Fawcett (2010: 28):
Halliday's claim is that the introduction of the 'hypotactic' relationship avoids what he describes, revealingly, as "a somewhat artificial increase in 'depth' in number of layers [in the tree structure]" (Halliday 1965/81). Indeed, it seems that the desire to avoid the embedding of units within units of the same or a lower 'rank' (i.e., 'rank shift') was the major motivation in the rapid extension of the use of 'hypotactic' relations to analyse a wide range of phenomena in the structure of language (as is shown in Section 4 of Appendix C).
Blogger Comments:
[1] The claim here is that Halliday's theoretical notion of hypotaxis was motivated by his desire to avoid embedding. The claim is disconfirmed by the presence of both embedding and hypotaxis in the theory. As previously explained, the distinction between hypotaxis and embedding provides insights such as what distinguishes, grammatically, a projected report (hypotaxis) from a pre-projected fact (embedding), and non-defining relative clause (hypotaxis) from a defining relative clause (embedding). The absence of the distinction in Fawcett's model is a reduction in the explanatory power of the theory.
[2] This claim of a future supporting argument is untrue, since Section 4 of Appendix C bears no relation to this discussion. Instead, it is a critique of the SFL notion of the verbal group, the merits of which will be examined later on this blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment