The Rank Scale As An Old Habit Of Thought

Fawcett (2010: 236):

The saying "Old habits die hard" holds for our habits of thought as linguists as well as for other sorts of habit, and the habit of thinking in terms of a 'rank scale' has been with most systemic functional linguists for all of their working lives. It seems to me that what Halliday did in setting up Scale and Category Grammar in 1961 and what other did in accepting it was to take over what was already to a large extent a tacit assumption in traditional grammar, and to formalise it as part of the new theory — just as he did with a number of other traditional concepts.  The concept of a 'rank scale of units' is therefore one which we may find particularly hard to hard to let go of. Indeed I allowed vestiges of it to remain in my own theory long after it had stopped playing any practical role in it (as I admitted in Chapter 8). So the general concept that there is indeed some sort of 'rank scale' — even if it is not exactly as Halliday describes it — is one that has been a background assumption about language for many linguists for most of the last half century — and probably longer.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Fawcett is here suggesting that linguists use the rank scale merely out of habit, rather than from understanding its place in SFL theory and its explanatory potential.

[2] This is potentially misleading. In his now superseded theory, Scale & Category Grammar, Halliday (1961) formalised the relation between grammatical units and constituency as a rank scale. In his successor theory, Systemic Functional Grammar, Halliday (1985: 22-30) distinguished two models of constituency: immediate constituent analysis (maximal bracketing) and ranked constituent analysis (minimal bracketing), associating the former with class labelling, and the latter with function labelling.

[3] As previously demonstrated, unknown to Fawcett, his Cardiff Grammar does assume a rank scale, though one in which form (unit) is confused with function (element).

[4] This is a serious epistemological misunderstanding. The question is not whether there is a rank scale — whether a rank scale "exists" — but whether a rank scale has sufficient explanatory potential to warrant its inclusion in theory.