"What Theoretical Concepts Are Required For The Description Of Syntax In A Modern Systemic Functional Grammar?"

Fawcett (2010: 274):

Let us now look again at the two questions with which we began this book. The first was:

What theoretical concepts are required for the description of syntax in a modern, large-scale systemic functional grammar?"

The short answer is that the concepts we need are specified in Chapters 10 and 11, and summarised in the last sections of those chapters. However, in the next three sections of this chapter I shall provide an integrated summary of the proposed new theory of syntax, and at the same time a comparison between it and the various other frameworks for syntax in SFL that I described in Part 1. The subsidiary question with which we began was:

How far are the founding concepts introduced by Halliday in "Categories" still valid in a modern, large-scale systemic functional grammar?

I shall return to this in Section 12.7 of this chapter.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, as previously noted, on the one hand, SFL Theory is not a description of syntax, for reasons given in Halliday (1985: xiv):

On the other hand, the linguistic phenomena that formal theories model as syntax and morphology are modelled as a rank scale in SFL Theory. This is why Fawcett devotes so much space in his book to misleading the reader by misrepresenting the rank scale, and calling it an "embarrassment" (pp 256, 310) to SFL Theory.

[2] To be clear, here again Fawcett modestly claims that the theoretical concepts that are needed in a modern systemic functional grammar are those that he has devised, despite the fact that

• his model is not modern, since it is based on Scale-&-Category Grammar (Halliday 1961), not Systemic Functional Grammar;
• his model prioritises structure over system; and
• his model prioritises the perspective of form (syntax) over the perspective of function.

Moreover, as this blog demonstrates over and over and over, Fawcett's Cardiff is internally inconsistent, and inconsistent with both the founding assumptions and the architecture of SFL Theory.

[3] To be clear, the term 'large-scale' is redundant here. SFL Theory models language as a whole, varying according to contexts of use.

[4] To be clear, Halliday (1995 [1993]: 272, 273) usefully outlines some what is — and not — common to Scale-&-Category Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar: