Fawcett's Argument Against Verbal Group Complexes

Fawcett (2010: 30n):

For a demonstration that the concept of the 'hypotactic verbal group complex' is not needed, and for an account of how the Cardiff Grammar provides for the phenomena for which Halliday sets up the concept of the 'verbal group complex', see Fawcett (forthcoming c). That paper also shows why the concept of a 'paratactic verbal group complex' is not needed, as well as showing, incidentally, how most types of text-sentence that Halliday would analyse as showing 'hypotactic' relations between clauses can be handled elegantly as embedded clauses.

Blogger Comments:

[1] The question of whether or not the concepts of 'hypotactic verbal group complex' and 'paratactic verbal group complex' are needed in SFL theory is decided on many interrelated factors, including on the basis of their explanatory power, and how they fit within the overall architecture of the theory — as well as the consequences, for the theory, including its self-consistency, if they are dispensed with.

[2] Fawcett's promised paper In Place Of Halliday's Verbal Group Complex was 'forthcoming' in the first edition of this work (2000: 342), still 'forthcoming' a decade later in the second edition (2010: 30n), and still unpublished another seven years later at the end of July 2017.

[3] This is another bare assertion.  The promised argumentation is still unpublished, seventeen years after the original declaration.

With regard to 'elegance' in this context:

In the philosophy of science, there are two concepts referring to two aspects of simplicity. Elegance (syntactic simplicity) means the number and complexity of hypotheses. Parsimony (ontological simplicity) is the number and complexity of things postulated.