It is important to emphasise that the 'ground rules' that guide my work on syntax differ from Halliday's in one important way. This is that the aim is to show only the minimal necessary structure at the level of form, and to provide for the explicit representation of meanings — and so also the representation of the broad types of meaning corresponding to Halliday's 'metafunctions' — at a second level of representation, i.e., at the 'systemic-semantic' level of representation.
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These different "ground rules", in fact, represent the proposal for a significantly different architecture for SFL theory. Where SFL involves system–structure relations (so-called "cycles") on both strata of the content plane, semantics and lexicogrammar, Fawcett's proposal is to have just one system–structure relation for the content plane, with system (paradigmatic axis) as the semantic stratum, and structure (syntagmatic axis) as the lexicogrammatical stratum.
That is, the Cardiff model of grammatical structure depends on a different theoretical architecture. This raises the stakes considerably, since adopting the Cardiff model of syntax, as a better alternative, entails adopting the Cardiff theoretical architecture, as a better alternative, as well as all its ramifications for the rest of the theory.
As already noted, the most immediate disadvantage of this architecture is its inability to model grammatical metaphor systematically — as a junctional construct involving the meanings of both the incongruent and congruent grammatical realisations.
If this significantly different model is to replace 'the standard model', it must be better, and it must be shown to be so.
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