The 'Clause' In The Cardiff Grammar

Fawcett (2010: 200):

The unit of the 'clause' is almost certainly central in every human language. It is the syntactic unit that corresponds to the semantic unit of the situation — and so typically, as we shall shortly see, to the unit of event in the belief system. A clause has the syntax potential that it does because of the particularly rich and complex array of meanings that we wish to express to each other about 'events'. However, a clause occasionally refers to an object that is identified by its role in an event, as in what I ate; see Section 10.2.9 below.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in Fawcett's model, as represented in Figure 12 (p210 and below), there is only ideational meaning — no interpersonal or textual meaning — and these meanings of language are additionally reconstrued as meanings outside language, in a belief system: situation as event, and thing as object.

A single metafunction model and a higher level belief system are both inconsistent with SFL Theory. On the latter point, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 3) write:

We contend that the conception of 'knowledge' as something that exists independently of language, and may then be coded or made manifest in language, is illusory.

[2] To be clear, the clause is not limited to expressing ideational meaning, and its semogenic potential lies in being the rank unit onto which all metafunctions can be mapped structurally. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 10):

The clause is the central processing unit in the lexicogrammar – in the specific sense that it is in the clause that meanings of different kinds are mapped into an integrated grammatical structure.