Fawcett (2010: 10):
Interestingly, however, neither Halliday nor any of his close colleagues has made a detailed statement about a modern theory of SF syntax that can be compared with that in "Categories". The best summary of the "basic concepts" of the theory as Halliday sees them today is in his paper "Systemic theory" (1993), and this is summarised in Chapter 5. A second obvious source of insights is the major description of English that he provides in IFG, and this is examined in Chapter 7. Surprisingly, there are considerable differences between the theoretical concepts presented in these two works by Halliday, both of which were published in the early 1990s, and this clearly requires comment and explanation.
Blogger Comments:
[1] This is yet another negative appraisal (judgement) that is entirely without foundation. Halliday (1961) set out the categories and dimensions of a theory of language, not syntax, and developed a theory from that framework. In the course of developing what became known as Systemic Functional Grammar, syntax — the syntagmatic arrangement of form — was backgrounded in favour of function, in line with the requirements of a functional, rather than formal, theory. Form is modelled in SFG as a rank scale of clause, phrase/group, word and morpheme, and a function structure at a higher rank is realised by a syntagm of forms at the rank below. This was all set out in the first edition of IFG (Halliday 1985).
[2] This is manifestly untrue, and will be demonstrated to be so in the critique of Chapter 7.
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