Misrepresenting Halliday On Hypotaxis [1]

Fawcett (2010: 27-8):

This leaves just the concept of 'hypotaxis'. Halliday describes 'hypotaxis' as "a chain of dependencies [between units]" (Halliday 1965/81:34). In Halliday's example I'd have come if you'd telephoned before I left, the clause before I left is said to be 'dependent on' if you'd telephoned — but not to be embedded within it and so not to fill one of its elements. And the clause if you'd telephoned is similarly said to be 'dependent on' I'd have come without being embedded in it as an element. This concept of 'dependence without embedding' is shown by the use of letters from the Greek alphabet, i.e., "α β γ" etc. to represent the 'elements' of such structures. … 

In IFG, however (e.g., pp. 375-81) Halliday shows the relationship of 'hypotaxis' as a set of horizontally linked boxes below the text, each labelled "α β γ" etc., exactly as in the 'box diagram' representations of structure in Figure 7 in Chapter 7. In these diagrams the relationship looks like sister constituency, the only remaining expression of 'dependence' being the Greek letters.

Blogger Comments:

Fawcett's argument against hypotaxis here is that Halliday's use box diagrams to label elements in a complex makes the structural relations look the same as constituency.  This is not an argument against hypotaxis, for the simple reason that it confuses the meaning of hypotaxis with the way it is expressed in a diagram.  More importantly, however, it is misleading in two ways, both of which serve Fawcett's own position, as will be explained.

Firstly, in IFG (1994: 223-4), at the beginning of the discussion of parataxis and hypotaxis, Halliday presents two very different diagrams that contrast the dependency structure of a clause complex (Figure 7-5) with its constituency structure (Figure 7-6), and then presents another different diagram (Figure 7-7) that combines both principles, showing how the two relations differ.  He (ibid.) also provides the same constituency and dependency relations simply as notations:

This can be represented as at the foot of the tree:

α ^ ββ1 ^ ββ2α ^ ββ2b1 ^ βαβ ^ bαα

or, using brackets (and showing type of interdependency), as:

α ^ " β (x β (1 ^ + 2 (α ^ " β (1 ^ + 2))) ^ α (x β ^ α))

The notation that is used here expresses both constituency and dependency at the same time: constituency by bracketing (using either brackets or repeated symbols), dependency by the letters of the Greek alphabet.

Secondly, the constituency relations here are of the clause complex, not the clause.  Fawcett's argument is that dependent clauses are "more insightfully" modelled as constituents of the clause.  That is to say, interpreting interdependency in a clause complex as constituency is not an argument that supports the interpretation of dependent clauses as embedded constituents of a clause.