and "morphemes"), it is clear that a "sentence" is not a unit in the same sense that a clause or group is. For Halliday, then, the "sentence" is simply another type of "unit complex". The significance of this change of position is that it makes the clause the highest unit of English syntax.²

² It should be noted that, while the concept that a sentence is a "clause complex" underlies all of Halliday's analyses of texts in IFG, he nonetheless still includes "sentence" in the list of units in his discussion in Chapter 1 (1994:23) of the theoretical concepts use in IFG — while warning that this will be "re-interpreted" later in the book.

Blogger Comments:

This is misleading. Halliday (1994: 23) explicitly uses the term 'sentence' as a way of connecting his functional grammar to 'folk linguistic theory' and 'traditional school grammar' for the benefit of the reader who is unfamiliar with his model:

Later, rather than "change his position", Halliday (1994: 216) explains why the term 'clause complex' is theoretically preferable to the term 'sentence' :

In later editions of IFG (2004, 2014), 'sentence' is explicitly listed as a unit of written expression (graphology); Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 21):