Misjudging Halliday And Misrepresenting The Orientation Of SFL

Fawcett (2010: 8-9):

What we need, clearly, is a recent statement by Halliday in which he summarises his current theory of language, in the way that "Categories" did for Scale and Category Grammar. Fortunately, his contribution on "Systemic Theory" to the Encyclopaedia of Languages and Linguistics (Asher 1993) goes a long way to providing this, and it can be usefully supplemented by his "On grammar and grammatics" (1996). However, the orientation of "Systemic theory" is 'theoretical-generative' rather than 'text-descriptive' … and the perhaps surprising result is that it has rather little to say about the syntactic structure of texts. We shall therefore also need to make use of Halliday's major recent descriptive work, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, and this provides, as we shall see, a significantly different picture of language. I shall also draw occasionally on Matthiessen (1995), a work that complements IFG invaluably by providing the system networks that are largely missing from that work, and which also sometimes provide a hint of an interestingly different perspective on the Sydney Grammar. 

However, for reasons which will be explained at the relevant points, the fact is that Halliday has nowhere made a comprehensive statement as to the nature of syntax in a modern SF grammar that is comparable in its scope with that in "Categories" — and nor has Matthiessen or any other exponent of the Sydney Grammar. One would expect that the enormous changes made to the model as it was developed from the Scale and Category Grammar of the 1960s into the Systemic Functional Grammar of the 1990s would have led to changes in the representation of structure at the level of form. And indeed they have, as Chapter 7 will clearly demonstrate. But Halliday has provided only the most general of justifications for the immense changes that he has made in the way that formal structure is represented in his model (e.g., in Chapters 1 and 2 of IFG).  The only reasonably full statement by a systemic functional grammarian whose purpose is to reflect the major changes in the theory referred to above has been that of Fawcett (1974-6/81) — this being probably best known through the summary provided in Butler (1985:94-102).

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Fawcett provides four negative judgements criticising Halliday's behaviour, juxtaposed with a positive judgement admiring his own behaviour:

Token	Appraised	Appraisal
		Polarity	Attitude
What we need, clearly, is a recent statement by Halliday in which he summarises his current theory of language	Halliday	negative	judgement: normality
and the perhaps surprising result is that it has rather little to say about the syntactic structure of texts	Halliday	negative	judgement: normality
the fact is that Halliday has nowhere made a comprehensive statement as to the nature of syntax in a modern SF grammar	Halliday	negative	judgement: normality
But Halliday has provided only the most general of justifications for the immense changes that he has made in the way that formal structure is represented in his model	Halliday	negative	judgement: normality
The only reasonably full statement by a systemic functional grammarian whose purpose is to reflect the major changes in the theory referred to above has been that of Fawcett (1974-6/81)	Fawcett	positive	judgement: normality

However, since the criticisms are entirely unjustified, this is very misleading. As previously pointed out, Halliday has

• been explicit about the place of formal syntagms in systemic functional grammar, 
• explained why a functional grammar views grammar 'from above', and
• explained why the metafunctions are included in the model of grammatical structure.

[2] This misrepresents the orientation of SFL.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 56, 57):

Systemic functional theory also differs from many other functional theories in its emphasis on comprehensive, text-based descriptions — descriptions that can be used in text analysis; …

The description of English grammar presented here is not designed as a reference grammar. However, unlike the recent reference grammars — or all previous ones for that matter, this description has been designed as one that can be used in text analysis — a task that imposes quite stringent demands on the description.