Misrepresenting Halliday (1994) On The Nominal Group

Fawcett (2010: 207):

As we saw in Section 10.2.5, Halliday treats the type of unit that has an adjective as its 'pivotal element' as a 'nominal group' — despite the fact that its internal structure is clearly similar to that of his 'adverbial group'. Thus Halliday describes the group very lucky as a nominal group that has the adjective lucky as its "head" — while also stating that such units are "sometimes referred to distinctively as adjectival groups" (1994:194). However, a few pages later in IFG he also recognises that examples such as more easily (and so presumably very cleverly too) are what he terms "adverbial groups", saying that they have a "modifier-head" structure. He recognises that this class of unit may have the "postmodification" of "comparison" (1994:210) — and yet he fails to mention that a group with an adjective at its "head" may also have this type of "postmodification" — and indeed that both types of "quality group" may also have other elements (a finisher and one or two scopes) also, as Appendix B shows. This area of IFG appears, frankly, to be internally inconsistent and to require considerably more work. Perhaps the next edition of IFG will draw on the major contribution within SFL to this area by Tucker (1997 and 1998).

See Appendix B, Fawcett (in press) and especially Tucker (1998) for a fuller picture of the quality group.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is not misleading, because it is true.

[2] This is very misleading indeed, and clearly, deliberately so, because Fawcett has previously acknowledged that Halliday does not classify units on the basis of their internal structure, but on the function they serve in the structure of the unit above on the rank scale.

[3] To be clear, this is merely an acknowledgement of the alternative view from which Fawcett's model derives.

[4] This is misleading, because it is the opposite of what is true. Halliday (1994) explains nominal group postmodification (pp192-3), and then Epithet as Head of the nominal group on the following page (p194). And for those unable to join the dots, he provides a specific example (p210):

[5] This is misleading. To be clear, here Fawcett is claiming that Halliday is inconsistent in his own modelling because he fails to mention Fawcett's model, the quality group, which, as previously demonstrated, is inconsistent with Halliday's model.

[6] This is misleading, because it is the opposite of what is true. As demonstrated above, Fawcett's conclusion is made on the basis of the three misleading claims identified above in [2], [4] and [5].

[7] To be clear, the latest edition of IFG, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 376) acknowledges Tucker's work, with clues on how to re-interpret it in a manner that is consistent with SFL Theory:

Tucker (1998) provides a detailed, lexicogrammatical and semantic description of adjectives in English, with system networks showing the potential for construing qualities.

[8] To be clear, Fawcett (in press) is still unpublished, 21 years after the first edition of this work, and the fuller picture of the quality group in Appendix B (p307) is given as: 

It can be seen that Fawcett's quality group includes not only conjunctions ('&') and clause-rank interpersonal Adjuncts (indeed), but punctuation marks ('e') from the stratum of graphology. Moreover, in presenting the Numerative fiftieth as the apex ('a') of a quality group, it misconstrues it as representing a quality at the level of meaning.