Misrepresenting Halliday: Syntax

Fawcett (2010: xviii):

We shall find that there are also important alternative positions within Halliday's theory, and — most pertinently — that he gives us no adequate statement of a 'theory of syntax' in either of the two major recent publications in which we might expect to find one: his paper "Systemic theory" (1993) and his widely influential Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985, second edition 1994). Moreover, we shall find that this leads us to draw unexpected conclusions about the theoretical status of the representations of clauses in IFG, and so about what a theory of syntax for SFL should be like.

Blogger Comments:

Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, as the name implies, is a theory of language that gives priority to

• system (paradigmatic axis) over structure (syntagmatic axis), and
• function over form.

In SFL, grammatical form is construed by the rankscale of

• clause
• group/phrase
• word
• morpheme

In SFL, a distinction is made between structure (function) and syntagm (form). In the following clause, the theme, mood and transitivity lines of analysis constitute function structures, varying for metafunction, in contrast to the formal syntagm of prepositional phrase ^ nominal group ^ verbal group ^ nominal group that realises the elements of function structure.

in Butler’s view	the Cardiff model	represents		a substantial improvement [on the Sydney account]
Theme: marked	Rheme
Adjunct	Subject	Finite	Predicator	Complement
Resi-	Mood		-due
Angle: viewpoint	Identified Token	Process: relational		Identifier Value
prepositional phrase	nominal group	verbal group		nominal group

Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 39):

Such a sequence of classes is called a ‘syntagm’. … The significance of such a syntagm is that here it is the realisation of a structure: an organic configuration of elements, which we analyse in functional terms.