Misrepresenting Halliday (1985)

Fawcett (2010: 25):

It was only with the eventual publication of the first edition of IFG in 1985 that large numbers of examples of analyses in SF terms became generally available. By then, however, Halliday had introduced a completely different type of representation, as we shall see in Chapter 7. 

Even so, IFG has the same lack of integrated representations of structure as "Categories", i.e., representations that shows [sic] how the analysis of, let us say, a nominal group fits into the analysis of a clause.

Blogger Comments:

This negative appraisal is unwarranted and misleading.  Halliday (1985) provides a grammatical rank scale which sets out explicitly how the analysis of each rank relates to the analysis of another.

For example, in terms of constituency, a higher rank unit, such as clause, consists of one or more units of the rank below, group/phrase.

In terms of levels of symbolic abstraction, each element of the function structure of a higher rank unit, such as the Senser of a clause, is congruently realised by a unit of the rank below, in this case, by a nominal group.

The elements of nominal group structure function within the nominal group, not the clause, whereas the nominal group, as a whole, serves a function within the clause.

Misrepresenting Halliday (1961)

Fawcett (2010: 24):

Reading "Categories" is demanding work, and the reader's task is not eased by the fact that only rarely does Halliday illustrate the abstract concepts that he is presenting with examples. Ironically, by far the fullest exemplification of the concepts comes in the 'grammar' of meals (viewed as another social construct) that is presented in Section 9! There are occasional indications as to what the elements of the units of the clause in English would be like (e.g., in Section 4.3), but there is no attempt to provide a full set of descriptive categories for any aspect of the grammar of English or any other language, other than the list of units on the 'rank scale' of English. For example, there is no indication of what Halliday considered at the time to be the full set of classes of group.  

Perhaps the most surprising omission is that there is no visual representation of the full structure of a clause-length text that has been analysed in terms of the categories proposed in this key paper. One direct result of this is that there is no indication as to how the various units in a the description of a clause are to be related to each other in an integrated representation of structure.

Blogger Comments:

This series of negative judgements, complaining of the absence of structural representations in Halliday (1961), is misleading because it studiously ignores the explicitly stated purpose of 'Categories of the theory of grammar'.  Halliday (2002 [1961]: 37-8):

My purpose in writing this paper is to suggest what seem to me to be the fundamental categories of that part of General Linguistic theory which is concerned with how language works at the level of grammar, with brief reference to the relations between grammar and lexis and between grammar and phonology. … 

No excuse is needed, I think, for a discussion of General Linguistic theory. While what has made linguistics fashionable has been, as with other subjects, the discovery that it has applications, these applications rest on many years of work by people who were simply seekers after knowledge. It would not help the subject if the success of these applications led us into thinking that the theoretical problems were solved and the basic issues closed.

Misconstruing Functional Grammar As Semantics

Fawcett (2010: 23):

While Halliday continues to use the derived concept of 'secondary structures' in IFG (as we shall see in Section 10.3.4 of Chapter 10), he took the innovatory step in "Categories" of interpreting 'secondary classes' as 'systems' (1961/76:67) — and so of relating the two paradigmatic concepts of 'class' and 'system' on the scale of delicacy. Thus, the elevation of the concept of 'system' to the level of 'meaning' (which we shall discuss in Section 4.3 of Chapter 4) also implies the elevation of the concept of 'class'.

 Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading.  What Fawcett labels 'secondary structures' turn out (in his Chapter 10) to be three distinct phenomena mistaken for one:

• univariate logical versus multivariate experiential structure of the nominal group,
• interpersonal structure of the clause: Mood + Residue versus Subject + Finite + Predicator + Adjunct,
• element of textual structure of the clause: Theme versus textual/interpersonal/experiential subtypes versus further subtypes of each.

The first involves two complementary metafunctional perspectives on the nominal group, the second involves the two layers of the interpersonal structure of the clause, and the third involves the elaboration of subtypes of the Theme of a clause.

[2] This is confused.  Class and system are not related on the scale of delicacy.  The scale of delicacy is a dimension of system.

[3] The term 'elevation' is misleading here, and is the source of the false inference.  In Section 4.3, Fawcett misinterprets Halliday's clause systems of TRANSITIVITY, MOOD and THEME as semantic instead of lexicogrammatical.  This is because Fawcett confuses semantics with a view of the grammar from the perspective of semantics.  Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 49) clarify:

Being a ‘functional grammar’ means that priority is given to the view ‘from above’; that is, grammar is seen as a resource for making meaning — it is a ‘semanticky’ kind of grammar.  But the focus of attention is still on the grammar itself.

Misunderstanding Lexicogrammatical Delicacy

Fawcett (2010: 23n):

7. In creating and interpeting [sic] system networks, the concept of 'dependency' is in fact more fundamental than 'delicacy', as I have shown in Fawcett (1988b). It is quite widely assumed that systems that are realised in lexis are inherently more 'delicate' than systems that are realised in syntax, and that syntactically-realised systems are therefore never dependent on lexically-realised systems. But see Fawcett (1996) for a demonstration that this assumption is wrong in relation to certain classes of lexical verb, and Tucker (1998) for a similar demonstration in relation to certain adjectives and manner adverbs.

Blogger Comments:

[1] In SFL theory, delicacy is a major organising principle of system networks.  It is the dimension from the most general choices to the most specific.  In terms of the fractal types (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999) that feature throughout the theory at various scales, delicacy is the expansion subtype elaboration.

In SFL theory, dependency is the hypotactic relation between units in unit complexes, as between clauses in a clause complex.  The closest relation to 'dependency' in the architecture of system networks is the conditional relation between systems, as specified by the entry conditions to systems.  In terms of the fractal types, condition falls within the expansion subtype enhancement.

[2] In SFL theory, the traditional notion of 'syntax' can be seen in the syntagms of forms that realise grammatical function structures, and lexis is part of a unified lexicogrammar.  Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 198-9):

… we can differentiate both processes and participants into finer and finer subcategories, until we reach a degree of differentiation that is associated with the choice of words (lexical items). Note that it is not (usually) the lexical items themselves that figure as terms of the systems in the network. Rather, the systems are systems of features, and the lexical items come in as the synthetic realisation of particular feature combinations. Thus lexis (vocabulary) is part of a unified lexicogrammar; there is no need to postulate a separate “lexicon” as a pre-existing entity on which the grammar is made to operate.