Theoretical Problems With Fawcett's Model Of Clause Structure

 Fawcett (2010: 200-1):

The most frequent elements of the English clause are the Subject, Operator and Main Verb, with one or more Complements and potentially many Adjuncts, selected from over forty functionally differentiated types. Typically, a Participant Role (such as Agent, Affected, Carrier or Attribute) is conflated with the Subject or Complement. Auxiliary Verbs and Main Verb Extensions also occur frequently, as do the Binders and Linkers that relate the clause out to another unit. See Appendix B and Fawcett (in press) for a fuller picture, including six other elements.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, on Fawcett's model, Figure 4 (p36), structure is located at the level of form:

Inconsistent with this, Fawcett's elements of structure are a confusion of form (Main Verb) and function (Subject, Operator, Complement, Adjunct). In SFL Theory, these functions are interpersonal functions.

[2] To be clear, Fawcett locates Halliday's systems of the clause at his level of meaning. In such a formulation, the participant rôles of Agent, Affected, Carrier, Attribute etc. (meaning) and the structural elements Subject and Complement (form) are located at different levels of symbolic abstraction. On this model, therefore, participant rôles are not conflated with Subject and Complement, but are realised by them, since realisation is the relation between levels of symbolic abstraction. That is, what Fawcett actually proposes is that experiential meanings are realised by elements of syntactic structure that correspond to interpersonal wordings in SFL Theory.