The Concept Of 'System' Has No Rôle In Systemic Functional Syntax

Fawcett (2010: 279-80, 280n):

The fourth "fundamental category" in "Categories" was, of course, the concept of system. It was Halliday's re-interpretation of this term in 1966 as 'choice between meanings' that made it the fundamental concept of a new model of language, and so of a new theory of 'meaning' (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4). It therefore has no role in the present model of syntax.²

² It would be possible to envisage a model with a set of system networks that represented choices at the level of 'pure' form such that these were 'predetermined' by choices made at a higher level of 'semantics'. Hudson's work (e.g., Hudson 1971) is presented as a systemic model of syntax of just this type (with no ambition to model choices between meanings), but this is not the direction in which Halliday has led Systemic Functional Linguistics. I would claim that the fact that the Cardiff Grammar can indeed operate with system networks that are explicitly intended to model choices in meaning and that can be directly realised in syntax at the level of form vindicates Halliday's original hunch in the 1960s that the system networks of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD, THEME etc. should be regarded as modelling choices between meanings.

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[1] To be clear, the concept of system has no rôle in Fawcett's Theory of Systemic Functional Syntax.

[2] To be clear, Fawcett has provided no evidence of this "fact". He has provided no system networks of meaning, and no realisation rules that specify how choices in systems are realised as his structures. Because his structures are not those of SFL Theory, he cannot claim that they realise the SFL systems of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD and THEME.

[3] To be clear, even if this "fact" were demonstrated, it would not vindicate something that is not true (see [4] below). More importantly, such a "fact" would not distinguish a model in which the system-structure relation is modelled axially — paradigm to syntagm — as in SFL Theory, from a model in which it is modelled stratally — meaning to form —  as in the Cardiff Grammar, because, in both models the relation between system and structure is the same: realisation (symbolic abstraction). 

However, this is undermined by the fact that the Cardiff Grammar (Figure 4) misunderstands the axial distinction between paradigm and syntagm as the distinction between potential and instance, as previously explained.

[4] This is misleading, because it misrepresents Halliday's "original hunch" on the theoretical location of these systems. From the first formulation of these systems, they have been located on the stratum of lexicogrammar. However, because SFL Theory models lexicogrammar in terms of the meanings they realise, these systems are interpretations of lexicogrammatical form (the rank scale of constituents) as meaning. As Halliday (1985: xix, xx) explains: