Fawcett (2010: xviii, xxi):
Indeed, it is one of the most surprising facts about SFL that, after forty years of fairly widespread use in various fields of application, there is no general agreement as to how best to represent the structure of language at the level of form. This book makes clear proposals for a (partly) new theory of syntax, and in particular for the replacement of the method of representing structure that is used in Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar (1994) by a simpler method. Moreover, the new theory of syntax is one that is equally relevant, I shall argue, to a model of language in which Halliday's current representations are retained. …
In what I have said so far, I have been writing as if the theory of syntax to be presented here is an alternative [author's bolding] to Halliday's approach to structure. And this is indeed what it is, in that the method of representing the syntax of a text-sentence to be described here is ultimately an alternative to his 'multiple structure' method rather than a complement to it.
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is neither surprising, nor a fact. In a functional theory of language, structure is labelled in terms of function, not form. Form is accounted for in SFL by the rank scale. The relation between function and form is realisation — the intensive identifying relation of symbolic abstraction. An element of function structure at a higher rank is realised by a class of form at the rank below (except in the case of rank-shift). For example, a Senser, as an element of function structure at the rank of clause, is congruently realised as a nominal group.
[2] The notion of replacing a functional conception of structure with a formal one is inconsistent with the notion of a functional grammar.
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