Misrepresenting Halliday On Conflation

 Fawcett (2010: 278-9):

Moreover, in his writings from the late 1960s onwards the emphasis is always placed on the concept that an element of a clause such as 'Subject' is not a single element but a conflation of three "functions" — and so the expression in structure of the concept that language simultaneously realises several different types of meaning.

However, as we saw in Chapter 7, Halliday immediately extended the concept of the conflation of single coterminous elements to the much more ambitious concept that a whole unit such as the clause can be represented as a series of simultaneous but different structures. This implied in turn that the various structures, each roughly the length of a clause and each with 'elements' that were not coterminous with the elements in the other structures of the same clause, were to be unified, by the application of a final 'structure conflation' rule of an unspecified type, into a single, integrated structure. But the concept that five or more different clause-length structures can be 'integrated' is, as we have seen, theoretically untenable (except in the trivial sense that involves dismembering the structures into their 'lowest common denominators').

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue. Firstly, 'Subject' is not an element of a clause, but of the interpersonal structure of a clause. Secondly, 'Subject' is a single element of the interpersonal structure of a clause. Thirdly, 'Subject' is not a conflation of three functions; 'Subject' is one of the three functions that are conflated (e.g. Subject/Theme/Behaver).

[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue. 'Subject' is the realisation of just one type of meaning, interpersonal, not several types of meaning.

[3] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The SFL notion that clause structures vary by metafunction is not an extension of the concept of conflation, if only because conflation requires the prior distinction of metafunctional structures whose elements can be conflated. Importantly, unknown to Fawcett, in SFL Theory, structures can not be conflated, because a structure is the relation between elements. See the posts examining Chapter 7 here.

[4] This is misleading, because it is untrue. The SFL model, which Fawcett demonstrably does not understand, does not imply a structure conflation rule, if only because structures are not conflated in SFL Theory.

[5] This is misleading, because it is untrue. Revealingly, here Fawcett switches terminology from 'conflation' to 'integration', which suggests he is, in fact, aware of the SFL principle that he is choosing not to mention. In SFL Theory, the three metafunctional structures of the clause are integrated in the syntagm of its constituents (groups ± phrases). Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 74):

The clause, as we said, is the mainspring of grammatical energy; it is the unit where meanings of different kinds, experiential, interpersonal and textual, are integrated into a single syntagm.

[6] This is misleading, because it is untrue. In SFL Theory, there are three clause structures: textual, interpersonal and experiential. Fawcett's miscalculation arises from misconstruing information structure as clause structure, and from counting the textual and interpersonal structures twice, as previously explained.