Misconstruing Hypotaxis As Embedding

 Fawcett (2010: 251):

Filling may introduce a single additional unit to the structure, or it may introduce two or more co-ordinated units. (For co-ordination see Section 11.8.2). For example, an Adjunct that expresses 'Time Position' may be filled by a nominal group such as the day before yesterday, a prepositional group such as on Friday, a quality group such as quite recently, or a clause such as when I was last in London. (In the last case it introduces a clause that is embedded in another clause; see Section 11.8.3 for 'embedding'.) Alternatively, an element may be filled by two co-ordinated units, as in (I lost it) either last Monday or last Tuesday. …

In the Cardiff Grammar, the realisation operation that introduces this relationship of filling to a structure is "Insert a unit to fill Element X". The most surprising fact about the Sydney Grammar's list of realisation operations, as stated in their theoretical-generative publications, is the lack of any equivalent to this crucial operation (as discussed in Section 9.2.3 of Chapter 9).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To translate this into SFL Theory: a functional element of one rank may be realised by either a unit or a complex of units of the rank below. However, only in SFL theory, the complex may be either paratactic ("co-ordinated") or hypotactic.

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, quite recently is an adverbial group.

[3] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the clause when I was last in London can be either rankshifted (embedded) or ranking:

Fawcett's Cardiff Grammar treats both of the above instance types as embedded, and so can not distinguish between them. Moreover, Fawcett's Cardiff Grammar treats such clauses as embedded (rankshifted) in cases of hypotaxis, but as co-ordinated (ranking) in cases of parataxis. That is, from the perspective of SFL Theory, Fawcett's model involves both reduced explanatory potential and theoretical inconsistency.

[4] This is misleading, because this fact is not surprising. As explained in the examination of Section 9.2.3 (here), Fawcett's realisation operation is unnecessary in SFL Theory, because a unit (clause, group, word, morpheme) is not "inserted" but selected from the rank scale in a system network.